The first Bark sex survey, conducted in 1974 one year after the landmark Roe v. Wade case, didn’t only make front page news at Redwood—it also garnered the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ann Gigounas, journalism adviser at the time of the first sex issue, was asleep on the Sunday morning when she received news of the Chronicle’s coverage.

“Eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, the phone rings. Lotte Schiller (a school board member) called me directly and said ‘What were you thinking, this is horrible,’ and she goes, ‘Go down and look at the paper,’” Gigounas said. “I went down and I got the Chronicle, and there it was.”

The story had a headline that read “School Sex Poll Praised,” and featured some of the findings from the survey, as well as the faculty’s opinions on the professional manner in which the survey was conducted.

Gigounas said she was shocked to receive Schiller’s  phone call.

“I was really scared, because here I was, a young teacher, and I thought, ‘Oh jeez, what have I done?’”

The survey, conducted by the 1974 Bark staff and published in the sex issue, was likely among the first of its kind in the United States.

“Other than the Bark poll, recent statistics relating to sexual activity among high school students seems to be nonexistent,” Dr. Walter Lee, the school psychologist at the time, stated in the 1974 issue.

“Redwood was probably not first, but certainly in the first wave of reporting on the topic,” Former adviser Sylvia Jones said in an email interview recently.

According to Gigounas, it was the Bark staff who proposed the idea of doing a sex issue.

“It certainly didn’t come from me,” she said with a chuckle.

Despite her support of the decision to run the issue, Gigounas said she was concerned that it wouldn’t be done professionally.

“I was also very afraid that we wouldn’t do it right,” she said. “I was concerned with making it responsible—I didn’t want it to be lurid.”

This concern about the issue led to disagreement over what type of content was appropriate to run in the paper.

“There were huge arguments over how much you could put in [the paper],” Gigounas said.

According to Gigounas, ultimately the staff was able to produce an issue that touched on both sides of the important topics.

“We balanced it—we put in abortion, Birthright, Planned Parenthood, we just balanced the whole thing,” she said.

In the 40 years since the first sex issue’s publication, the Bark has continued its sex poll.

Survey questions have evolved over the years, with older survey questions about agreeing/disagreeing with statements such as “abortion is murder,” “prostitution should be legalized,” and “the institution of of marriage is outdated.” Issues during the AIDs epidemic also asked the question “Does the threat of AIDS limit your sexual activity?”

The question of whether homosexuality is an illness was first posed in 1974, and was placed back into the survey this year after a hiatus to see how student opinions on the causes of homosexuality have changed. In 1974, 37 percent of students agreed or strongly agreed that homosexuality was an illness, 26 percent had no opinion, and 37 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. Today, only 3.8 percent of students believed homosexuality was an illness, while 96.3 percent believed it was not.

Former adviser Donal Brown said that when he took the job in 1977, the students were adamant about running a second sex issue.

“They were really up on their game and they were very enterprising,” Brown said. “They didn’t say,‘Can we do a sex issue?’, they said, ‘We’re going to do a sex issue.’ And so there I was, having to advise this thing.”

Initially, the running of a survey of students’ sexual behavior did not cause any major controversy at the school.

“We didn’t get a lot of flack from a lot of people—my recollection is that no one at school, teacher-wise, was hysterical about it or anything,” Gigounas said. “My feeling was they thought it was handled very well, and very professionally, and I think it was.”

According to Brown, the lack of controversy at the time was partially due to the support of the school’s first principal, Donald Kreps.

“We had a principal who was very forward-thinking, and understood the necessity of running a newspaper, but in most schools in most communities it wouldn’t be allowed,” Brown said.

However, not all administrators over the years had the same response to these sex polls as Donald Kreps did.

“At times after Mr. Kreps’ retirement, it also seemed possible that some administrations were  overly concerned about ‘protecting’ Redwood’s image to the public rather than understanding the need for transparency on many teen issues, not just those of sexual relations,” Jones said. “There was never censorship, but pressure was sometimes extreme in my opinion.”

Although there has never been censorship, over the years the Bark has fought with the administration over whether the survey could be completed during class hours.

“We’d always done these polls, and I advised the students to do another sex poll because it was at that real difficult time where we thought that the AIDS thing might hit the heterosexual community, especially young people, really hard,” Brown said. “So the students started to do the poll, and we always handed it out and told students to cover their answers, and we were very careful about how we went into classrooms—no laughing or joking.”

Despite these precautions, the principal at the time, Greg Duffy, stopped it, reminding the Bark staff of section 60650 of the California Education Code. This rule states that “no student shall be given any test, survey, questionnaire or examination containing questions about personal or family beliefs or practices in sex, family life, morality, or religion.”

“We’d pretty much ignored [the education code] because it was accepted in our community,” Brown said.

Ultimately, the Bark lost their privilege to poll students during class hours.

“We weren’t able to win the battle over completing the poll, but we negotiated that we could publish the results that we already had,” Brown said.

After this controversy, Bark didn’t run another sex survey until 2003, but even then, the staff was required to run surveys outside of instructional hours.

Despite these challenges, the sex issue has endured throughout the years. Subsequent issues following the 1974 issue ran in 1977, 1982, 1985, 1991, 1994, 2003, and 2009.

Kiara Brinkman, who was editor-in-chief during the time of the 1996 controversy, said she believes the sex survey is an important venture for the Bark.

“I believe the sex poll is a worthwhile endeavor,” Brinkman said. “It’s a way to get valuable information, and knowledge is preferable to a lack of awareness or a quiet denial of reality.”

Brown also commented on the value of the sex survey, commenting that running it is a public service. And indeed, the results of the survey were utilized for public services—the Marin County Health and Human Services used the the results of the Bark surveys for their own data collection, according to Brown.

“They got a lot of information about what was going on in schools from the Bark,” Brown said.