Without discussion, the Milwaukee School Board voted 7-0 Thursday night to make condoms available at many of the city's high schools, paving the way to make Milwaukee Public Schools one of the relatively few districts in the nation to provide contraception to students.
The communicable disease prevention program, as the district calls it, could be in place as soon as the 2010-'11 school year.
The proposal sparked some opposition after being made public Dec. 2, but the board approved the condom distribution without much dissent. Comments from the public are not allowed at board meetings and a board committee had voted 5-0 on Dec. 9 to recommend adopting the program.
The condoms will be available free of charge, but only to students in high schools that have school nurses and only after students request them at the nurse's office, according to a fact sheet circulated by the school district. Up to two condoms will be distributed at a time.
Handing children condoms because they're having sex anyway is like teaching kids how to aviod getting caught shoplifting since they're going to do it anyway. It's aimed at trying to reduce the impact of the consequences rather than preventing the bad behavior in the first place. One of the major deterrents to immoral behavior besides one's on conscience is the risk of the consequences. Risk is based on two things; severity and likelihood of occurence. Condoms are intended to mitigate the consequences by reducing the likelihood of occurence. They can't do anything about the severity of an STD or teen prenancy. Also, what mitigating the consequences does is make it easier to defy what your own conscience is trying to tell you is wrong. It is equivalent to reducing the enforcement of crime in order to reduce the number of people in jails.
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