The Re-education of Lubbock, Texas

By Rebecca Onion, WireTap. Posted March 23, 2005.

The Education of Shelby Knox follows the political awakening of Shelby, a young woman who grew up in a conservative Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas. The documentary, which was chosen as a Sundance Film Festival selection this year, will also appear on PBS this spring and might just inspire a whole new generation of sex ed advocates.

Although Shelby's religious and personal convictions had led her to make a virginity pledge through True Love Waits, she quickly becomes active within a movement to bring comprehensive sex education into the schools in her area.

The film follows Shelby over three years, during which time she and her group lobby the school board on behalf of comprehensive sex ed and (sadly) lose that fight. Shelby then pulls even farther away from her parents' conservatism by allying herself with a group of GLBT students working to get the school district to let them start a gay-rights club.

Shelby is now a freshman at the University of Texas-Austin. She spoke with us on the phone about activism and life in Lubbock. (The film will be broadcast on June 21 on PBS, as part of the documentary series POV).



WireTap: So, how did you get into activism, before the film crew chose you as their subject for this documentary?

Shelby Knox: I'd been interested in leadership and politics. I was very interested in watching the news, what was going on with world leaders, stuff like that. At 15, I still had the political leanings of my parents, which is to say, I was basically Republican. I hadn't really questioned why they believed those things, I was just wholeheartedly in support, because my parents believed them. We went to First Baptist Church of Lubbock since when I was little, and I think 99 percent of the people in the church are Republicans. The whole town is very much Republican. And my parents grew up in other places in Texas and New Mexico that were very conservative.

WT: So, you initially decided that you wanted to join the Lubbock Youth Commission because you were interested in leadership, not necessarily in the sex ed issue.

SK: Yes. We got involved in the sex ed issue later, because we were looking for an issue that represented the concerns of most youth in Lubbock. When we looked around, we realized that almost everyone knew somebody who had an STD or had gone through a teen pregnancy. [Editor's note: Texas has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country.] And we did some research and found out that there was a theory that this was because of the abstinence-only sex education policy. I started looking on the internet at different sex ed programs, and looking at the sites from SIECUS [Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States] and Advocates for Youth. And then we started to develop ideas about what the ideal sex-ed curriculum would be.

WT: What kinds of ideas did you guys start to have?

SK: The main thing we wanted was that there should be a rule that everything taught be medically accurate. There was a lot of information coming out of the [abstinence-only] programs that was not medically accurate. We also wanted a public health official to come in and teach the classes, instead of a pastor. And we wanted information on all the STDs – they left out some of them in the current curriculum. And we also wanted to cover relationship issues, because the abstinence programs are telling you just not to have sex, but it's hard to know how to discuss sex with other people. Those are the main things we were looking for.

WT: Why did you stipulate that it be a public health official, not a teacher, who would teach this sex ed?

SK: Well, the Texas Department of Health has people who are actually state-certified to teach sex education. And we talked to them and they said they'd definitely be willing to do as many presentations as they had to – they'd love to teach in the schools. So we were advocating that.

WT: So the resources are there, it's just a matter of the administration agreeing to bring them in.

SK: I talked to one woman who said they get very few requests for their services in the schools.

WT: So you did this research for a new curriculum, and then you were kind of going to use that as a tool to show people what it should be?

SK: We developed a few proposals we were going to bring to the school board. And we decided that in the meantime, because the school board wouldn't meet with us, we all would get trained to teach sex education ourselves. We took a Red Cross course. Then, in my junior year, I started volunteering for Planned Parenthood as the youth volunteer coordinator, and worked on developing curricula for elementary-age kids to be taught by young adults like myself.

WT: What did your parents think about you volunteering there?

SK: My parents were actually fine with it. My parents, unlike most Republicans, are pro-choice, and they always believed in the sex ed issue. They had no problem with me volunteering for Planned Parenthood.

WT: What did the rest of the people at your school think of the comprehensive sex-ed campaign?

SK: People my age were really supportive. They knew we didn't have that much information, and they wanted more. They even started coming to members of the youth commission with their questions about sex, because they knew we were being educated. And so we sort of became peer educators.

WT: What kinds of questions did they have? Do you remember?

SK: "If my boyfriend smokes enough pot before we have sex, it'll kill all his semen for a couple hours, right?"

WT: Oh my God!

SK: That one's good. Or "If a guy douses his penis in Coke, he can't get a girl pregnant, right?" Then others were like "Where do I get condoms, where can I get tested for STDs?" This was the kind of information that they weren't getting in school.

WT: And how did your teachers react to your work?

SK: Some of them were very supportive. Some of them came up to me and said, "I support you privately, I can't support you publicly." Others were not so supportive. I had a Spanish teacher who would always call me a baby killer.

WT: In Spanish?

SK: No, not in Spanish. That was interesting! She's like 80 years old and shouldn't be teaching anymore, but everyone's so scared of her that they don't want to fire her. Something else was that the day after I appeared in a big article in the newspaper, somebody threw a rock through a window on my car.

WT: Did you ever find out who did it?

SK: No.

WT: Did you think it was the Spanish teacher?

SK: Maybe! No, she couldn't even lift a rock. So yeah, I got mixed reactions.

WT: What happened when you started getting involved with the gay rights kids?

SK: Nobody really said anything at all to me. I think they were used to it by then. Plus, I was very disconnected in high school. I was always working on other things. I didn't do normal high school things. I was doing the sex ed work, and I was doing the film. That sort of alienates people a tiny bit, when you come around with a film crew.

WT: So, after all this, do you want to go back to Lubbock and live at some point?

SK: No! I will never ever ever live in that city.

WT: Why?

SK: It's repressive; it's difficult for me to live there. It's too small. I guess I appreciate growing up there – it taught me a lot of things. But now that I'm out, I don't really want to return. I'll always go back to see my parents and my friends, but I don't want to live there.

WT: So what did you think about Austin when you went there? I had a friend who grew up in San Antonio and then went to UT-Austin, and he thought his whole childhood that he couldn't wait to move to Austin. Did you have the same kind of idea?

SK: No, I spent my first semester being really angry I was there. Because I had gotten into all these NYC schools. And I really wanted to be in New York, and I was upset I had to be in Austin. But once I got over being really angry, it's a really neat town, there's a lot of diversity there, there's a good music scene, it's a good place to live. It's a good community. But later on, I think I want to go to Columbia or Georgetown for law school.

WT: What do you want to do with a law degree?

SK: I want to eventually end up in the political sphere, but I want to get a law degree, maybe to practice law for a while, in women's and children's rights.

WT: Are you doing any activism at UT now?

SK: There's a group called Voices for Choice that's recently had a lot of problems, and I'm going to get involved with them, maybe try to work to resurrect that group. Then, also, I'm still working on sex ed. I'm doing outreach around the sex ed issue while I'm doing appearances for the film.

WT: Seems like you have your plate full.

SK: I think you could say that.

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