WARWICK — A federally financed abstinence-only sex education program that was barred from the state’s public schools last spring has received the approval it needs to be taught.

Lesson plans revised by Heritage of Rhode Island in response to guidance from the Department of Education now meet state standards and have been approved for use at the high school level, Education Commissioner Peter McWalters announced.

The announcement, which McWalters put in a memo to school superintendents last month, came two years after Heritage of Rhode Island began seeking state approval of its abstinence-only sex ed program and eight months after McWalters said the program shouldn’t be taught because it hadn’t been approved.

Christopher C. Plante, Heritage’s executive director, said yesterday he was pleased with the way the state’s review process worked and is already talking to local officials about teaching the revised program to high school students in Warwick and Woonsocket.

Despite charges that the program promoted sexual stereotypes and isolated gay and lesbian students, Plante said just a few things in the program had to be changed.

The information Heritage offers regarding the effectiveness of condoms is still being revised, he said, and a handout on marriage vs. cohabitation by Glenn T. Stanton, a policy analyst for the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, has been dropped.

But the Heritage program still emphasizes marriage as the only safe setting for sex, and that tends to marginalize not only gay and lesbian students but also children being raised by gay and lesbian parents, Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said.

The Heritage program also tends to understate the effectiveness of condoms as a form of contraception and means of protection against sexually transmitted diseases, Brown said.

For both reasons, Brown said, the ACLU is drafting a letter to McWalters expressing concern that the program has been approved.

A letter that the ACLU sent to McWalters more than a year ago led to McWalters’ advisory last March that the program hadn’t received approval and shouldn’t be taught.

The ACLU letter seemed to set to stage for the kind of culture war that has erupted over federally funded sex education initiatives since President Bush took office, with liberals arguing that the program’s emphasis on abstinence and on marriage arose from the administration’s conservative ideology, rather than on scientific analysis and fact.

But that battle never seemed to matter much to Lidia Goodinson and other parents who lobbied the State Education Department on behalf of the Heritage program.

“Heritage’s ‘Right-Time, Right-Place’ curriculum offers positive information that will empower our teens to take control of their lives,” Goodinson said at the event that Heritage sponsored to commemorate World AIDS Day yesterday.

“This abstinence program can only help our present situation and help brighten our children’s futures,” she said.

Heritage says its program is intended to supplement, rather than supplant, current HIV/AIDS instruction in the public school system. Heritage instructors provide abstinence-only sex education only in the presence of regular classroom teachers responsible for teaching the broader curriculum required of local schools.

The group operates on an invitation-only basis, offering about 5 hours of instruction, down from the 6½ hours that the instruction lasted when the program was first introduced.

“We had to condense a lot of things,” Plante said.

In the end, however, what paved the way for state approval of Heritage’s abstinence-only sex education program wasn’t so much the condensation or revision that the program underwent as Heritage’s decision to hire a law firm to help it deal with the state Education Department, Plante said.

The law firm of Brown, Rudnick, which was hired last spring using money from a private contributor, helped guide Heritage through the thicket of state laws and regulations regarding sex education, Plante said.