It's back to school time! You'll have your class schedules soon if you don't already, and we hope that you find a subject this year that really inspires you — whether it's art, math, history, science, P.E., or something else.

For each of these subjects, you should be able to trust the information you get in class. Educators are tasked with teaching facts, methods, and theories that cover everything you need to know and prepare you for the future.

The same should be true for sex education.

Abstinence-only sex education has been illegal in California for years. But some schools are still failing to teach sex ed, or are teaching a version of sex ed that spreads misinformation and is based in fear and stigma.

The good news is that California has a fantastic new law that says that you have a right to quality, comprehensive sex education that's based in fact. If you're in 7th grade or older and you're at a public school, your schools are now required to teach sex ed at least twice before you graduate. And the law affirmatively recognizes that sex ed should be fully inclusive of LGBTQ students and acknowledge diversity in gender and sexual orientation.

Here are a few of the topics your sex ed curriculum is now legally required to cover:

• How to have healthy and safe relationships, and how to identify abuse
• How to say no to sexual contact you don't want
• How Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and HIV are transmitted, how to protect against getting them, and how to treat them
• How to prevent pregnancy, including a variety of birth controlmethodsand abstinence
• What to do if someone does get pregnant, including parenting, adoption, and abortion
• Gender, gender identity, and gender expression
• Sexual orientation and how it’s normal for people to have different sexual orientations

If you'd like to learn more about all the topics you should be receiving in your sex ed curriculum, please check out our information page at myschoolmyrights.com.

And if your right to quality, comprehensive sex ed isn't being respected, this fact sheet and FAQ page can help your school administrators understand what the law requires.

If you have questions about the new law, how to implement it, or need examples of resources and curricula, check out our Know Your Rights: Sex Education resource page. Here you can download FAQs, a compliance checklist, and other materials you might need. Whether you’re a parent, teacher, administrator, student, or advocate, there’s something here for you.

Are you worried that your school isn’t complying with the California Health Youth Act? Contact us!

If you’re a middle or high school student in the Los Angeles Unified School District, you’ve probably been subjected to a “random” metal detector search – and if not, you’ve probably heard about them. Every day, school staff are required to interrupt class and search students and their belongings, even if they have done nothing wrong and there are no safety concerns at the school. This practice, like on-campus policing, is ineffective, intrusive, and excessive, and is applied in a discriminatory fashion against students of color and low-income students. Students aren’t suspects, and policing them undermines their education and damages school morale.

School should be a place where you can feel at home. It should be a space of learning and growth, where educators nurture your developmental needs. When police officers replace school administrators as disciplinarians, the results are often disastrous, especially for students of color, low-income students, and students with disabilities. Police presence on campus contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline that pushes thousands of youth out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system.

It’s important for you to know what your rights are at school and with the police. If you’re a student in California, you have the following rights:

• You have the right to refuse a search conducted by a police officer in your school. Even if you cannot stop the search from happening, you can speak up and say: “I DO NOT WANT YOU TO SEARCH ME.”
• You have the right to remain silent. If a police officer asks you questions, you can refuse to answer and you should ask to have a parent, guardian, or other adult present.
• Police officers must have “reasonable suspicion” to search you. And, under some circumstances, they need even more than that. This means that they have to have a reasonable belief that you broke a law or school rule and that the search would uncover evidence of the violation.
• If school officials or police officers illegally search you, they cannot use what they find against you in court. But your school can use evidence from an illegal search in school disciplinary proceedings.

The bottom line is that student behavior shouldn’t be treated like a crime, and you shouldn’t be treated like a criminal for breaking rules.

Unfortunately, over the past two decades police presence on campus has increased dramatically in California. Right now, over 1.8 million California K-12 students attend schools with a sworn officer assigned to their campus. There are 19 school districts across the state that operate their own police departments, and over 650 full-time sworn officers are assigned to school districts. 

This proliferation of on-campus policing disproportionally harms students of color, low-income students, and students with disabilities. For example, Black and Brown students are far more likely to be targeted for arrest by police for minor misbehaviors. An ACLU study found California students face discrimination based on race, disability and income:

• Black students are three times more likely than white students to be arrested at school. American-Indian students as twice as likely, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students are 1.5 times as likely. Latinx students are also arrested at a rate higher than their rate of enrollment in California schools.
• Students with disabilities are three times as likely as students without disabilities to be arrested.
• Schools where over 80 percent of students are low-income have an average arrest rate that is seven times higher than schools where fewer than 20 percent of students are low-income.

In addition to the potential trauma of officer misconduct, giving a student a criminal record for minor, non-violent school violations damages the school environment and can have severe, life-long consequences. A single arrest doubles a high school student’s likelihood to dropout, makes it more difficult for them to get employed, and dramatically increases the chance that they will have future encounters with law enforcement.

If you would like to learn more about what policies your school can adopt to keep police accountable, check out our report The Right to Remain a Student.

Every student deserves to feel safe at school — that means not feeling harassed or targeted by police. The ACLU strongly believes that police should only be called to campus if there is a real and immediate physical threat to student, staff or public safety.  In contrast, when schools turn to the police to deal with commonplace discipline, it harms students by undermining school climate and creating an environment where students are treated as suspects and criminals.