Income and Vegetarianism: Is it a barrier?–Cost of being vegetarian

In 2014 7.3 million Americans consider themselves vegetarian. But just how much damage, if any done at all, does being a vegetarian do to your wallet?

According to the USDA’s Food Price Outlook, the cost of meat has increased. Products such as beef, eggs, and pork are among some of the products that have seen an increase in supermarkets nationwide.

Coincidentally, vegetarianism is also on the rise in the U.S., with about 8 million adults considered themselves followers on the lifestyle. 7 percent of that 8 million had a household earning under $50,000.

A study published last year, compared the amount of money spent by meat eaters and those following a vegetarian diet. It was found that weekly, a person following a meat based diet spent about $53.11, compared to $38.75 for those following a plant based diet. In one year alone, $746.46 was spent on a vegetarian diet.

“I found that eating meat was more expensive,” said Dawn Hewitt, a Newhallville resident. “I usually bought pork or beef.”

Nationally, out of those who ate meat, 2 percent had an income in the $50,000-75,000 range. The average United States income is about $54,000. People who had below average incomes, were much more likely to be considered vegetarian compared to those who made above average, according to the Huffington Post.

“A vegetarian diet is not as expensive as people believe,” said nutritionist, Yvette Graffie-Cooper, “It’s really what you make of it.”

Graffie-Cooper suggests coming up with meal ideas ahead of time to save time and money at the grocery store. She also said looking at the weekly circular for grocery stores will let you know what they have on sale. She also advises to buy healthy foods in bulk, and also utilizing local farmer’s markets which are also cheaper.

“Things like beans and quinoa in bulk are much cheaper than buying individually. It also has a lot more serving,” Cooper-Graffie said.

City Seed is New Haven’s local farmer’s market. It is also apart of the city’s effort to combat their reputation as a food desert.

During the winter months, the farmer’s market is located indoors at the Metropolitan Business Academy. Beginning in about May, different locations around New Haven are chosen as spots for set up.

City Seed also accepts SNAP, or food stamps.

“This makes it easier for families living in New Haven to have access to fresh food, especially those considering a vegetarian lifestyle,” Graffie-Cooper said.

As for the distance, the closest location of the farmer’s market to Newhallville is about a 30 minute walk, or 15 minute drive. Graffie-Cooper says this is another barrier.

“Not everyone has access to these markets, especially those in the heart of the food desert.”

Convenience beats health in a New Haven food desert

By Melissa Barclay

For Lezlie McEachern, a student who grew up in the Newhallville area of New Haven, healthy food was not always a priority. Newhallville is considered a “food desert,” and McEachern’s family struggled with a hectic schedule, lack of knowledge about nutritious food and transportation issues.

According to the USDA, a food desert is defined as an area that lacks healthy produce. Residents within these areas are also more than a mile and a half from a grocery store or supermarket, and lack reliable transportation.

“If you told me I lived in a food desert, I would be very confused — my family would be confused. Honestly, I would keep eating the same — it was cheap,” McEachern said.

McEachern was within walking distance to a bodega and a Chinese takeout restaurant. She frequented them in high school and sometimes when she goes home.

The word “bodega” is Spanish for corner store. They sell some items that can be found in the grocery store, such as milk and bread — but often at higher prices.  Although those items are available, it is still cheaper to buy the unhealthier options, such as prepared fast food such as a cheese steak, or fries.

“My favorite thing to get was a beef patty on a hard roll. I also loaded up with snacks for lunch and all throughout the day — I hated the school lunch,” McEachern said.

McEachern’s high school schedule started with first period at 7:55 a.m. McEachern skipped breakfast. Lunch was from the bodega a few blocks down. A beef patty on a hard roll and snacks such as Little Debbie cakes held her over for the day.

“After school, if it was cheerleading season, we would go get something to eat. It would be like pizza, Chinese, or subs. It was never anything healthy. Everything was close,” McEachern said.

Growing up, McEachern’s family attempted to be nutritious. They were aware that diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure ran in the family, and wanted to clean up their diet. But there were financial pressures, and eating healthy was more expensive.

As a result of her poor diet, McEachern’s health began to suffer. Her weight increased, and she felt sluggish. She admitted that a lack of education on what she ate contributed.

“I was really aware of how much my weight changed. I felt sluggish and tired all the time. I didn’t realize it was because of my diet until now,” she said.

At the time, McEachern’s family only had one car. It was mainly used by her father, who worked in North Haven. Her mother worked in New Haven and took the city bus to work. McEachern also took the bus.

“My father often worked late, and was tired by the time he came home,” McEachern said. “By that time, I had already gotten something from the bodega, and my mother cooked dinner, but I usually never ate it.”

To combat issues faced by families such as McEachern’s, and more severe cases, the New Haven Food Policy Council created a “Food Action Plan” in 2012 aimed at creating a healthier “food system” for the city.

Goals include increasing access to healthy food for New Haven residents and encouraging healthy food choices by educating residents.

Events such as a community potluck, cooking classes featuring nutritious food, and gardening activities have been held so far.

“I do think there needs to be programs that educate people in food deserts about nutritious food,” McEachern said. “But I wish more people knew about it. My family didn’t, my friends — they need to push it more.”

Melissa Barclay is a senior journalism student at Quinnipiac University. She is writing about food deserts this spring. She can be reached at melissa.barclay@quinnipiac.edu.

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Explaining the controversy surrounding concurrent surgery

By Melissa Sirois

In the fall of 2015, a small group of reporters for The Boston Globe published an exposé on the surprisingly little-known phenomena of concurrent, or overlapping, surgeries—namely, those occurring at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

The investigative piece has since provided talking points for several malpractice lawsuits and begs the question, “Is it right or safe for surgeons to run two operations at once?” Concurrent surgery is considered acceptable by some prestigious hospitals and banned at others.

In order to understand why the story and the lawsuits have been so controversial, it’s important to first get a sense of what concurrent surgery is and how it can impact public health.

Dr. Aziz Benbrahim is a surgeon at Midstate Medical Center in Meriden, Connecticut. Midstate is part of the parent practice Hartford Healthcare Medical Group, which is also affiliated with Hartford Hospital, the Hospital of Central Connecticut, Windham Hospital and Backus Hospital.

Benbrahim said concurrent surgeries occur when a surgeon works on more than one patient at a time with the support of a team of medical professionals, sometimes other surgeons, to mainly assist with preparatory tasks and the opening and closure of wounds.

He said this often occurs in situations where patients are undergoing orthopedic surgery, that pertaining to the musculoskeletal system, or cardiac surgery.

According to Benbrahim, there is also a subset of concurrent surgery, something that The Boston Globe’s “Clash in the name of care” may have missed.

“Consecutive surgeries” occur when a surgeon has one or more surgeries booked immediately after one another. When the surgeon finishes stitching up one patient, he or she immediately moves on to the next open room, where all instruments and materials are already sterilized and the patient has just been wheeled in.

In the case of consecutive surgeries, medical staff is much less involved in the actual performance of the surgery and instead work to ensure that the surgeon avoids waiting for a newly cleaned room by simply making two available.

The Boston Globe’s story primarily focuses on Benbrahim’s first definition of “concurrent” surgeries, and it provides arguments from medical professionals and experts on both sides of the issue.

Benbrahim said he doesn’t personally practice concurrent surgery because the work that he does is technically challenging. But those who do practice it, he said, cite the optimization of time and patient volume as driving factors.

Dr. Michael DeBakey, a popular heart surgeon mentioned in “Clash in the name of care,” was an example of someone who often did practice concurrent surgery. It wasn’t unusual for DeBakey to work on three or four patients at a time, the story said, and a fair amount of people in the field said his practices were successful.

Indeed, a concurrent surgery page on MGH’s website cites “timeliness and availability of vital services” and “optimal use of rooms and surgical teams” as a few of its reasons for implementing concurrent surgery practices.

Another reason, according to MGH, is that concurrent surgery allows for greater access to preventative, life-saving services in times of large patient traumas. The website lists the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings as an example of when such “multitasking” was beneficial in maximizing the number of patients treated in the shortest possible time.

There’s also the weight of education. Benbrahim said concurrent surgeries are more likely to occur in teaching hospitals, where residents are being educated and trained.

The Boston Globe said MGH officials “described the practice as an extension of the teaching hospital’s team approach, pairing senior doctors with residents—surgical trainees—and fellows…”

Still, Benbrahim remains unconvinced and continues to question the risk factors associated with performing concurrent surgeries. “The most important patient in a day is the one in the operating room,” he said.

And what happens when a relatively simple surgery goes wrong? Some pending malpractice lawsuits cite concurrent surgery’s role in complications.

According to Benbrahim, patient care, safety and positive outcomes are most important when it comes to performing surgeries. He said he personally doesn’t agree with the idea of concurrency because it seems like “short-changing” patients.

To be clear, though, he said it is not entirely unimaginable that a set of concurrent surgeries could be performed without a hitch. Two important factors need to line up for it to work: a predictable procedure and a “well-oiled machine.”

Benbrahim said that concurrent surgeries are most often streamlined procedures that feature frequently reproduced techniques that very rarely go wrong — obesity and orthopedic surgeries, for example.

Perhaps even more crucial is the effectiveness of the medical team working on the patient — the “well-oiled machine.” He said concurrent surgeries require “an excellent team, all the time, every time,” in order to ensure successful, positive patient outcomes.

While The Boston Globe has undoubtedly uncovered the details of a newly controversial practice, Benbrahim said that generally, “Patients trust the system a lot.”

Over the phone, he mentioned that he had some down time at work after just finishing a robotic surgery.

“Maybe that’s the future,” he said with a chuckle.

Melissa Sirois is a senior journalism major at Quinnipiac University. She is writing about public health this spring. She can be reached at melissa.sirois@quinnipiac.edu.

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In board rooms and doctor’s offices, Connecticut embraces ‘mindfulness’

By Melissa Sirois

Perhaps it wasn’t being practiced or talked about in decades’ past, or perhaps it was still in the process of being socially constructed, and we hadn’t come up with a name for it yet.

Either way, it didn’t appear as prominently in the public sphere. Today, though, “mindfulness” is everywhere.

It’s on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list in the form of Dan Harris’ 10% Happier, a story of the Nightline co-anchor’s experiences with meditation. It’s practiced and praised by everyone from Anderson Cooper, to Katy Perry, to Derek Jeter. It’s even being implemented across Silicon Valley at tech giants such as Apple and Google.

But what, exactly, is mindfulness? And why do people care?

The Capitol Region Education Council (CREC) out of Hartford promotes mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.” Essentially, mindfulness is being consciously and acutely aware of your senses and living in the present moment, away from the usual distractions.

Emily Rosen is an educational technology and mindfulness specialist at CREC and has been working in the world of mindfulness for 12 years. She said the practice is about learning how to disconnect and take a pause.

“You could be mindful about anything,” she said. “You could be mindful about doing the dishes. It’s a question of putting your mind and your senses and your attention all in one place.”

Jennifer Berard, chair of Pratt & Whitney’s Military Engines Health and Wellness Committee, echoed this sentiment — that mindfulness can be practiced anytime, anywhere, even while doing things that may seem mundane.

Berard said that people who are truly happy live in the present moment and appreciate it for what it is. She sees a need for increased self-awareness, especially among people in the corporate working environment. “You’re spread across thin,” she said. “You’re in the past, and you’re in the future. You’re not in the moment.”

Both Rosen and Berard stressed that mindfulness is more than just meditation, yoga and breathing exercises. Rather, mindfulness is the larger umbrella that encompasses these tactics, and it is a skill that manifests itself differently in people.

The practice of mindfulness is not only helpful for short-term focusing and attentiveness. Extensive research by neuroscientists has documented that consistent mindfulness practices can result in increased feelings of calm and empathy for others, improved impulse control and emotional regulation and decreased levels of stress, anxiety and depression.

Historically, psychologists have used mindfulness as an approach to therapy for those who have experienced emotional trauma and extreme, prolonged stress.

Rosen said that mindfulness is different than the traditional approach to therapy, “but it’s kinder and gentler in some ways. It’s a process. It’s not a quick fix for sure.”

New Haven Insight is a meditation community that hosts group sessions every Monday and Thursday evening in the Dwight Hall Chapel on Yale University’s old campus. According to an informational brochure, the group, founded in 2008, is “dedicated to the practice of mindful awareness and compassion with the goal of decreasing (and ending) stress and suffering for all.”

Connecticut is also home to the mindfulness retreat center that is Copper Beech Institute. Based out of West Hartford and founded by a University of Notre Dame alumnus, Copper Beech offers daylong and overnight retreats, meditation groups, mindfulness education courses and workshops with mindfulness experts.

According to its website, “Copper Beech Institute envisions a future where mindfulness and contemplative practice are transforming education, health care, business, government, and every level of society affecting a healing shift in how we relate to one another and the earth…. Copper Beech Institute strives to awaken us to the fullness of our potential.”

In December, Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) hosted a two-day mindfulness conference, organized by Rosen and three others. The event brought together CREC educators and CCSU professors, as well as psychologists, students and guest speakers.

“There’s more going on in this realm than any individual knew about,” Rosen said. “We just found a lot of people doing interesting work.”

The conference was so successful that Rosen and the team have been asked to host a second. “We’re trying to make the next conference a little more in-depth…whether you’re new to mindfulness or you’re a psychologist and you’re already using these tools and looking to learn more,” she said.

Hartford Hospital has also gotten involved in the mindfulness movement by hosting eight-week Mindfulness-Based-Stress Reduction (MBSR) courses intended to teach the basics of meditation, yoga and stress management.

The series is based on similar courses hosted by the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness and features Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR approach.

Kabat-Zinn established MBSR in the 1970s to help patients who were experiencing chronic pain, and in 2012, he spoke to Google employees about the method.

Today, Google’s “emotional intelligence” initiative is the more progressive type, offering employees access to about a dozen courses on mindfulness meditation and boasting a six-month wait list for its most popular class, “Search Inside Yourself.”

In contrast, Connecticut’s Pratt & Whitney, a Fortune 500 company that manufactures jet engines, hails from a more conservative culture, through which Berard said “the glorification of busy” often permeates.

Berard said the Pratt & Whitney culture fosters hard work, but “just because I’m busy doesn’t mean that I’m doing well or getting anything done.” She understands the importance of retention and keeping employees happy.

Since becoming chair of the Military Engines Health and Wellness Committee, Berard has made it her mission to develop a mindfulness initiative that will create “opportunity areas” for employees to improve both inside and outside of the work environment.

She received support from the president of Pratt & Whitney’s military engines division in establishing “meeting-free afternoons” after 2 p.m. on Fridays.

“Each person and meeting room in Microsoft Outlook now has a block on the calendar to dedicate time for personal development, organization, training and closing out the week and preparing for the next,” she wrote in a graduate admissions essay about her work.

In addition, Berard has held a handful of hour-long mindfulness seminars, ran a health fair and initiated the addition of outdoor seating to Pratt & Whitney’s East Hartford campus.

She has also encouraged “walking meetings” and outdoor meetings to increase blood circulation and foster creativity and has supported mindfulness efforts by UTC-4-Vets, an internal employee resource group for those who have served in the armed forces.

Overall, Berard said she is striving to create a culture of work-life integration. “I always say that when you hire a person, you hire the entire person. You hire people who have interests, hobbies, families, health concerns — and as a company we need to focus on our people,” she wrote in her essay.

For those who may be intimidated by the idea of practicing mindfulness, Berard and Rosen emphasized that no one person is an expert, and no two people are “mindful” in the same way. “It’s a personal practice thing,” Rosen said. “It doesn’t really have to do with career, specifically. It’s not just for people in the healthcare field.”

More importantly, they said, mindfulness is about being able to understand and regulate one’s own emotions, becoming self-aware, developing healthy, life-long survival skills and embracing the present moment.

“Can you really dedicate yourself fully to anything that you’re doing other than what you’re doing right now? The answer is no,” Berard said. “You really need to make time for yourself or else time is going to eat you.”

Melissa Sirois is a senior journalism major at Quinnipiac University. She is writing about public health this spring. She can be reached at melissa.sirois@quinnipiac.edu.

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New position will tackle New Haven’s ‘food deserts’

By Melissa Barclay

When was the last time you went to the grocery store? How long did it take you? What was your mode of transportation?

Residents of New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood can’t easily walk or take public transportation to a grocery store.

For many Americans, a trip to the grocery store is a leisurely task. But for others living in areas designated as “food deserts,” access to healthy food is limited. Instead of having access to nutritious food, residents are surrounded by fast food joints that are cheap and convenient but unhealthy.

Some sections in New Haven have been designated as food deserts by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Based on the CARE 2015 health survey, hunger rates within the city’s six lowest-income neighborhoods soar up to 40 percent. In addition to that, 7 out of 10 residents are considered overweight or obese due to the lack of nutritious food in their diet.

To try and address this issue, the New Haven Food Policy Council has created a new position – food system director – which will be responsible for coordinating events raising awareness about the issue.

According to the job posting for the position, the food director will be responsible for creating and implanting strategies that will decrease the lack of access to healthy food within New Haven and serve as a liaison between the city and the New Haven Food Policy Council.

The position has yet to be filled.

Resident Joanne Ndiaye and her family have struggled without convenient access to a local supermarket.

“[I’m] no stranger to the task of trying to keep a balanced, healthy meal on the table,” she said.

Ndiaye has been a resident of the Hill section of New Haven for the last 10 years.  She is also a single mother of five children, and a beneficiary of the SNAP program.

SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It is a government program providing food stamps to families who qualify.

“Like so many other families, we depend on SNAP benefits and food pantries to make ends meet from month to month,” Ndiaye said.  “There were times we were left to eat foods that were not balanced and healthy.”

Public transportation is an issue in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood. city buses do not travel directly to the supermarkets, and some residents have to transfer to another bus to get there and back.

In order to get to the nearest grocery store, Save-A-Lot in Hamden, most residents have to travel about a mile and a half. But fast-food joints, such as Chinese food restaurants, are located within walking distance in the neighborhood.

Melissa Barclay is a senior journalism student at Quinnipiac University. She is writing about food deserts this spring. She can be reached at melissa.barclay@quinnipiac.edu.

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Wallingford pastor organizes mission trips to Haiti

By Nick Solari

Pastor Lubin Beaucejour used to sit at his desk overlooking Interstate 91 and watch the cars fly by.

Beaucejour – an employee of Blue Cross Blue Shield in North Haven at the time – noticed that everybody seemed to be in a rush to get somewhere. Born and raised in Haiti, he marveled at the way Americans were always “on the go.”

“Watching the people drive by, I used to sit in my office looking out the window and just think, ‘what a country,’” Beaucejour said. “When I came to this country, and I saw the wealth of America, I remembered what I left behind. I saw the America that was spoiled. I used to just think ‘no, this can’t be possible.’”

He remembered what living in Haiti was like. He knew that things had gotten worse since the earthquake that devastated the country in 2010. People had no food, no water, no housing, no clothes.

“You have to go there to even comprehend the level of poverty,” Beaucejour said. “People say we have poverty in New Haven, and that we have poverty in Hartford and Waterbury… But what they don’t realize is that it’s much different.”

One of the biggest differences, Beaucejour said, was that Haiti had no “safety nets.”

“Haiti has no welfare, no soup kitchens, no Salvation Army. You might think it’s bad here, but it’s much worse there.”

He was “inspired to actually find a way to be the bridge that brings America to Haiti, and to be a blessing to the Haitian people.”

Beaucejour, currently a pastor at Christ Community Church in Wallingford, began organizing his first voyage back to his homeland in 2000. He created the Bethesda Evangelical Mission (BEM), a nonprofit organization that planned mission trips to Haiti’s southern peninsula.

BEM then became a branch of GO-ICS (Global Outreach International Center for Services), which Beaucejour created to “meet the medical challenges of the people of the southern peninsula,” according to the organization’s website, www.timetogonow.org.

The goal was simple: to provide access to health care throughout the region.

So Beaucejour began recruiting people to make trips to Haiti with him. At first, the organization would collect medication and health care supplies. They would go for a week, and hold open clinics in different villages where people could wait in line to receive care.

Sixteen years later, BEM still follows the same routine. Kathy Clements, a retired nurse, has been making two trips a year with Beaucejour and BEM since 2010.

Clements’ mother passed away on Jan. 12, 2010 – that day the earthquake in Haiti occurred. Clements was having a hard time dealing with her mother’s death, which is when her friend, Abby Bruce, suggested she take the trip to Haiti.

“I’m going to Haiti with my daughter,” Bruce, also a registered nurse, said. “You should come with us.”

“I found a way to give back in my mother’s memory,” Clements said. “I’ve gone back twice a year since, and I don’t regret a single moment of it.”

Bruce, who sponsors four children in Haiti, and Clements have been a part of BEM’s trip in February and August each year.

“There’s a group of us that have been doing this since 2010,” Bruce explained. “You develop relationships with the people you go with, so they become like family.”

Beaucejour says he is forever indebted to the people who have helped him with his project.

“It shows the heart that they have,” Beaucejour said. “For them, to give up their luxury to go help, it’s just a selfless action. They are the engine that makes this program run.”

BEM’s people stay in Beaucejour’s brother’s mission house when they travel to Haiti. Each day is the same: They wake up at 6 a.m., pray at 7, eat breakfast at 8 and then they’re out to door and on their way to a different village.

By the time they arrive there are hundreds of people waiting in line to be seen. The team sets up tables and chairs in a tent at the front to check people in. Younger children, who go on the trip but aren’t medically trained to take care of people, sit in the front of the portable tent to stamp people’s hands and provide them with anti-worm medication – since most of them need it.

The people then see the registered nurses and doctors. The team stops seeing patients for 15 minutes to eat lunch, and usually works until the sun goes down – since they have no electricity to keep working at night.

“I have an opportunity, given my medical background, to really make a difference,” Bruce said. “I feel like it’s my obligation, when I’m there, to give everyone waiting the proper treatment that they need.”

Patients there have all sorts of problems, ranging from ear infections and heartburn to malaria and malnutrition.

Clements recalls one 3-year-old child she saw years ago with an ear infection. He had puss dripping down his shoulder and the skin on his neck had been burnt.

“We cleaned his ear out, and the whole time he was screaming in pain,” she said. “We gave him antibiotics and Tylenol for the pain. The next time we went, I saw him, and he was doing much better. I think he would have lost his hearing if we hadn’t seen him that day, so that’s one instance where we truly changed someone’s life.”

Currently, GO-ICS is the No. 1 provider of medication for the southern peninsula of Haiti. The organization has funded and help build 12 schools in the region, and is poised to create a hospital in the region by 2019.

The hospital’s land was recently paid for, and GO-ICS has begun raising money for its construction.

The organization’s two main sources of funding are individual online contributions through PayPal and an annual gala in Hartford.

“Sometimes I just sit back and put my hand on my head and say, ‘you know what, there’s a kid eating because of us,’” Beaucejour said. “Isn’t that amazing?”

Beaucejour said religion is at the center of his operation, but across various faiths. Over time, his team has consisted of people who are Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Hindi.

“They all come together for the common good,” he said. “Every morning I have a devotion and I read from the Bible, but not to make people feel bad. We all pray together. They listen to what I have to say, and I listen to them”

That’s the most important part of Beaucejour’s operation: That people of all different faith can work together to help others.

“It shows that people can be mankind again,” he added. “Life is about finding Jesus in other people, and I truly believe seeing something is better than hearing it.”

“If I say I love you by being there when you’re hungry and naked, that’s the genuine love … It shows,” Beaucejour added. “That’s what this organization is about. We show people through our actions.”

Nick Solari is a senior journalism major at Quinnipiac University. He is writing about religion this spring. He can be reached at nicholas.solari@quinnipiac.edu.

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Inconsistency seen in Connecticut’s handling of sex ed

By Melissa Sirois

“We’re freaking slammed everywhere—all over the culture and all of these billboards, commercials, everything! But then the minute it gets down to the real thing, no one wants to talk about it.”

So said Lilly Bosco, a member of Plainville High School’s graduating class of 2012 and a marketing student at the University of Hartford. She’s in the middle of her commute to school on a Sunday afternoon, and there is no hiding the fact that she is frustrated.

But it’s not the extra hours at the library that have got her speaking so passionately—at least, not this time. It’s the issue of the current state of sexual education curriculum in Connecticut.

Bosco says the system has not provided a comprehensive sexual education experience for students in middle and high schools. And she’s not alone in her opinions.

In 1987, the Center for Disease Control introduced a system for integrating health education practices into school settings across the United States. The approach, called “Coordinated School Health” (CSH), established the goal of improving the health of students in the hopes of also improving academic achievement.

According to the Connecticut Department of Education, the CSH blueprint is applied in partnership with support from the Department of Public Health and funding from the CDC. The DOE’s mission statement for the approach is “to nurture the physical, social and emotional health of the entire school community…and to promote and support the full implementation of a coordinated approach to school health…”

Connecticut’s sexual health education curriculum’s eight content standards, in line with the CSH program, include items such as “analyze factors that may contribute to a healthy and unhealthy relationship” and “discuss important health assessments, screenings and examinations that are necessary to maintain reproductive health.”

While a 2003 study sponsored by Advocates for Youth and The Parisky Group of Hartford showed 91 percent of all adults support sexual education in high school, some of the people most affected — students and their primary care providers — say not enough is being done to create an integrated approach to sexual education in the classroom.

Michael Corjulo is the former president of the Association of School Nurses of Connecticut and a pediatric nurse practitioner at the Children’s Medical Group in Hamden. He believes people at the DOE have good intentions and would probably be open to more collaboration with parents and primary care providers.

“I think the important thing is that we make a structured effort to try to ensure that we’re giving kids the same message about sexual education in schools as they would get by their primary care provider,” he said.

Bosco supports this notion, too. She said the education system should be more in tune with students’ sexual educational needs, which include the knowledge of resources and more transparent discussions around how to have consensual, safe, fun sex.

Of her sexual education experience in Plainville’s public school system, she said, “I don’t remember anything too significant…. I don’t think it was really taught in an effective way. They just wanted to get through it with us.”

“There was never any followup,” she said.

According to Corjulo, Bosco and thousands of other students like her have experienced a superficial approach to sexual education.

Statistics from the Connecticut School Health Profiles (SHP) for 2010 illustrate the discrepancies in sexual education curriculums. In 2010, 87 percent of health courses in grades six through 12 taught about HIV prevention; 88 percent about human sexuality; 78 percent about pregnancy prevention; and 87 percent about STD prevention.

That same year, 95 percent of high school sex ed teachers and 75 percent of middle school sex ed teachers taught abstinence as the best method of avoiding HIV infection.

By comparison, the report said educators were “less likely to provide instruction on ‘controversial’ methods.” For instance, 66 percent of teachers instructed on the importance of using condoms consistently and correctly, and only 56 percent taught students about how to obtain condoms.

Emma Bartley also attended junior high in Plainville, but spent her high school years at St. Paul Catholic High School in Bristol, where she graduated in 2015. She had a bit of a different experience as she moved from public to private school.

Bartley said she was exposed to sexual education in religion class at St. Paul under a faith-based approach, where she felt educators didn’t address the reality of the situation.

“They weren’t telling us what to believe — they would say, ‘Use protection,’ but I feel like at the same time they kind of acted so innocent and just acted like we were all waiting until marriage,” she said. “They were almost blind to what was actually going on, but they wouldn’t admit it.”

To be fair, Bartley said she feels as though St. Paul’s health curriculum generally worked pretty well for her. She learned the ins and outs of harmful drugs and alcohol, and she said there was a lot of focus on building healthy relationships and recognizing unhealthy dating practices.

Bosco said she sees obvious room for improvement and places blame on the overarching taboo culture surrounding sex — the one where sex sells, but we’re afraid to talk about it with our children.

“I think it really starts with kids, and they’re not having the proper conversations,” she said. “It’s totally being brought to them in an awkward way right from the beginning — that it’s weird, and it’s not a normal conversation [to have].”

On the awkward conversation front, Corjulo would agree. He said while some schools across the state probably handle sexual education very well, “It’s sort of hit or miss. It’s not a structured, intentional approach.”

A lot of this, he said, stems from unprepared faculty members — gym teachers, for instance — who are unaware of how to broach the topic with their students. “I don’t think that health educators in schools get down to that level of, ‘OK. You’re in this situation here…’,” he said.

Both Bartley and Bosco said they didn’t experience truly open conversations about sex until college, where free condoms are often distributed in student centers, and there are semester-long courses dedicated to discussions of human sexuality.

During her freshman year at University of Hartford, Bosco had her own sexual health scare, something she says high school health class did not prepare her for but should have.

Before she knew it, an STD had passed through three unknowing people, and she was one of them. Bosco said she was infected for three months before she even realized something was wrong and found the courage to ask for help.

“The dangers of sex that exist — they’re real. But they don’t have to become part of your sex life,” she said.

Melissa Sirois is a senior journalism major at Quinnipiac University. She is writing about public health this spring. She can be reached at melissa.sirois@quinnipiac.edu.

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