UVa students' voices echo in Senate as education bill passes with Kaine's sexual assault proposal included

The discussion was pretty free-wheeling, when Sen. Tim Kaine gathered with members of UVa’s One Less group last December to talk about what to do about sexual assaults on campus.

But he learned something then that, as of today, looks as if will  reshape federal education policy.

Over two hours back in December, the senator and the students wrestled with the tough questions of whether colleges or the police and courts ought to deal with such cases.

The students looked hard at their own school, including questions about fraternity and sorority culture that were particularly urgent in the wake of a Rolling Stone story, later withdrawn by the magazine as discredited, about a reported rape.

There was blunt talk, too, about what colleges teach students about safe relationships – kind of sandwiched between a talk on drinking and another on credit cards during freshman orientation, Kaine recalled.

So he asked, what about high school? Didn’t you have sex education there?

Sure, the students said. But it was all about the biology, not about relationships.

“So I’m 57 and I didn’t know what I used to know,” Kaine recalled. “I forgot what it was like to be a 19 year old on a college campus away from home for the first time.”

He forgot, too, what those painful high school classes were like.

But he drove back to DC with an idea starting to percolate.

What if middle and high school health education classes included information on what to do if you’re feeling pressured or coerced, or even fear violence, in a relationship? he asked himself.

He got together with Sen. Claire McCaskill, who represents his home state of Missouri, graduated from the University of Missouri a few years ahead of him and who went on to work as a prosecutor of sex crimes.

The two from Mizzou decided to push legislation requiring school systems that seek federal "21st Century Schools" funding under the Safe and Drug-free Schools Act's programs to report on how they teach about safe relationships – all those hard to talk about subjects like coercion, dating violence, stalking, domestic abuse and sexual violence.

Their proposal was incorporated in the Every Child Achieves Act of 2015 which passed the Senate to replace the No Child Left Behind law. The House of Representatives has passed a different version of that basic education law, so there may be some more wrangling to come.