If Maple Grove Senior High chose a prom queen, AshleyGort would have had a good shot at the crown. Ashley, a petite and popular juniorwith delicate features, wore deep-sea blue to the event, accessorizing her fullybeaded gown with a blue necklace like the one Kate Winslet wore in Titanic and matching blue rhinestones scattered over her pale blond hair. Her boyfriend, Mike Conlin, borrowed his uncle's Lexus to ferry Ashley to dinner at Landmark Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Driving away from the restaurant on an unseasonably warm night a few months ago, the couple looked as if they might be headed off for a romantic evening. But while many of their classmates spent the wee hours in rented hot tubs or boogying in Minneapolis clubs, Ashley and Mike drove the half-hour north to a friend's finished basement in their suburban hometown. With their parents stationed upstairs and peeking in at regular intervals, Ashley, Mike, and a few other couples watched movies, played Ping-Pong, and talked until dawn. They did not drink, smoke, or, as Ashley puts it, "touch each other inappropriately."
"We couldn't get like all close with each other," Ashley explains. Peran agreement they struck with their parents, the kids were allowed to cuddle andhold hands, but physical contact ended there. "Couples weren't allowed in roomsby themselves," says Ashley. "There was nothing else you could do, really."
If such rules sound strange, they don't to Ashley and many of the other kidsenrolled in the Osseo School District's abstinence-until-marriage class, whichteaches students that sex outside of wedlock is physically, emotionally, andspiritually dangerous, while carefully omitting information about birth control,homosexuality, abortion, and other topics that might muddy the message. Thecurriculum includes sections on "good touch versus bad touch" and refusal skills,and the "Sexuality, Commitment and Family" textbook features a diagram meant tohelp students figure out exactly where to draw the line (arrows endorsehand-holding and talking, but a red danger sign appears at necking).
While almost a quarter of the nation's school districts now teach abstinencethis way, Osseo schools have earned a page in sex-ed history for offering both ofthe conflicting approaches to teen sex that have riven the country. Students herecan take either the new abstinence class or the traditional course, which bothwarns kids against sex and prepares them for it with information about condomsand such. For Ashley, the choice was simple: "They talk about gays and lesbiansand stuff like that, and I personally don't want to hear about that," she says ofthe older option. "I want to marry the opposite sex. I want to spend my life withthat one person and share things with that one person and not other people."
For Josh Goldberg, a baseball player and good student who is in Ashley's gradeat Maple Grove, the sex-ed decision was also a no-brainer. Josh went for the moreexplicit of the two health courses. Though some students have taken to callingthis the "slutty" class, Josh would hardly fit anyone's definition of the term. Asa sophomore, he counted himself among his school's "normal people group," whichhe translated to mean that he and his friends didn't drink or go to parties and"there's a lot of people who are a lot more weird than us." Indeed, when I metJosh on the first of several visits to Maple Grove, he and his friends seemed tobe spending most of their free time jumping up and down on a trampoline in theGoldbergs' yard and playing with walkie-talkies. ("Come in, Josh. Come in, Josh.You're going to fail your driving test." Hysterical laughter.) Still, when it wastime to sign up for health--a requirement for graduation--Josh and most of hisfriends opted for what he calls the "regular class," while most of Ashley'sfriends joined her in taking the abstinence-until-marriage course.
And so it is with students in Osseo's three senior-high and four junior-highschools: Kids who share Bunsen burners and school colors and class presidentssplit into two camps to hear two seemingly irreconcilable perspectives on sex.This sorting clearly has something to do with the students' own feelings aboutsex. (Of her few friends who didn't take abstinence class, Ashley worries, "Gosh,I would have thought they would've liked to be in this class.") But the divisionhas even more to do with their parents. Between the two classes and the two adultfactions still fighting bitterly over what should go on in the classes, it cansometimes seem as if the national fault line over sex education runs rightthrough Osseo, Minnesota.
It was a snowy morning six years ago when Ashley's mother, JeriGort, felt the first rumblings of Osseo's war over sex ed. The day started outlike any other in the Gort house; Jeri kissed her husband, Randy, good-bye as heheaded off to work, wrangled Ashley and her younger sister through breakfast, andthen bundled up her daughters and headed out toward the bus stop. When she gotthere, another mother mentioned that Ashley's fifth-grade teacher would definesexual intercourse in class that year--and everything shifted for Gort. "At thatmoment, I truly believe the Holy Spirit came down and made me teary and gave methe grieving of the heart," she marveled recently. Standing on the corner,watching her daughters and their friends run around in the snow, the innocence ofall of Osseo's children suddenly weighed on her. "I knew then that things neededto change."
That Jeri Gort would be the one to change things in Osseo was also, asshe sees it, a matter of divine intervention. "Most Christian women are soft, butI'm not soft and I'm not sweet. I'm an oddity," she said recently, as if she wereexplaining the fact of her blue eyes or her Minnesota-blond hair. "God made me alittle rough around the edges. That's why He spoke to me that day."
As she stands just five feet tall in white canvas sneakers, with a gentle,Midwestern voice, Gort's rough edges aren't immediately apparent. Still, she isthe one most people around here credit--or blame, depending on their point ofview--for first stoking tensions over the Osseo schools' approach to sex and thenpushing through the district's Solomonic attempt to resolve them. Starting fromthat simple bus-stop revelation, Gort managed to create an abstinence class in aschool district where most parents didn't see the need for one and thus set up aroad map for conservatives around the country who wanted to do the same.
After hearing about the imminent lesson, Gort decided to "opt" Ashley out of,taking her to lunch on definition day rather than having her exposed to theinformation. Shortly after, she took herself down to the Osseo District office toreview all the sex-education materials and began speaking at parents' meetingsabout what she saw there. Not only did sex come up earlier than she would haveliked, she reported to parents throughout the district, but the subject wasintroduced before marriage was. Perhaps most troubling to Gort were thedescriptions of different methods of contraception, which she took as aninvitation for kids to have sex. "Only half of high-school kids have sex," shetold one group, citing the figure that has become the half-empty glass ofsex-education debates. "What about the kids who don't have sex? What aboutsupporting them?"
Josh Goldberg's mother, Tobe, one of the parents assembled at that meeting inthe Maple Grove Elementary School library, was more concerned with preventingdisease and pregnancy in the half of kids who inevitably will have sex. "Youcan't have too much information," the mother of two is fond of saying. "Thatwoman wants to get rid of sex ed," is what she actually whispered to her husbandArlin that night as they sat squeezed into the child-size chairs in the library.The Goldbergs had already had "the talk" with Josh and his then-10-year-oldbrother, Noah, making sure that they knew the basics of reproduction and why it'sso important to put it off until later. But Goldberg also wanted her boys to hearabout both sex and birth control at school. So when Gort said she was starting agroup to reconsider the sex-ed program, Goldberg joined.
Officially, Osseo's Human Sexuality Curriculum Advisory Committee was justsupposed to make recommendations to the school board about how to updatesex-education material. In practice, though, monthly meetings were both moreintimate and more explosive than that, with Gort leading the committee majorityand Goldberg serving as the spokesperson for the much smaller faction that wantedto keep sex ed as it was. The two sides were able to agree on a few things--thatpictures of animals with their babies were appropriate for the younger children,for instance, and that fifth-graders were ready to learn about the physicalchanges that happen in puberty. But on most other issues, people who might haveotherwise been exchanging niceties in the supermarket ended up attacking oneanother's views on the most personal of questions: Did the clitoris deservemention in a discussion of female anatomy? Did children need to learn aboutmasturbation? Homosexuality?
Gort suggested that the subject of abortion, which was introduced in eighthgrade along with sexual orientation and masturbation, offended some parents andshould be removed. In response, another mother muttered something about returningto back-alley days, slammed her eighth-grade textbook shut, and--as others in thedwindling Goldberg camp had already done--stomped out of the sexuality-committeeroom for good. Committee members also spent months arguing over birth control andthe nature of pornography.
As the debate became more specific (several meetings were devoted entirely tothe failure rates of condoms), their positions reflected a more fundamentaldivide. You could see it as political--Goldberg, who eventually became the onlyperson in her camp, was also the only self-described liberal among about twodozen committee regulars. Or you could see the district's struggle as part of itsbooming development. The 66-square-mile patch that makes up the Osseo SchoolDistrict used to be potato country, but in the past 20 years, while the number ofstudents in the district has doubled, the area has morphed into the kind of tidysuburb that so many Americans now call home. And as curlicues of manicuredstreets have unfurled and Babies "R" Us, Barnes and Noble, and Starbucks havesprung into service, some have mourned for Osseo's rural past.Sexuality-committee chairman Dean Potts seemed nostalgic both for Osseo's rootsand for his own boyhood on a North Dakota farm, where he learned both hisconservative values and a certain frankness about sex. ("At grade level four orfive, I was personally out pulling lambs out of ewes," Potts recalled fondly.)
The religious split was even plainer. One of a handful of Jews in Maple Groveand the only Jew on the committee, Tobe Goldberg reached an icy standoff withPotts, who was studying to be a minister in the Church of the Nazarene throughouthis tenure as chairman. Another committee member, Tony Hoffman, quoted Scripturewhen he argued against an educational video that he felt wrongly portrayed gaymen with AIDS as victims. And while Goldberg stopped even exchangingpleasantries with her fellow members, a core group of mothers Gort calls the"prayer warriors" was gathering regularly at her house to pray. The prayerwarriors prayed for the success of the abstinence class in their cars, whilewalking, or sometimes even in the hallways and parking lots outside importantsexuality-committee meetings.
The prayer warriors were also there when the school board formalized theseideological differences three years ago. Jeri Gort talks of the plan that theboard approved by a 3-2 vote as a compromise. But Tobe Goldberg didn't experienceit that way. Not only did the school board create the new two-track healthprogram over her objections; it also approved the committee's proposal to changethe definition of sex that all students would hear. After that board meeting,which stretched until 3 A.M. sexual intercourse was officially no longeran act between any two people but one that occurs between married parents ofopposite sex "when the father's erect penis is inserted into the mother'svagina."
On the wall of sex-ed instructor Chris Meisch's classroomthere is a saying spelled out in orange and black construction paper: "Noknowledge is more crucial than that of health." Tacked up nearby are postersaddressing why it's important not to drink and drive and why tobacco is sodangerous. On the first day of the family-life section of Meisch's third-periodabstinence-until-marriage class, there is also a question on the board: "What islove?" Students filtering in after the 9:37 bell obligingly search for an answer."The feeling you have for people in your family?" one boy asks hopefully. "Whenyou care about someone a lot, even more than you can say?" offers another. Whenno one comes up with the definition he's looking for, Meisch, a young,athletic-looking teacher, prompts the 10th and 11th graders, asking them to namedifferent kinds of love. By the time they work their way to "boyfriend-girlfriendlove"--past love for parents, pets, and chocolate milk--the point is gettingclearer: Love doesn't always involve sex. "You fall into infatuation," saysMeisch, his tone making it clear that this is not the desired outcome. "You growinto love." A few students jot this down in their notebooks.
The two versions of high-school health impart many of the same lessons:Drugs are bad for you, exercise good, leafy greens essential. But theabstinence-until-marriage version grapples with the more amorphous questions ofvalues in a way that its counterpart does not. The new course takes the longview, explaining that marriage between a man and a woman has been the normthroughout history and that the only safe sex is "with a marriage partner who ishaving sex only with you." Students hear about what makes a compatible mate andeven why they should want to mate in the first place. (Parenting, as oneabstinence textbook explains, is "a tremendously rewarding commitment based onresponsibility and self-sacrifice.";;;) When the subject of birth control comes up,teachers are supposed to discuss only its failures and emphasize its inadequacy.
Students in abstinence class not only hear this particular take on love andromance, they must also present it. Though Ashley did her oral report on tobacco,others whose presentations involved more controversial topics had to cast themcarefully in the negative. So when it came time for her report on teens andsexually transmitted diseases, Carol Christensen steered clear of the "goodstuff" about birth control that she says she would have mentioned in the otherclass, trying instead to make a loopy argument that birth control is bad becauseof its inconvenience. "Like who's going to go and take out a measuring spoon andmeasure out the exact spermicide at 1:30 in the morning on a Tuesday night?" shesays.
In the interest of preventing such situations, abstinence class offers datingexercises. One homework assignment has students write out their dating standards(extra credit if parents sign them). Another asks, "What do you consider thevalues of postponing sexual gratification?" Several sections advise on settinglimits, though by 10th grade Ashley Gort has figured out many of her own.
"If I know that a person has had a history, or whatever, then I don't getinvolved," she explained to me one afternoon as we sat in "Maple Grove Free," afamily-oriented evangelical church located near the Dairy Queen here. Though shewas then "on hold" with the captain of the basketball team, Ashley had never gonelong without a date. The key to such lighthearted socializing was to communicate:"You have to make sure you pick the kind of person who feels the way you do; thenit's easier to bring up the subject and everything."
Her mother's guidelines also may have helped. Boys were allowed to come by thehouse and even hang out with Ashley in the family room. (One time, when she wasgrounded, three stopped by to pay tribute in a single evening.) But per houserules, the family-room door always remained open. And while Jeri trusted Ashleyand the Holy Ghost, whom she credited with giving Ashley the desire to stay pure,she was cheered that her daughter's romances never seemed to last more than a fewweeks.
Meanwhile, Josh Goldberg spent his 10th grade more engaged withschool and sports than with girls. Still, he felt he had made the right choiceabout sex ed; abstinence class seemed to leave some teens unprepared. Otherstudents had similar objections to the new class. The Harbinger, the Maple GroveHigh student paper, weighed in with several articles and a searing, unanimousstaff editorial condemning the district, the human-sexuality committee, and theschool board for "offering a curriculum of questionable value that is asdeceptive as it is bigoted." The writers took particular offense over theabstinence textbook, which warned against marrying someone of a differenteconomic, cultural, or religious background. When one mother who supportsabstinence confronted the Harbinger's faculty adviser in the school parking lot,tempers flared. She angrily complained that the editorial quoted the abstinencematerials out of context, and the adviser, as she tells it, shot back that shewas "desperately sad as a fellow Christian that you people have decided to makeone of God's greatest gifts such a shameful and divisive thing."
The battle that had already torn up the sexuality committee wasspreading. Sam Garst, the father of a senior in the district and the retiredCEO of a deer-repellant company, founded Osseo Parents for Straight TalkAbout Sex and printed a brochure with the headline "How Do You Feel AboutSpending $96,000 More To Educate Our Kids Less?" (The total cost of newabstinence-education materials and arrangements for splitting up studentsactually ended up closer to $130,000.) Though he got a few positive responses,Garst also received several phone calls informing him that he was going to hell,dozens of angry e-mails (including one accompanied by a computer virus that wipedout his hard drive), and piles of hate letters. "Hey Sammy," read a typical one."You go ahead and hand out condoms and pills to your kids, we'll teach ours rightand wrong."
Meanwhile, across the ideological divide--and a couple of streets--Garst'sneighbor, Scott Brokaw, also felt that he was being attacked for his beliefs. Oneof two Osseo school board members who championed the new abstinence class, Brokawsays he was wrongly accused of beating his wife by someone who was angry over hisposition on the sex-ed curriculum. A radio-advertising salesman who calls hisopponents "vile and mean-spirited people," Brokaw ended up hiring a lawyer todefend himself against the charge. On another occasion, when Brokaw and his wifewere eating in a local restaurant, a table of teachers and parents opposed to theclass sent him a drink that, the waitress informed him, was known as a Blow Job.
For Osseo students, the cost of choosing a side can loom even larger. Whenhe was a junior at Maple Grove High, Andy Caruso went so far as to obtain awaiver of the district's health-class requirement because he feared theassumptions kids might make about his sex life whichever track he chose. "Itseems like a personal thing that you don't want all your teachers and yourfriends to know," he said.
The matter of public perception is, not surprisingly, particularlysticky for girls, who make up the majority of students in Osseo'sabstinence-until-marriage classes. Even in a district with female student-bodypresidents and girls' basketball teams that make it to the state finals, girls arestill bound by the "hush-hush" rule, as Jessie Sodren, who took theabstinence-until-marriage class, calls it. According to her then-boyfriend, whotook the other class, the opposite is true for boys. "Guys just say, like,'cool,'" he explains. "They just give each other high fives and stuff."
Another couple who split up for health class is less candid. "I've alwaysknown I would save sex for marriage. It's just the way I was brought up," saysthe girl, a 16-year-old sophomore, whose plans for future include "doingsomething with money, making it grow and making more money." There would havebeen no reason to doubt her story had her best friend not mentioned the daybefore that this same girl had just gone through a terrifyingtwo-and-a-half-month pregnancy scare.
By all student accounts, many sexually active kids end up in the abstinenceclass--a situation that some attribute to parents who sign them up for it withoutknowing what's really going on. "I know the kids that were in there and, like, Iknow some of them shouldn't be in there," explains Josh Goldberg, raising hiseyebrows meaningfully. "I don't think their parents have any idea what's going onin their life." Ashley Gort, too, recognizes this. "Some of them, if they do doit, they're probably not even going to marry the guy," she told me, shaking herhead.
Indeed, students end up in one class as opposed to the other for all sorts ofreasons. Carol Christensen took abstinence because the traditional classconflicted with Spanish. Another student, who identifies herself as a born-againChristian and whose mother got pregnant at 16, signed up for abstinence butlanded in the traditional class as the result of an administrative error. And onesophomore says she took abstinence because she heard it was easier than thealternative. When I asked her what she hoped to get out of it, she replied, "aC."
But even kids with the clearest of intentions can't knowwhat's in store for them. For Ashley, the surprise came in the form of Mike, thehandsome senior with three jobs who, for the past 10 months, has replaced all herother admirers. With a cell phone and her grandfather's hulking old Cadillac nowat her disposal, Ashley can see Mike whenever she's not doing homework, workingat Old Navy, or at dance-line practice.
The Gorts do have a few hard-and-fast rules though: If Ashley doesn'tcheck in, she loses the car; her weekend curfew is midnight, no exceptions; andwhen she comes in, she has to kiss her mother goodnight.
"I have a good nose--I can smell pot from a mile away," says Jeri Gort, who isnot above sniffing during this tenderest of evening rituals. "I tell her and herfriends, if you start drinking, there's no way you can be a virgin when yougraduate." Even with all the work she's done to make sure that her daughter getsthe right messages, it still comes down to guarding and worrying for Gort.
The Goldbergs, too, are nervously watching a new relationship blossom. Josh'sgirlfriend Janessa first started jumping on the trampoline along with Josh and hisfriends at the end of sophomore year. Next came cuddling on the couch, long phonecalls that Josh sometimes conducted under a blanket if his parents were around,and his crash course in rose buying.
Even though they have already had "the talk," the Goldbergs find themselvesventuring back into that uncomfortable territory lately, reminding Josh about thegirl across the street who got pregnant at 16. They're hoping that their message,along with the instruction he's gotten in school, will protect their son from allthat could go wrong on his way to adulthood.
It's not terribly different from what's going on just five minutes away at theGorts' house.
Research for this article was supported by a grant from the National Press Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
