Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 5, 1993 TAG: 9312030170
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
No one disagrees.
But is Roanoke ready to listen to the hard truth, to the stories of real teen-agers, to the details of their shocking, sometimes hopeless, lives?
Is it ready to listen to the story of Audrey Fitzgerald, 16, a student at Roanoke's school for pregnant teens? Audrey says she's in the 10th grade - but she doesn't know whether that means she's a sophomore or a junior.
Audrey is six months pregnant with her second child. Her first child was fathered by a different man, a guy who has been in and out of jail, she says. She carries her ultrasound pictures of her soon-to-be baby boy - its penis circled, the words "It's a Boy!" written at the top.
Is Roanoke ready to see itself through the eyes of social worker Beth Evans for just a day as she chauffeurs girls to clinic and counseling appointments? Will it sigh along with her when she pulls her van up to a subsidized-apartment building and her nine-months-pregnant teen-age client refuses to come outside?
"She's about to pop any day now, and she won't even go to the doctor," Evans says of the eighth-grade dropout. Evans had just made arrangements to get the girl back in school - but the teen-ager refused to go there, too.
"You give 'em chances, you give 'em chances, you give 'em chances," she says, driving away. "But they are just teen-agers, after all."
Does Roanoke want to know that more special-education students are getting pregnant?
Does it want to listen to Deneen Evans, the counselor at the teen-health center, describe how some middle-school girls are being targeted by men in their 20s and 30s?
"It's a status thing for the girls, being with older guys," Evans says. "Older men are preying on these girls - because they feel they're free from disease."
Corinne Gott's not sure if Roanoke is ready to listen. For 10 years now, the city has had one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in Virginia. "And yet, do we ever get good after-school programs going? Do we ever get birth-control access for teens? Do we ever get good family-life [education] in the schools?
"It's pure denial," says Gott, the superintendent for Roanoke's Department of Social Services. "The public's attitude is, `I'd rather not know about it - because I can't do anything about it anyway.'
"The thing is, you've got to know the truth before you can tackle it."
To tackle the issue, experts say, the city needs a coordinated, multifaceted strategy involving the schools, Social Services, churches and the health and recreation departments. Most of all, they say, it needs a public mandate.
"Now, I don't mean to sound smart, but they can go up to Mountain Lake all they want and talk about economic development and make vision statements," says the Rev. Nelson Harris, a member of the Roanoke School Board.
"But as long as we've got 50 percent of our kids living below the poverty level, and as long as we've got the highest teen-pregnancy rate, and as long as we've got our kids waiting in line at CHIP [the Child Health Investment Partnership] to get properly immunized, what are we really doing?"
\ Who's in charge?
The fact is, there are a lot of good programs already targeting Roanoke's teen-pregnancy rate.
The fact is, these programs are acronym-heavy and leadership-light. No one's coordinating the efforts; no one's in charge.
There is BBC, the Better Beginnings Coalition, the underfunded community network that meets monthly and provides speakers and support programs in the schools.
There is TOP, the Junior League-initiated Teen Outreach Program, which in some cities has helped reduce teen pregnancy one-third and cut the dropout rate in half by teaching at-risk kids self-esteem through community service.
Trouble is, Roanoke's TOP program reaches only 60 kids - 40 students at Patrick Henry High School, 20 at the Alternative Education Center.
There is RAHP, the Roanoke Adolescent Health Partnership, that brought together business, school and health and welfare leaders to launch a $400,000 program for teen-health centers at Patrick Henry and William Ruffner Middle School this fall. RAHP tiptoed around the birth-control issue by forgetting to mention to parents that, yes, birth-control prescriptions would be issued - and found itself caught in a public-relations fiasco.
Still, workers at the teen-health center bemoan the gap that remains in services: Students still have to go somewhere else to get the prescriptions filled.
"My biggest dilemma is I can't give them a condom," counselor Deneen Evans says. "I know they leave here, and they are going to have sex. They tell me that."
Asked why the centers didn't open with a stated mission to provide birth control on-site, Annie Harmon, the executive assistant to the school superintendent, says, "It was a board decision."
But Harmon is a member of that board. "They wanted to open up the centers with as little controversy as possible - because the need for children's health care is so great," she says. "They didn't want an uproar to jeopardize it."
And then there is SHAC, the School Health Advisory Committee, which has just commissioned an ad-hoc committee to look at the city's FLE - family-life education - curriculum, which now targets youngsters in kindergarten through 10th grade.
There is widespread opinion that the curriculum is a good one. The problem is, it's not regularly implemented.
The teacher who's uncomfortable talking about sex always finds a way to run out of the time needed to teach it, educators say. Middle-school teachers feel the subject isn't taught nearly enough in the elementary grades - and by the time the kids get to middle school, they are already dealing with puberty.
And yet, do people want to face the reality of Theresa - the 10-year-old fifth-grader impregnated by a 14-year-old? "She lived with her 85-year-old great-grandmother," recalls social worker Debbie Henderson, who handled Theresa's case seven years ago. "Her water broke while she was riding her bike."
Schools waiting until middle school to address issues of sexuality "are missing the whole essence of the program: teaching values, responsibility, decision-making - all the skills we used to learn around the dinner table," says Christie Barlow, a second-grade teacher and family-life education committee member.
Is the community ready to take a hard look at the students at Roanoke's Maternal and Infant Education Center, whose routine family rituals have been so neglected that the staff shows Disney movies and carves pumpkins at Halloween - things most of these young mothers have never done?
The center offers academics, prenatal training, supervised parenting instruction and day care for infants. The center's name was changed from School for Pregnant Teens this year, because the new superintendent thought the school should be shown "in a more positive light," says Kathy Kelly, its director.
The problem is, girls are permitted to attend the school only through the semester in which they deliver. Many drop out after that, because they can't afford day care - and they don't qualify for the city's limited subsidized day-care programs.
"I'd like us to offer day care from birth till the child is Head Start age," Kelly says. "Some of the attitude is we've done things to make it too easy for teen-age mothers - and that's not the case.
"These girls get up at 5 a.m., walk five blocks to catch a bus with a diaper bag and an infant, ride the bus, and get their babies settled in to be in class."
Teen moms have special needs that must be addressed - or taxpayers end up footing the bill all over again, if not through welfare programs, then through a host of social problems that lead to violence and crime.
"We spend millions on jail cells," says Dr. Don Stern, Roanoke's departing Health Department director. "And where are these prisoners coming from? From destabilized families. Either you put money at the end - serving the consequences - or you put money in prevention by putting in resources that help stabilize families."
Social worker Henderson recalls recently spending two hours with a pregnant teen at the mall, just looking around. "I'd hold up a frou-frou maternity dress and tell her, `It's you,' and she'd laugh," says Henderson, who teaches a weekly Lamaze class at the Maternal and Infant Education Center.
"Some people would say that's not a good use of taxpayer money; but I got my chance to put my arm around this girl, to get her to laugh, to show her there's someone else out here who cares about what she does or how she looks."
Robin Bullard, who teaches a jobs and parenting class at the high schools for teen moms, concentrates on undoing the unhealthy parenting skills these girls may have picked up from their own parents.
"Most teen parents think spanking is the way to go, because they were spanked," Bullard says. "When the babies cry constantly, they feel like the baby is spoiled.
"Forced potty training is an issue - they're tired of changing diapers; they're tired of buying diapers."
Yet almost all buy disposable diapers and formula. "Very few breast-feed. How can you breast-feed, when you're in school all day?" Bullard asks.
Here's the story of 17-year-old Angela, one of Bullard's students, who lives alone with her child in subsidized housing: She needs a baby sitter while she's at school. She gets $449 a month from Social Security. She makes $2.13 an hour plus tips at her job, but sometimes she gets as little as $11 a night.
Her rent is $300 a month. She has her own car to maintain, one child, utilities. The father disowns the baby.
"Last week, she was tired," Bullard says. "She'd been up all night, took her baby to the emergency room for an ear infection. The next day, she had a government test, and she hadn't studied for it. . . . I sat there, and she cried and cried. And I just told her everything would be all right."
Bullard's class takes many of the students after they leave the school for mothers-to-be; but this year, only 36 students elected to participate. Of the 36, just eight qualify for her subsidized day-care program, because their parents make too much money - approximately $18,000 a year, she says.
Fifteen of the 36 get day care through Social Services, "but they have to be economically disadvantaged," already receiving Aid to Families and Dependent Children. As for the remaining 13, their parents find some way to keep their children in school - "either they pay for the day care, or they keep the kids themselves."
But those students represent only 36 of the city's teen moms. What's happening to the rest of the 85 to 95 students who pass through the Maternal and Infant Education Center every year? What's happening to the 15 or so other pregnant students who go to Alternative Ed each year - because they get more school credit there than at the maternal school?
Kelly says the schools don't keep records to track the dropout rate among teen mothers, though she says, "most of our girls complete school."
Health Department social worker Fran Villarreal, who works with many teen mom dropouts, insists most of them don't finish school. "There's a crying need for on-site day care in schools," she says.
Henderson agrees, remembering the emergency phone call she took from police one afternoon, when one of her high-school-age clients left her baby with an unreliable day-care provider: "She'd left her baby with her new boyfriend, a 17-year-old, who agreed to care for it for the day.
"That afternoon, he went into Hardee's on Ninth Street and gave this baby to two teen-age girls sitting in there. He didn't even know them. The two teens got sick of the baby, called police and left. . . . And that wasn't the first time we've had that happen."
\ `Us vs. Them'
Gott, the Social Services superintendent, isn't afraid to step on toes when she underlines the need for a coordinated attack on Roanoke's teen-pregnancy crisis - using both preventive and after-the-fact strategies.
"None of our plans now are coordinated. All of them are of narrow vision," Gott says. "We need to listen to the truth from the crowd that's really dealing with it - the people who aren't caught up in the politics of the issue." The people who are living the cold, hard truth.
"Get the NAACP to come in" and talk about male responsibility, Gott says.
Listen to the Roanoke NAACP's president, the Rev. Charles Green, as he describes what he sees in the housing developments after the AFDC checks come in every month:
"You can't hardly get a parking place at night, because these guys are collecting. They're out collecting the money from these girls who get these checks. The worse the boyfriend is, the better they like them."
Gott says: "Get the people in the projects to tell you what they know."
"We're so polarized now," says Janet McDowell, Planned Parenthood's director of education and training. "Rather than drawing people together, teen pregnancy is still perceived as `Us vs. Them' - the white, upper-middle class versus the predominantly black, poor segment . . . when we know that's simply not true."
According to 1991 figures, there were 186 white pregnant teens in Roanoke, compared to 160 nonwhites - although the nonwhite rate was twice as high. The white teen mothers were 10 times more likely to be married at the time of delivery.
Sit in on one of Hannah Glisson's Unexpected Grandparents meetings, held every Tuesday night at Salem's First United Methodist Church. "We felt like our girls wanted to get pregnant, that it was accepted," says Glisson, who is middle class and white.
"At one point, I said to Mary [her 17-year-old daughter, pregnant at the time] that this wasn't right, and she said, `It's not the way it used to be, Mother.'
"I said, `Other people might not see it [as a stigma], but I still do.' "
Listen when two "pregnant and proud" teens like Shannon Huff and Tasha Walker offer the city a window into their world: "There are two reasons girls get pregnant," Huff says. "Welfare gives them $231 for the baby, and they want to get closer to the guy - at least they think they're getting closer."
Gott says: "Get the mothers of these moms to come in and talk about what it's like."
Listen to the guilt in Carolyn Saunder's voice when she describes finding out her 16-year-old daughter, Amanda, was pregnant: "I had taken her pills away from her, because I thought [the pills] would encourage her to have sex," the Salem mother says.
"All the while, I was telling myself, `My daughter wouldn't be having sex.' I just couldn't imagine it."
Gott maintains that the crowd dealing with teen pregnancy is out of touch with reality. "They're school officials, agency heads, experts - they don't really know the problems firsthand. To get a real plan, you've got to get the real picture first."
Gott is hopeful that a new teen-pregnancy task force being formed by Glenn Radcliffe, director of human development, will listen to the hard truth and then map out a plan. Its first meeting is Monday.
"We need to not concentrate on us being the highest in teen pregnancy - because it makes us feel defeated," Gott says. If Roanoke had consolidated with the county, the pregnancy rate for this area would have dropped dramatically.
"We need to concentrate on the fact that we have problems that concern us, and we can do something about it. It can be attacked. I hear people say all the time, `Roanoke's gone to pot. People have lost their values.' But our kids are no worse today. So let's give up the defeatist attitude and work on the positive things we can do."
Counselor Patty Bundy, whose doctoral dissertation explored Roanoke's teen-pregnancy crisis, sees the issue as Roanoke's No. 1 problem - because it affects all generations, exacting the greatest emotional, financial and educational costs.
"From the retired person to the infant, the economic costs are there," Bundy says. "Economic development - they can't employ people who aren't skilled. The psychological costs - these women aren't equipped to integrate into the adult world. The emotional costs - their own development gets paralyzed by premarital parenthood. We're just creating another generation of dysfunction."
Don't be embarrassed by Roanoke's teen-pregnancy rate, TAP Director Ted Edlich advises. And don't get caught up in finger-pointing denial.
"The issue is how to get wide community support for a strategy - and not let the controversy take up more energy than the solution," Edlich says.
by CNB