Health standards will be taught in freshman PE classes at the end of April through early May for the class of 2029.
The change comes from the Board of Education’s decision to embed California education standards into pre-existing courses, allowing more flexibility in student schedules.
“The Board of Education wanted to afford students the opportunity to be able to take a year long class, in lieu of a semester class,” PHS principal David Yoshihara said.
According to The California Department of Education, there is no statewide health class requirement. If there is a health class requirement it would have to be set by local administration. However, The California Healthy Youth Act mandates comprehensive sexual health education and HIV prevention education at least once in middle school and once in high school. The integration of Health standards into PE is said to maintain these requirements.
“Every district has different requirements and the Board of Education said, if [health class] is not required by the state of California, then we’re not going to require it,”Yoshihara said.
In anticipation of the changes to the PE curriculum, PE teacher Jeffrey Peters has adjusted his second semester schedule.
“I’ve shortened the units. I’ve had to look and compare my calendar from last year to this year to see exactly [what the changes are] but I don’t think I’m losing a unit,” Peters said.
Peters will not be teaching the health unit. Instead, Health Connected, a nonprofit organization providing comprehensive sexual health education will be leading the unit.
According to the Health Connected, their curriculum includes 12 sequential sessions intended to be taught for a minimum of 10 hours over the span of 2-3 weeks and meets the stringent requirements of California Education Code (sections 51930-51939) for 7th-12th grade students. The Connected Health curriculum complies with all The California Healthy Youth Act requirements.
“Connected health is a vendor and the district has contracted with them to meet the requirements of the California Health Youth Act,” Yoshihara said.
Moving forward this health unit will continue to be embedded into PE, and placed earlier in the year.
“We’re doing it in April [this year], I think we’d rather do it in October,” Yoshihara said.
PHS teachers suggest that the current health curriculum is too large to be condensed into two weeks of learning.
“Theres no way that they can cover it [the whole health course], so essentially it will be a Sex Ed class,” Anonymous PHS teacher Jane Doe said.
