Rachel, Western PA

Last week, Anna and I trekked to Westmoreland County to canvass in the towns of Mt. Pleasant and Ligonier. We are spoiled, as we are interning at an urban affiliate, mostly covering turf that lies less than 10 miles from the office, with semi-reliable public transportation to get us there. So a distant, more rural canvass was a bit of a shock to our city-scuffed shoes. After a terribly fraught journey to our meeting point for the Mt. Pleasant canvass, we decided that the pouring rain was not going to let up, and so our first taste of canvassing, Westmoreland-style, came the next day, in the small quaint town of Ligonier.

I had hoped that we would find more people at home than we typically do in Pittsburgh. It was a chilly day, threatening rain, and I reasoned that in a small town like Ligonier, there would be… well, less to entice people to leave their homes on a Saturday afternoon. I was wrong; the percentage of knocks that went unanswered was no less than in our many Pittsburgh canvasses. For the people we did speak to, however, there was an important difference.

Pennsylvania has no statewide guidelines for the teaching of sex ed (hence this internship) and from what I gathered, the education young people receive at schools in Ligonier is spotty at best. Mothers could break out with personal stories about the inadequacy of their children’s’ education. On the other hand, Pittsburgh public schools are required to provide comprehensive sex education, and try as we might, this fact stole the urgency from our conversations. Women in Pittsburgh would listen to my story, but then say “Well, my kids already get good sex ed, so I’m not interested,” or “I’m happy with the status quo in Pittsburgh, so I won’t sign.” Woman after woman produced something along these lines: “My kids are out of school,” “I don’t have kids,” “I teach my kids about sex myself.”

I try not to get frustrated, but I sometimes want to interrupt with “But what about all the other kids in Pennsylvania?” What about those kids stuck in a high school much like my own, that in lieu of a real sex education program, offers gruesome pictures of advanced STDs and a few quips about abstinence? I have encountered hardly any hostility towards my message, little denial of the benefits of comprehensive sex ed. But for some people, their thinking stops there, at their doorstep, at the boundaries of their school district. I wish I could inspire everyone with the passion I heard from those Ligonier women, somehow make them see that elsewhere in the state, children just like their own are being denied the education they need and deserve. But I guess that’s the point.