September 21, 2017 10:02 AM UTC

Elections Matter, Sex Ed Edition

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post’s John Ingold reports:

A Denver-based program that helps school districts with sex education and works to prevent teen pregnancy is closing, after the Trump administration ended its main grant early.

Colorado Youth Matter received 75 percent of its funding from the federal grant, about $750,000 per year. The grant had been scheduled to run through 2020, but the Trump administration ended the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants as of next summer for all of the 84 organizations around the country that received them. The administration cited concerns about whether the programs were effective, a rationale critics have questioned. [Pols emphasis]

Regardless, without its main source of money, Colorado Youth Matter would have struggled to make its budget work, said Andrea Miller, the group’s executive director. Another private foundation also ended its grant with Colorado Youth Matter after the Trump administration announcement, worried that the organization would be too diminished without the federal money, Miller said.

“It would be difficult to regain some of that ground,” she said.

As Ingold reports, Colorado has been a leader for some years now on reducing the rate of teen pregnancy–most notably for a program to distribute long-acting reversible contraception to young women, but also due to educational initiatives like the federally-funded program described above.

Reports from other states about the loss of these grant funds trace the decision to Valerie Huber, described as “an outspoken advocate of abstinence-only education,” was appointed by the Trump administration to head the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Adolescent Health. Colorado Youth Matter’s sex ed program taught both abstinence and common sense about sexuality and safety.

And Donald Trump can’t have that! The reasons why, while keeping this a family show, run the gamut.