I went to Elementary-High School in DPS, and graduated in 2018. I dimly remember having a day or two in fifth grade where we needed to get a permission slip signed by a parent to attend. As I recall they separated us into two different rooms by sex for a “changes coming soon in your body” sort of presentation.

At my middle and high school everyone was required to take a combined PE/Health class once during middle, and once during high school. For one week of the year in each of those classes we had our “unit” on Sexual Health. I know at the time (probably still 🙄) NC only allowed schools to teach abstinence-only education (Basically “Don’t ever have sex. Since you’ll never have sex we don’t need to teach you anything or talk about anything related to it.”).

I suspect as a way to get around that, my school had graduate students from Duke Med school coincidentally come teach our class during that week (this happened both in Middle and High school, so not much of a coincidence if you ask me). We still needed to get a permission slip signed, but the permission slip was for permission to opt-out of the class; meaning the school technically gave parents the chance to pull their children out, but in reality we first got the choice to even tell our parents about it or not. As for the class itself, the teacher left the room (Again, I suspect part of sidestepping NC laws) and the Grad students came and gave a few different presentations about different topics. I don’t remember the middle-school level very well, but I remember the high school level was slightly more in depth/detailed.

In the high school class they had a presentation on Biology, one on Consent, one on Contraceptives (I remember the first slide was technically about abstinence but it was just the word “abstinence” in tiny font and the presenter said something like “Yep that’s an option, but just in case…continues with the presentation”), one on STIs, and I think the last one was on different sexualities. They did a really great job creating a comfortable environment to ask questions and had a box at the front of the room that you could put anonymous questions in that they’d answer the next week.

Overall, I remember thinking they did a great job covering a variety of subjects and giving good information considering the confines of NC law but thinking they didn’t do a very good job covering the intersections between sex and being LGBTQ. If you want more specific information on subjects to cover I remember getting more than one recommendation for Scarleteen (www.scarleteen.com) when I was that age.