Ball State University is first in the Mid-American conference for more than football.
The 2008 Trojan Sexual Health Report Card ranked Ball State 31st in the nation -ยก- 31 spots better than last year - better than every other MAC school and nine spots behind Indiana University Bloomington for best in Indiana.
Kent Bullis, medical director of the Amelia T. Wood Health Center, said he attributed the rise in the rankings to the way the independent research firm, Sperling's Best Places, conducted the survey. A representative from Sperling's called Bullis for information about sexual health initiatives at Ball State. He said he wasn't contacted during last year's survey.
Health educator Lisa Thomason said the representative asked Bullis if the university provided free contraceptives, if it had sexual health programs, including peer education, if it had a sexual health awareness week and if it provided checks for sexually transmitted diseases.
Thomason said Ball State's best-known initiative is giving students free condoms. Students can choose from three brands and take five condoms a day at the Health Center.
"We certainly don't care what brand they use as long as they're using them," she said.
The Health Center also offers free tests for syphilis and HIV on Tuesday afternoons, she said. The tests are confidential.
Bullis said the screening process had improved in past years. The old process had students go to the Health Center, register to be checked and wait until a doctor could help them. Now the process is simpler, and students don't need to see a doctor to be checked, he said.
Sophomore telecommunications major Dasia Gilbert and freshman accounting major Patrick Qualls said Ball State hasn't done enough to promote sexual health on campus.
"I haven't seen one thing about sexual health," Qualls said.
Gilbert said the amount of promotion and advertisement often went unnoticed among students and health classes don't spend enough time on sexual health, she said.
"All we get in health classes is 'don't smoke because you'll get cancer,'" she said.
Thomason said Health Education conducted outreach programs for any group that requested them. It has done programs for individual classrooms, residence halls and student organizations. She said she looked for specific times to do a program when sexual health was a priority for students, such as near Spring Break and Valentine's Day.
"It's great to see an improvement in the rankings and that other people will be aware of some of those programs," Thomason said.
Qualls suggested Ball State could increase awareness among students by offering an elective sex education course.
Ball State offers a course called Health, Sexuality, and Family Life which focuses on several topics, sexual health among them.
Gilbert went further and said a sexual health course should be in the University Core Curriculum.
Qualls said he had heard rumors throughout high school that as many as two-thirds of Ball State students had a sexually transmitted disease.
Thomason said she had heard such rumors during conversations with students. Health Education conducted surveys every three years that prove otherwise. The 2006 survey found that Ball State's STD rate was about five percent, she said.
"It's nice to be able to correct that misconception, wherever it came from," she said.
RankingsThe study ranked 139 schools around the nation.Rankings for Indiana schools:IU-22Ball State-31Purdue-54IUPUI-126Notre Dame-136
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