The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education received an update on how the district educates students about how to handle issues of sexual misconduct in a meeting March 2.

Director of healthful living and athletics Scarlett Steinert said training and education around these issues should start early.

“Research on sexual assault has really shown a strong connection between bullying that goes on in younger years without consequences and in the later years sexual harassment,” she said.

CHCCS does a number of things to help educate students and provide a safe environment, officials said. It works with a number of outside sources to give teachers proper training on how to handle issues of sexual misconduct. And the district has counselors in each school trained to handle these issues and students also take courses designed to educate them on sexual misconduct.

However, Steinert said there were areas the district needs to improve.

“Students are taught health only through ninth grade,” she said. “There is no other time in tenth through twelfth grade to teach the health curriculum. So it stops and ninth grade and we do realize that that is a gap.”

Measuring the success of these educational programs can be difficult.

Rachel Valentine of the Orange County Rape Crisis Center said the number of sexual harassment and sexual assaults reported can be a misleading statistic.

“We would like to see that number decline,” she said. “However, if we look at that data and what we see is spikes and increases, we would see that as a positive because what that tells us is there are more people who are comfortable coming forward.”

Instead, Valentine said the Rape Crisis Center encourages people to look at the willingness of by-standers who get involved when sexual misconduct is occurring.

CHCCS is currently working on finding ways to continue the education of parents, teachers and students when it comes to issues of sexual misconduct.