Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Massachusetts, recently made headlines when it was discovered that 17 girls at the school became pregnant this year - more than four times the number who usually become pregnant in a year. Controversy swirled around the school after reports that several of the girls had been in a "pact" to get pregnant at the same time; later, school and town officials denied that there had been a pact. Still, the troubling fact of the school's spike in teen pregnancy remains. What led to Gloucester High's increase?
While it would be easy to dismiss it as a few young girls' mistakes, teen pregnancy is not a simple phenomenon. Gloucester is a fishing community dealing with a declining economy and increased unemployment; studies show that poor and low-income teens are more likely to become pregnant than their middle-class and affluent peers. Reports have also noted that Gloucester High's school health center officials both quit because the clinic would not be allowed to distribute contraceptives, and the Gloucester Times reports that the school's sexuality education program had been cut due to lack of funds.
Although the vast majority of pregnancies are unintended, it is also true that some teens desire pregnancy - especially those with lower education goals or those who believe their life goals better accommodate childbearing, according to a recent study from the Guttmacher Institute. Helping youth conceive pregnancy as an impediment to life goals is an important aspect of teen pregnancy prevention.[1] Strategies that combine youth development, life skills and mentoring, and sex education may be best suited for this task. Further, communities must also struggle with institutional factors such as poverty and unemployment that deprive young people of their hope for a successful future.
It is not known whether the pregnancy spike at Gloucester High is an isolated event or part of a larger pattern in the community. But we know that across the United States, teens are giving birth in increasing numbers. Communities both large and small must be prepared to talk openly about this issue and work with their young people to prevent negative sexual health outcomes.
Source: advocatesforyouth.org
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies — more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October, after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.
The question of what to do next has divided this fiercely Catholic enclave. Even with national data showing a 3% rise in teen pregnancies in 2006 — the first increase in 15 years — Gloucester isn't sure it wants to provide easier access to birth control. In any case, many residents worry that the problem goes much deeper. The past decade has been difficult for this mostly white, mostly blue-collar city (pop. 30,000). In Gloucester, perched on scenic Cape Ann, the economy has always depended on a strong fishing industry. But in recent years, such jobs have all but disappeared overseas, and with them much of the community's wherewithal. "Families are broken," says school superintendent Christopher Farmer. "Many of our young people are growing up directionless."
The girls who made the pregnancy pact — some of whom, according to Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers — declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. "They're so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally," Ireland says. "I try to explain it's hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m."
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
But by May, after nurse practitioner Kim Daly had administered some 150 pregnancy tests at Gloucester High's student clinic, she and the clinic's medical director, Dr. Brian Orr, a local pediatrician, began to advocate prescribing contraceptives regardless of parental consent, a practice at about 15 public high schools in Massachusetts. Currently Gloucester teens must travel about 20 miles (30 km) to reach the nearest women's health clinic; younger girls have to get a ride or take the train and walk. But the notion of a school handing out birth control pills has met with hostility. Says Mayor Carolyn Kirk: "Dr. Orr and Ms. Daly have no right to decide this for our children." The pair resigned in protest on May 30.
Gloucester's elected school committee plans to vote later this summer on whether to provide contraceptives. But that won't do much to solve the issue of teens wanting to get pregnant. Says rising junior Kacia Lowe, who is a classmate of the pactmakers': "No one's offered them a better option." And better options may be a tall order in a city so uncertain of its future. — With reporting by Kimberley McLeod/New York
After a controversy erupted in late May over a proposal to distribute contraceptives at Gloucester High School, principal Dr. Joseph Sullivan said he was surprised that no reporter had approached him for his take on the matter. If they had, Sullivan told TIME on June 11, he would have explained straightaway that "a lack of birth control played no part" in a quadrupling of the number of teen pregnancies at the school this year compared with last year. "That bump was because of seven or eight sophomore girls," Sullivan told TIME. "They made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together."
Since TIME first wrote last week of this "pact," as Sullivan called it, a media firestorm has hit this seaside town on Massachusetts' north shore. News outlets from as far away as Australia and Brazil have been quick to hone in on the more salacious details surrounding these young mothers-to-be. But at a press conference today, Gloucester mayor Carolyn Kirk emerged from a closed-door meeting with city, school and health officials to say that there had been no independent confirmation of any teen-pregnancy pact. She also said that the principal, who was not present at the meeting, is now "foggy in his memory" of how he heard about the pact.
Sullivan has not spoken publicly about the teen pregnancies since he told TIME earlier this month that several girls repeatedly requested pregnancy tests at the school clinic and that some had reacted to positive test results with high fives and plans for baby showers. Pathways for Children CEO Sue Todd, whose organization runs the school's on-site daycare center, told TIME on June 13 that its social worker had heard of the girls' plan to get pregnant as early as last fall. She noted that some of the girls involved had been identified as being at risk of becoming a teen mother as early as sixth grade, when they began to request pregnancy tests in middle school. "What we've seen is the girls fit a certain profile," Todd said. "They're socially isolated, and they don't have the support of their families."
On June 11, the mayor and the school's superintendent, Christopher Farmer, said that some of the sophomores at Gloucester High appeared to be getting pregnant on purpose. Farmer said today he now believes that some of the girls who were already pregnant decided to band together to stay in school and raise their babies together. He added that if he had previously known of the pact as described by Sullivan, there would have been a schoolwide intervention earlier.
None of the rising juniors TIME identified as being members of the pact have come forward publicly, but nine Gloucester High students have talked to TIME about the girls who decided to get pregnant. Some described the pregnant teens as having little parental supervision. "They could stay out all night if they wanted," says a classmate, whose parents requested that she not be identified by name. Others noted a herd mentality. "I think the plan was a lot about peer pressure," says Nicole Jewell, a rising junior who describes herself as being friends with some of the girls involved. "But a lot of girls were excited to be a part of it."
So did the girls make a formal pact to get pregnant together or not? Without comment from any of the pregnant students themselves, it may be impossible to determine exactly what they agreed to, and when. So far, the only school official to use the word pact is Sullivan, who reportedly now says he does not recall who told him about the pact in the first place. But what does seem clear based on TIME's reporting is that some of the girls in question did at least discuss the idea of getting pregnant at the same time, and that too little was done to educate the girls on the potential ramifications of that choice.
By Patrick Anderson
Staff writer
June 10, 2008 12:20 am
—
Supporters of comprehensive sex education say cuts to funding for health education, both locally and across the state, are endangering efforts to reduce teenage pregnancy and may have some impact on the jump in pregnancies at Gloucester High School this year.
In 2003, the state, facing a fiscal crisis, stopped $25 million that had been going to the Department of Public Health and Department of Education for health education.
The money, which made up the Health Protection Fund, was available to school districts and groups providing health education that adhered to the state's educational frameworks, which include comprehensive sex education.
"What we hear from schools is not a reluctance to provide health education, but a lack of funds," Patricia Quinn, executive director of the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy, said yesterday. "Every school district had applied to and gotten some of that funding and none of it has been replaced."
Quinn said that with a reduction in sex education, the Alliance fears that knowledge about contraception among teens will decrease and that Massachusetts' long-declining teen pregnancy rate will rise.
School and city officials have been discussing strategies for reducing teen pregnancy since Gloucester High School reported pregnancies among students this year spiked to around four times the annual average.
Although the question of whether the high school health clinic should provide contraceptives has driven debate, officials working to formulate a comprehensive policy on the subject are considering whether changes to school health education should be part of the solution.
The high school health clinic provides pregnancy tests and some counseling. Girls that become pregnant, or express a need for more substantial reproductive services than the clinic offers, are usually referred to outside providers.
Health Quarters in Beverly is the nearest provider of confidential, low-income reproductive health services to Gloucester and one of the organizations that has lost out on state health education funding.
Lianne Cook, the executive director of Health Quarters, said yesterday that in 2002, her organization had eight full-time staff members providing sex education and outreach to the 45 cities and towns the organization serves and was active in Gloucester schools. But after the state budget decreases, Health Quarters had to scale back to only one full-time educator, Cook said.
"When state money went away, we had to cut back," Cook said. "There is a massive need. Schools come to us and say: 'Can you help us?'"
Federal funding for sex education is limited to "abstinence only" instruction which does not present contraception as an option.
A group of U.S. senators, including Kennedy and Kerry of Massachusetts, has proposed opening up the funding, $209 million proposed for fiscal 2009, to comprehensive sex education programs. The program, if not reauthorized, is set to expire June 30.
While the number of pregnancies at Gloucester High School has caught the attention of many leaders both inside and outside the city, public health officials so far have not been able to determine whether they are part of a larger, regional trend or an isolated event.
The latest statewide teen pregnancy data, which showed the rate was down slightly from the previous year, was compiled in 2006. The state does not collect school pregnancy data.
Cook said she did not have any evidence to support, either statistically or anecdotally, that more teens on the North Shore are becoming pregnant based on what she saw at Health Quarters. But Cook said it did not appear as though Gloucester was dealing with a unique problem.
"I don't think we have a good baseline," Cook said. "Seventeen is too many, but without a baseline, it is hard to measure what is happening."
Cook said the fact that the numbers reported by the high schools are for only positive pregnancy tests, not actual births, made them difficult to compare with rates collected for cities and towns, which are for actual births.
Brian Orr, the doctor serving the Gloucester High School Health Center, said nationally around 30 percent of teen mothers choose to have abortions and his experience indicated there was no reason to think the numbers at the high schools were far from that rate.
Orr said he was surprised by the number of girls at the health center who had been disappointed when pregnancy tests conducted at the clinic came back negative.
Quinn said although the Alliance on Teen Pregnancy did not have any statistics on teen births after 2006, she was hearing anecdotal reports of significant increases.
Quinn said she was concerned about the results of a national study released last week by the Centers for Disease Control that showed the percentage of teens that said they had used a condom the last time they had had sex in Massachusetts had declined from 65 percent in 2005 to 61 percent in 2007.
The total percentage of Massachusetts teens who had engaged in sex dropped during the same period, contrasting with a modest increase nationally, according the study, called the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.
Gloucester public school students receive sex education during middle school and are required to take one health class during their freshman year of high school.
Mayor Carolyn Kirk, who is also a member of the School Committee, said yesterday that although sex education had not been specifically targeted for decreases in the last few years, the shrinking of the school budget in the last eight years had likely taken a toll on it.
"I know that as we cut budgets, the first things that go are things that are not graduation requirements," Kirk said.
Kirk yesterday said an effort being led by city Health Director Jack Vondras to provide the School Committee with expert analysis and information on teen pregnancy was progressing and the committee would hold a special meeting in the next few months to discuss the topic.
She said the committee might be ready to vote on a new comprehensive school policy to limit teen pregnancy by mid-August.
Patrick Anderson can be reached at panderson@gloucestertimes.com.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.
Source: http://www.gloucestertimes.com/archivesearch/local_story_161233105.html
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