Brandon, who will be a junior in the fall, said many teenagers know what condoms are (and some have known since elementary school because of older siblings or classmates). They know people who are gay, might have friends who are gay and, even if they aren't themselves, have classmates who are sexually active.
"I know [parents] don't want to believe their kids are having sex," said Rebecca Hughes, 16, who will be a senior in the fall. "But it's out there."
The statistics speak for themselves: By the time they have reached their senior year in high school, three out of five young people in the United States have had sex, and one in five of those has had sex with four or more partners, according to the 2001 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance.
"You can take the sex out of the curriculum, but it's still going to be in society," said Laura, who just finished her sophomore year and would have been in the class introduced to the contested sex-ed curriculum.
A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation on the media habits of young people found that on average, 8- to 18-year-olds watch nearly four hours of television a day and devote nearly two hours a day to listening to music. Another Kaiser report released two years ago said that in a sampling of programming from the 2001-02 television season, 64 percent of the shows included some sexual content, 32 percent had sexual behavior and 14 percent featured strong suggestions of sexual intercourse.
In the top 20 shows watched by teenagers, including "Friends," "The Simpsons" and "That '70s Show," 83 percent included some sexual content, the study found.
Although shows favored by teenagers were more likely to include sexual content, the researchers found that the programs also were more likely to include a reference to safer-sex issues, such as waiting to have sex, using protection or the consequences of sex.
With so many images of sex on television, in movies and in song lyrics, the Bethesda-Chevy Chase students said, parents shouldn't be shocked that teenagers are curious. And Mark Strom, 16, said adults don't understand something else: In the end, sex education isn't all that exciting.
It's a class, he said. It's a grade.
"People think this stuff is more advanced and racy than it really is," he said. "That's just not true."
