The Plymouth School Board has approved a plan to add a new sexual health and drug education program into the junior high school curriculum. This spring, the 10-day PATH (Positive Approach to Teen Health) program will be offered to some of the students at Lincoln Junior High School.
The board’s approval of the program Tuesday came after it put off making a decision last month, amid questions about where the new program would be introduced in the curriculum. Lincoln Junior High School Principal Reid Gault says he met with Plymouth Schools Superintendent Dan Tyree, as well as his entire staff to put together an updated plan, “I took it to our staff discussion just recently this last week, and it’s decided that we’re going to, this first year, do it through our health curriculum, which means that it’ll be done the last nine weeks of the school year, from April 11 to April 22, through our health, physical education, and wellness, so it’ll be the seventh graders that have one of those three classes.”
That means seventh graders who are not currently taking a health class will not be taking part in the PATH program. Gault originally planned to avoid this problem by putting the program in the science curriculum at first, but some school board members expressed concern with the idea of removing two weeks of the existing science curriculum and replacing it with the PATH program.
Gault told the board that placing the program in the health curriculum will allow the school to test it out before potentially offering it to all students in a particular grade.
