Oklahoma flunks sex education test

State’s law and regulations regarding sex education in public schools failing, report says.

August 12, 2025

A recent report about the state of sex education in the United States has flunked Oklahoma.

The report, from Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), paints a stark picture of sex education in Oklahoma, awarding the state an overall grade of F and highlighting widespread gaps in both policy and practice.

The report card serves to summarize each state’s existing laws and standards regarding sex education and HIV/AIDS instruction, based on two weighted categories: a Sex Education Requirement Grade and a Content Requirement Grade.

Despite longstanding requirements that state schools teach HIV/AIDS prevention and consent, Oklahoma remains one of just a handful of states without any mandate for comprehensive sex education. Under current law, districts must emphasize abstinence, deliver medically “accurate” AIDS instruction—including stigmatizing language about same-sex activity—and allow parents to “opt-out” their children for any HIV or sexuality lessons. Instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity is expressly excluded except when condemning “homosexual activity” as a leading AIDS risk.

Oklahoma received a C for its Sex Education Requirement Grade but an F for its Content Requirement Grade. “Sex education in the United States is a patchwork of state and local policies that dictate what, if any, sexual health instruction is taught within schools across the country,” the report’s executive summary states. “As a result, access to quality and comprehensive knowledge about sexual and reproductive health is largely influenced by the zip code young people live in.”

Only two states received A grades, Oregon and Washington. Five more states earned A- grades, including California, Illinois, the District of Columbia, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. Oklahoma was among thirteen states (25 percent of the nation) that received F grades. The others were: Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Nebraska, Wyoming, Ohio, South Dakota, Utah, Mississippi, Arkansas, Indiana, and Arizona.

SIECUS defines comprehensive sex education as “instruction on human sexuality and sexual health that is medically accurate, age appropriate, inclusive and/or culturally relevant, and evidence-based or evidence informed. This instruction must encompass STI and pregnancy prevention through contraception, healthy relationships, adolescent development, assault prevention, anatomy, sexual orientation and gender identity, and more.”

According to a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) webpage dated November 29, 2024, a quality sexual health education curriculum should include:

- medically accurate, developmentally appropriate information;

- content focusing on key behavioral outcomes and promoting healthy sexual development; and,

- curriculum that gives students the skills and confidence they need to navigate healthy sexual development and avoid or reduce sexual risk behaviors or experiences.

The same webpage also features a disclaimer that the “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s executive orders.”

According to the CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks six categories of health risk behaviors, 39 percent of Oklahoma high school students who responded to the survey reported having had sex at least once in their lifetime. The national average was 31 percent. The survey also recorded that 6.1 percent of Oklahoma high school students who responded said they had sex for the first time before the age of thirteen, double the national rate of 3 percent. In all, 18.7 percent of Oklahoma high school students who responded said they did not use any method to prevent pregnancy during their last sexual encounter with an opposite-sex partner, according to the survey.

The CDC webpage containing this data had been removed and then restored by court order as of February 14, 2025. The webpage now features a disclaimer from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Servies stating that any information promoting gender ideology is “extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female,” and that “the Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities.”

State laws often leave students lacking basic sexual health knowledge

Oklahoma public-school students often finish school without essential knowledge of condoms, contraception, diverse sexual orientations, or nonjudgmental resources, as Oklahoma’s sex education laws fail to prepare young people to make informed decisions about their bodies and relationships. “Lawmakers and advocates have had to focus more on stopping regressive legislation than progressing comprehensive reforms,” the report states.

During the 2025 legislative session, two bills, SB 587 and HB 1603, would have mandated that students in grades seven through twelve watch a “three-minute-long computer-generated rendering or animation showing the process of fertilization and every stage of fetal development.” This language, while not mentioning any specific video, mirrors legislation passed in other states that refers to “Meet Baby Olivia,” produced by the anti-abortion group Live Action. The video describes fetal development but does not tell students how women get pregnant.

In 2022, the Oklahoma Legislature passed SB 615, adding school counselors to the list of staff who must disclose and make available to parents any materials they may use when counseling students on topics such as sexual orientation and gender identity, chilling a source of confidential support for students. Meanwhile, multiple bills from 2022 through 2025 sought to further roll back sex education, from shifting to opt-in models, banning external public-health partners, or eliminating sex-education content from health classes. So far, none of these bills have succeeded, but the persistence of these proposals serves to pressure districts to curtail instruction.

The situation wasn’t always so bleak. As recently as 2019, the Legislature passed SB 926, which required curriculum related to human sexuality to include instruction on consent. The passage of SB 89 in 2021 created new health education standards that included “physical health, mental health, social and emotional health, and intellectual health,” but the standards have never been fully implemented.

The state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, has worsened the state of sex education in Oklahoma by revising standards to include controversial materials, limiting discussions of gender identity, and threatening schools over diversity-related content.

While Oklahoma politicians have failed its public-school students, state voters say they support outcomes directly affected by teaching comprehensive sex education. According to a poll of more than 1,000 Oklahoma voters, 94 percent said they want to see the state’s teen birth rate lowered, and 97 percent wanted lower rates of sexually transmitted infection. Amber Integrated conducted the poll, which The Oklahoman reported earlier this year.

How can you help? Contact your state legislators and ask them to run bills calling for more sex education in public schools. You can also reach out to your local school board members and ask them to approve more sex education curricula in your community’s schools.

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