The advocacy groups and conservative members of the Board of Education Standards demanding the inclusion of Alzheimer’s disease and sex trafficking in the revision of South Dakota’s K-12 health curriculum standards seem to be missing the point of the standards. The state does not and should not use the standards to dictate a laundry list of specific topics that all health educators must cover. The state standards focus instead on providing a framework for developing skills that will help students improve their health and reduce risk.
As both the current standards and their lightly revised proposed update state, the South Dakota Health Education Standards “do not address specific health education content areas; instead, they provide a framework from which curricula can be developed independently. The selection of specific health content is left to state and local education agencies. This approach allows the SDHES to remain relevant over time, and it enables state and local education agencies to determine the curriculum content that best addresses the needs of their students” [emphasis mine].
Both documents refer to “common health education content areas” and CDC “adolescent risk behaviors” that inform and align with the standards, but the eight standards themselves and their numerous grade-level performance indicators do not mention any specific disease, injury, risk factor, remedy, or health practice.
| Standard | current (2018) | proposed (2025) |
| 1 | Students will comprehend concepts related to health promotion and disease prevention to enhance health. | Students will comprehend concepts related to health promotion and disease prevention to enhance health. |
| 2 | Students will analyze the influence of family, peers, culture, media, technology, and other factors on health behaviors. | Students will analyze the influence of family, peers, culture, media, technology and other factors on health behaviors. |
| 3 | Students will demonstrate the ability to access valid information and products and services to enhance health. | Students will demonstrate the ability to access valid health information about products and services that enhance health. |
| 4 | Students will demonstrate the ability to use interpersonal communication skills to enhance health and avoid or reduce health risks. | Students will demonstrate interpersonal-communication skills to enhance health and avoid or reduce health risk. |
| 5 | Students will demonstrate the ability to use decision-making skills to enhance health. | Students will demonstrate decision-making skills to enhance health. |
| 6 | Students will demonstrate the ability to use goal-setting skills to enhance health. | Students will demonstrate goal-setting skills to enhance health. |
| 7 | Students will demonstrate the ability to practice health-enhancing behaviors and avoid or reduce health risks. | Students will demonstrate health-enhancing behaviors and avoid or reduce health risk. |
| 8 | Students will demonstrate the ability to advocate for personal, family, and community health. | Students will demonstrate the ability to advocate for personal, family and community health. |
Neither the current standards nor the proposed revised standards mention Alzheimer’s, or dementia more broadly, or osteoporosis, heart disease, cancer, covid, influenza, syphillis or any other disease that may affect students right now or in their far off old age. Neither the current standards nor their proposed updates tell teachers or students to avoid sex traffickers, drug dealers, keg parties, Arby’s, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s bad advice, or other things that might hurt or kill them. They don’t need to. The health standards remind teachers of the big goals: get kids to think about their health, look for information, discern good info from bad, and act on good info to keep themselves and their communities safe and healthy. If teachers want to talk about how to avoid sex traffickers (step one: don’t go to parties with Donald Trump) or prevent Alzheimer’s, they can already do that within either version of the health standards.
And even if teachers can find time to squeeze either of these hotly advocated topics into their already crowded and time-constrained health curricula, I’m not convinced that Alzheimer’s or sex trafficking ought to jump to the front of the line. The Alzheimer’s advocates aren’t asking for lessons on how to prevent Alzheimer’s, and that’s good, because it’s kind of hard to teach kids specific actions on that front, since we have no definitive answers on what causes Alzheimer’s. But the request for standards on teaching kids to give care to family members with Alzheimer’s seems to ask too much. Teaching students to be home health aides is a degree program, not something we can practically fit into half an hour every other day between P.E. classes and not something we can universalize to every student. Every student has to decide whether to drink or smoke or exercise or use a condom; not every student has to decide how to keep Dad from wandering off. I don’t minimize the challenges of taking care of a loved one with dementia of any sort; I just speak to the cold calculus of the finite time teachers have to cover important topics and the decisions they have to make about which topics they must most urgently address to make the biggest practical difference in all of their students’ lives.
As for sex trafficking, I suggest that’s more of a crime, a topic for social studies, not health class. If the conservatives wanted to wage their crusade against that (fake? overhyped and conspiracy-riddled?) “epidemic“, perhaps they should have brought that up during the recent revision of the social studies standards (which Kristi Noem and Hillsdale College did see fit to rig with a giant and impractical laundry list of specific topics).
Curriculum standards do not need to and should not address every topic. They should provide a framework of practical goals and observable outcomes that tell us students are ready to meet not only current, obvious challenges but unknown future challenges. The health standards as written and as revised provide that framework. The health standards don’t need to explicitly mention Alzheimer’s or sex trafficking to allow teachers to address those issues, assuming those teachers and their school communities choose to prioritize addressing those issues ahead of or alongside the other topics they decide they should include in their local lesson plans.
I like lists. They tend to focus the mind. I don’t think lists are appropriate for curriculum standards, though. One issue would be that there are so many health issues that you would have about a half a minute to deal with every one of them. And that means you wouldn’t be doing students much good. So you have to prioritize.
I would put Alzheimer’s way at the bottom of issues students should know about. An understanding of how drugs and alcohol affect the brain would be much more important. A prerequisite for sex trafficking would have to be a major understanding of sex and sexuality, I would think, and you can touch on sex trafficking in a good sex ed unit.
Lists would have to be made age appropriate. I don’t think you would want to introduce the topic of sexual health in kindergarten. Even if that was on the list for high school students there would be the usual church ladies tut-tutting about it. If you could get 5-year-old boys to understand why it is important to wash their hands after peeing that would be the best thing you could do.