All About Abstinence

Another impactful semester of abstinence education has come to an end - and the numbers are growing every year!The 2017 Fall Semester presented a 17% increase over the previous year – meaning that nearly 300 more students heard the abstinence message last fall!The 2016/2017 school year ended with the Creating Positive Relationships (CPR) program being presented to 3,148 students, and we expect our CPR course to reach over 3,600 young people during the2017/2018 school year!Last fall we taught at 13 different Muncie and Delaware County junior and senior high schools to 1,741 students.This total included 2 new middle school classes! We also presented the program to 178 Anderson Highland Middle School students, as well as 8 teenagers at the Madison County Youth Center, giving us a grand total of 1,927 students for the 2017 Fall Semester! Additionally, we hope to add Anderson High School to the curriculum this spring, increasing the number of students that will hear the abstinence message.We are blessed to have a team of instructors who make learning about such an important subject fun and memorable. We have received glowing reports from the teachers, not to mention these awesome comments from the students:“You actually made learning about STD’s and abstinence kind of fun.”“The instructor was funny, and kind of weird – which was a good thing!”“He [the instructor] was nice and open-minded to our questions.”“The thing I liked about this program is it helped me talk to my Mom after four years.”“This week helped me know how to talk to my friends about sexual activity and why they should wait.”"The lesson was very helpful in learning how to establish a healthy relationship. It also taught me how to set proper guidelines and boundaries of a relationship. Finally, it taught me about the dangers of not remaining abstinent until marriage."There are always a great many young people who appreciate hearing the abstinence message because it affirms their decision to wait until marriage. Whilestudents need to hear this important message for many reasons, one Central High School student stated - “it impacted my future”, and that’s our goal!We offer this program free to public and private schools as well as youth organizations for these exact reasons - it is the mission of First Choice and the SRA Program, to educate young people about making healthy choices that impact their futures and their lives.