Up until this past June, schools in Hawaii were not required by law to teach sex education. And those schools that did provide sexuality education to its students relied primarily on abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula.

Then, in 2009, a state law passed requiring that all sexual health programs in schools provide medically accurate information. This law has instigated much controversy over the past several years but, according to recent research date, this broadening of schools' sex education curricula may have been at least partially responsible for the reduction of teen pregnancy and abortion in Hawaii.

On June 16, 2015, the Hawaii Board of Education voted to make sex education mandatory starting in the 2015–2016 school year. It will be interesting to watch the effects of this evolution in how sex education is being approached in Hawaii. For more information on the changes that have occured over the past decade or so, click here [2].

(image via [3])