According to ABC News, starting this fall, kindergarten through fifth-graders at Veterans Memorial Elementary School in Provincetown, Massachusetts will be able to get free condoms. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick is urging the district to revise its policy.
“It is simply not age appropriate to have a program in place for such young children, not to mention not having parents of such young children involved,” Patrick said in a statement.
But most of the debate in Provincetown seems to be over how restrictive the policy is going to be.
“I don’t like that students can’t be discreet about this,” says school committee member Shannon Patrick, the Provincetown Banner reports. “They have to go and ask for it. I’d rather them not have the conversation (with counselors) and have the condom than not have the condom.”
You might think, that’s ridiculous, elementary school children shouldn’t even know what to do with a condom, much less need one, but, particularly with more and more kids hitting puberty before age 10, sexual urges don’t necessarily wait for high school these days.
“Menses used to begin at 18 or 19 and now it’s coming at a much earlier age,” said Beverly Whipple, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. “Adolescence is much prolonged. People are getting married much later. So we do know that there’s a much longer time between hormonal surges and marriage.”
Beth Singer, Provincetown school district superintendent, says that opponents of the policy are misinturpreting it and it was never aimed at elementary school students. She also insists that the policy makes it clear that the district does not encourage sexual activity. They are simply making sure that resources are available for kids of all ages, should they make the choice to be sexually active.
“Sex has no age limit. It’s an individual scenario for each person,” Singer told CNN. “We can’t put out an age for using condoms.”
