Overview
My Future-My Choice is a comprehensive, medically accurate, inclusive and trauma informed sexuality education
curriculum. It meets the 6th grade requirements of Oregon’s Health Education Standards, including Erin's Law and House Bill 2509 to provide age-appropriate sexuality education as an integral part of the health education curriculum.
Purpose
This ten-part education series aims to provide middle school students with tools to have healthy relationships that includes setting and respecting personal boundaries and treating each other with respect and dignity. My Future-My Choice offers skills to resist peer and social pressure including messages from the media and teaches students how to prevent sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy.
Curriculum focus
- Learn and understand how your bodies change when you are becoming an adult.
- Learn and understand about gender and the different ways people identify and express themselves.
- Learn and understand about sexual orientation and the different kinds of romantic and sexual attractions people may have.
- Learn and understand how you can help make your school a safer place by treating all people with respect and compassion.
- Learn how to set goals and understand that goals can be an important reason to wait to be sexually involved.
- Discuss and understand different types of pressures, including the media, that influence your decisions to be sexually involved.
- Learn and understand what makes relationships healthy and unhealthy.
- Learn and practice assertive skills to use in pressured situations.
- Learn and practice a decision-making model to help make healthy decisions.
- Learn and practice how to protect yourself from unplanned pregnancy and STIs.
- Learn and practice setting and respecting boundaries, as well as consent.
Positive Youth Development approach
Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a strategy that helps ensure youth voices are heard in decisions that impact them. It also helps engage young people as resources to adults and their community. Engaging them on this level can lead to improvements in areas of academic success; school and community connectedness; self-confidence; employability; social development skills; physical and mental health; and an overall sense of well-being. (The America Promise Alliance Report - Every Child, Every Promise: Turning Failure into Action, 2006).
To support the PYD approach, My Future-My Choice trains high school Teen Leaders across Oregon to deliver half of the curriculum. Teen Leaders act as role models to middle school students and help make My Future-My Choice an impactful classroom experience. Teen Leaders also have the opportunity to collaborate as members of the Teen Advisory Board.