A forum about sex education in Florida’s St. Lucie County schools managed to garner several hundred attendees.

The local school superintendent recommended Get Real about AIDS, which includes discussion of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as both abstinence and contraception, to the school board in August.

School officials released a modified version of Get Real About AIDS last week in which they removed descriptions of sexual activities, hands-on demonstrations of condoms and an exercise where students would have been asked to purchase condoms. Despite those modifications, controversy over the curriculum has not diminished.

According to the Palm Beach Post article, the program was recommended in light of concerns that the health curriculum wasn’t doing enough to combat sexually transmitted diseases. St. Lucie County has Florida’s highest rate of HIV and AIDS cases among black residents, according to statistics the health department released last year.

To see how your state compares to others in AIDS/HIV rates, as well as other health care issues, you might want to check out the Kaiser Foundation’s state health facts Web site.

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