A Tangled Situation

Yesterday I heard two little things that got me thinking. The conversation was between me, my ESL mentor teacher, and another TA. My ESL mentor teacher, who teaches in a public school in Massachusetts, mentioned that they have a day care on campus at her school to serve the 22 teenage mothers enrolled there. The school has something like 1000 students, I think. The TA who graduated from boarding school called Choate piped in, “Oh, those kids just disappear on 'medical leave' at my school.”

Two radically different approaches to the same sad reality. It was weird seeing them back to back. The Guttmacher Instistute, which conducts studies every year on pregnancy and abortion, found in 2002 (the latest stats) that about 4 out of every 100 girls are pregnant at some point between the ages of 15 and 17. Of this group, about 31% of girls end their pregnancy with an abortion, around 14-15% miscarry, and about 55% give birth. (FYI, girls who have abortions at this age have no obligation to inform their schools about it.) In 2002, this meant that there were nearly 139,000 girls that gave birth while in high school. In the 15-19 age range, though, about 13% of girls become pregnant. The good news is, the pregnancy rate has gone down 36% since its peak in 1990 and it looks like it will continue in that direction.

For schools, it must be quite a challenge to know how to deal with these students. The various options for these girls, I would guess, fall along socio-economic lines first of all, and secondarily according to whether they plan to keep the baby. For many girls in public school, having a baby means dropping out of high school. What I've found on the web says that while a few of these eventually get their G.E.D.s, the majority soon get on welfare and never graduate. To keep them in school, some public schools have set up day care services—a helpful offering, but also an odd thing to have in a high school. I wonder if this changes the attitudes other girls have about getting pregnant while in school. It keeps kids where they need to be, but also probably normalizes what shouldn't be normal. A third option I just heard about is Independent Study, where students make a contract with a school to meet certain requirements outside of the formal classroom. Regardless of the options, it's kids in public schools who confront this issue at its worst. It's most prevalent here, and as a result the stigma is not as severe.

On the flip side, if families have the money and decide the girl should not keep the baby (whether through adoption or abortion), they will take their daughter out of school or away to a different school for a year. I remember hearing of this back at Cambridge. This way the girl can avoid the social pressures and still continue with school afterward. What do they learn from it, though? I think it sets the precedent that parents are always there with the safety net in case I screw up too badly—a rescue mentality. For these girls, both the natural and social consequences are minimized so that life remains as normal as possible.

There are probably other options I haven't mentioned. Anyone know about charter schools?

How should schools mediate between the task of education and such personal issues as this? Or, should they at all? These questions probably lead into private v. public discussions and questions of how badly states would like their residents to be educated. It's certainly a mess of conflicting interests and natural constraints.

The million dollar question, of course, is: how can we teach kids to be responsible enough that they don't get pregnant unintentionally? Another tangle of parental v. institutional responsibilities.