<r>This was in the newsfeed and I found it quite intersting. What do you all think?<br/>
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<URL url="</s>Brenham Banner-Press Online Edition<e></e></URL><br/>
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<URL url="</s>Brenham Banner-Press Online Edition<e></e></URL><br/>
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</e></QUOTE></r></s>How to prove who your baby’s father is and how to get child support from a parent who won’t pay are some of what high school students will be learning in their health classes next year.<br/>
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Those and other lessons are part of a new curriculum called Parenting and Paternity Awareness (PAPA) that is being incorporated into all Texas health classes throughout the state as a result of House Bill 2176, which was passed during the 80th Legislature.<br/>
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PAPA was developed by the child support division of the attorney general’s office in 1995, but its inclusion into health curriculums by school districts has been voluntary up to this point.<br/>
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According to Jon Forsythe, director of student services for the Brenham school district, “basically, we’re required by law through HB 2176 to integrate this into health classes, which is what we will be doing.”<br/>
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In addition to paternity and child support issues, which are two of five elements the curriculum stresses, Forsythe said the other three are lessons on the benefits of legal fatherhood, single parenting and relationship violence.<br/>
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He said he’s aware that there is a possibility of some concern on the part of parents, but added that much of what the PAPA curriculum teaches is not really new.<br/>
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“Teen pregnancy has been around for quite a while, so most school districts have had parenting classes. We’ve just never gone into stuff like child support,” he said.<br/>
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He said that as a rule, schools in the district try to anticipate if material that parents might find objectionable is set to be presented to students, so that they can opt to not have their child in the room when the lesson is taught.<br/>
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Rod Viebig, who teaches health at the high school, agrees that most of PAPA is old hat, and should not cause much of a stir, if there is any at all.<br/>
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“The controversial part (of the course) is usually when we teach about sex, and this isn’t about sex,” he said.<br/>
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The PAPA curriculum consists of 14 one-hour sessions, which comes out to about half of a six-week period, so its full implementation would necessitate dropping quite a bit of what is currently being taught in health, but Viebig said a trainer from the attorney general’s office told him that it could be winnowed down to five if he stuck to PAPA’s main ideas.<br/>
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Overall, Forsythe thinks that PAPA will be beneficial to students.<br/>
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“When young adults have children and are not prepared for parental responsibilities, this supplemental curriculum actually helps them know some things they’ll need to know as a single parent,” he said.
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