Adolescent Sexual Health

NCSD is committed to promoting STD prevention and sexual health for adolescents. Each year, almost half of the approximately 19 million new STD infections are among youth aged 15 to 24¹. Yet true sexual health is more than the absence of disease. To this, NCSD is involved with several initiatives to promote inter-program, youth development, and community strategies to reduce STD, HIV, and unplanned pregnancy risk for young people.

Since 2003, NCSD has received funding from the CDC-Division of Adolescent and School Health to provide capacity building assistance to state health and education agency officials to develop coordinated sexual health policies and programs for young people. More recently, NCSD has strongly advocated on DASH's behalf to ensure that the important work DASH funds will continue irrespective of their anticipated reorganization. All CDC-DASH HIV prevention activities will shift to the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHHSTP), and will become a new division in NCHHSTP.

NCSD Webinar Series on Replicable Models of School-based Sexual Health Services for Adolescents

During the 2010-2011 school year, NCSD produced four webinars on school-based sexual health services for youth. All were well-recieved and developed to meet NCSD members' needs around sharing strategies for the successful implementation of STD testing and other comprehensive reproductive health services in a school setting.

The first webinar, hosted on September 1, 2010 and titled State Efforts to Support School-based STD Screening Programs, highlighted strategies and partnerships the Louisiana STD Control Program has developed to support school-based STD screenings in Orleans Parish, as well as how the STD Section of the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH) successfully partners with local health departments and other MDCH programs to screen almost 3,000 students annually in nine school-based and school-linked sites throughout Michigan.

Our second webinar, hosted on September 15, 2010 and titled The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Going Big: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the School-Based Screening Program in Washington, DC, focused on the successes and lessons learned from the district-wide expansion of the District of Columbia Department of Health’s school-based screening program.

The third webinar, School-based STD Screening Efforts in Miami-Dade County, Florida, took place on May 10, 2011. This webinar highlighted how the Miami-Dade County Health Department and Miami-Dade County Public Schools teamed up to provide school-based STD screening events in two public high schools as a direct response to the 1 in 4 STD data regarding adolescent girls in this country.

The fourth webinar of the series, Providing STD and Reproductive Health Services in a Rural Setting:The Story of the Durango High School’s School Based Health Center, occurred on May 26, 2011.This webinar focused on how the school-based health center (SBHC) in Durango High School was able to include services like STD testing and treatment into its menu of services with community support and consent.

Providing Customized, Hands-on Capacity Building Assistance

From 2003 to 2011, NCSD was a member of the National Stakeholders Collaborative (NSC), a collaborative project also comprised of the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP), the National Association of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD), and the Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education (the Society). Over the course of 8 years, the NSC brought together state health and education officials from 33 states in a two- to three-day strategic planning process, also known as National Stakeholders Meetings (NSM), to coordinate and improve HIV, STD, and unintended and teen pregnancy prevention policies and programs for school-aged youth.

Through follow-up technical assistance, such as mini-grants, webinars, and site visits NSM teams from across the country were able to...

• Create the Core Competencies Toolkit for Providers of Adolescent Sexual Health and Reproductive Health Programs and Services (California-- find the toolkit in our STD Information and Resource Database)
• Host a professional development event on medically accurate HIV, STI, and substance abuse prevention tools and resources for Jefferson County school administrators, Safe and Drug Free Schools coordinators, school nurses, counselors, and health educators (Kentucky)
• Create a manual for schools on developing appropriate HIV policies (Massachusetts)
• Develop and revise the joint state health and education agency white paper, The State of Adolescent Sexual Health in Michigan (Michigan)
• Sponsor trainings in 2009 for over 150 school counselors, nurses, health educators, and other school health professionals on effective strategies for engaging parents when developing, revising, reviewing, and promoting sex education curriculums and school health prevention programs (Missouri)
• Author the Guidelines for Sexual Health and Disease Prevention, a K-12 framework for comprehensive sexual health education in schools statewide (Washington State)

In addition to our work as part of the NSC, NCSD also partnered with the National Association of County & City Health Officials (NACCHO) to develop the COllaboration in ACTion: Reducing HIV/STDs & High Risk Behaviors in Our Communities (CO-ACT) Project, a pilot project that was created to strengthen state and local health departments’ capacity to collaborate with their respective education partners to develop, implement, adapt and evaluate effective and sustainable adolescent HIV/STD prevention programs. Through CO-ACT, state and local teams from Baltimore, Maryland and Durham County, North Carolina solidified their internal and external partnerships to better engage youth and teachers, respectively, at health promotion events like the annual Maryland HIV Youth Summit and through the creation of professional development trainings that meet the requirements of the North Carolina’s 2009 Healthy Youth Act.

Additional Resources:

• NSC Webinar: State Strategies for Addressing the Sexual Health Needs of Youth in Foster Care, April 8, 2010
• NSC Webinar: Positive Youth Development Framework: Practical Applications for State Departments of Health and Education, September 23, 2010
• NSC Webinar: Strategies for Creating LGBTQ Inclusive Anti-Bullying Policies at the State Level, February 23, 2011

¹ Weinstock H, Berman S, Cates W. Sexually transmitted diseases among American youth: Incidence and prevalence estimates, 2000. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 2004;36(1):6-10.