As high school seniors prepare to graduate and head off to college, this summer many of them will sit through various orientation presentations to prepare them for life on a college campus. What sort of information is given to incoming college freshman can very from state to state, from school to school, so local officials and administrators at Daniel Hand High School (DHHS) are working to make sure all members of this senior class receive a critically important presentation on sexual assault before they receive their diplomas.

On Tuesday, June 12, every member of the DHHS senior class will attend an assembly addressing sexual assault on college campuses. State Representative Noreen Kokoruda (R-101) first brought up the idea of having a presentation at the high school and partnered with MADE in Madison Assistant Coalition Coordinator Jennifer Wenderoth-Holster to give the presentation. When they approached the school to see about maybe having an afterschool presentation, Kokoruda said she was very pleased when DHHS Principal TJ Salutari quickly suggested making it a mandatory assembly for the whole senior class during the school day.

“I was trying to find a way to get a lot of girls to come to a meeting, so I was thinking of doing it through sports teams,” Kokoruda said. “So I called the athletic director and he said, ‘Let’s get the principal involved’ and that went to they are going to make it an assembly in school.”

Wenderoth–Holster, who works through Madison Youth & Family Services and local colleges, and has worked with Kokoruda on legislation up at Hartford, will give the presentation to the students. By new state legislation, all students have to receive some form of sexual assault education every year, but due to when that law became effective, the senior class at DHHS had not received a presentation like this yet.

“This needs to be done in the high schools,” Wenderoth-Holster said of the education. “They need to get this information well before they are at college, because the problem is when you are doing these freshman orientation presentations, it may be when they are moving in to school, it may be the first semester, or it might be in the first year, and by then it’s too late. It’s important that the education is starting younger.”

The presentation will include information on all the different aspects of sexual violence, how those acts translate into punishable crimes, the importance of consent and what role alcohol or drugs play in consent, and the need to understand how the law works in whatever state a student’s particular college is in.

Having all of this information before is student goes to college is critical, Wenderoth-Holster said, because the majority of college sexual assaults occur in the first few weeks a student is at school.

“It’s called the red zone and it’s the time that you move into school in the beginning of fall end of summer up to when you go home for Thanksgiving break,” she said. “That is where the majority of sexual assaults happen. They say just over 50 percent of the college sexual assaults that happen, happen during those couple of weeks.”

The presentation at DHHS is just for students, who will have the opportunity to ask questions and have discussions and hopefully take this education with them when they leave for college.

“I am glad Madison is being so proactive on this because some towns and districts are not,” Wenderoth-Holster said. “It’s something that needs to be addressed for boys and girls, but also for parents to have these conversations with their teenagers, especially before they go to college.”

While the presentation is in the school, both Kokoruda and Wenderoth-Holster said the conversation shouldn’t stop there. According to Wenderoth-Holster, 70 percent of Connecticut residents said their parents never talked to them about sexual assault.

“It’s a difficult conversation,” said Kokoruda. “But this is about the safety of our kids.”