Purpose: This investigation focuses on prescription drug education topics important to consumers but “missing” from the content of health textbooks. Significance: Middle-school and high-school students represent the major consumers of health education in the U.S. Health textbooks likely represent the most common denominator in, and the major conveyor of, the curriculum. Failure of health textbooks to address important prescription drug-related topics translates into a future population missing important information and skills related to prescription drug use. Methods: All middle-school (n =17) and high-school (n = 7) health textbooks available from major publishers were analyzed. A coding system for topics was designed to identify information important to consumers. A review of research and prescription education materials and 25% of the textbook sample resulted in 126 topics organized within 14 larger categories. The unit of analysis was a sentence related (or potentially related) to prescription drugs. Two coders assessed a total of 8,641 sentences. Inter-rater reliability was 87.2%; intra-rater reliabilities were 93.8% and 90.4%. Findings: Textbooks completely failed to address 32 of 126 topics. Generally, missing topics focused on information that patients need to tell their doctors, what patients need to do at the pharmacy, information sources, non-traditional prescription drug sources, and prescription drugs of concern to special populations (e.g., elderly, children). Conclusion: To the extent that the public health system relies on school-based education for students to learn about prescription drugs, the young people are likely to be under-informed and at risk to problems associated with prescription drug use. At the end of the session, participants will (1) be able to identify the topics and categories of prescription drug-related content about which students need to be educated, (2) be able to identify categories and topics of information missing from health education textbooks, and (3) understand the significant role played by textbooks in health education and the importance of topics being “absent from school” textbooks.Keyword(s): curriculum development, health promotion, youth-at-risk