Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503180028
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Her 2-year-old daughter, Tamaria, stands next to her at the coffee table, munching from a Pringle's can. August's 13-year-old brother, Jamie, watches her manipulate the computer trackball.
Caught up on her homework and rested from a full night's sleep, the William Fleming High School senior is feeling better, finally. In an interview 18 months ago, she was tired and depressed - tired from getting up with her baby at night, depressed by a variety of troubles, including her grades in school and her baby's unsupportive father.
"I wanted to quit school,'' she recalls. "I missed a lot of days when the baby got sick'' with ear infections. After attending summer school last year, "She passed the 11th grade by the skin of her teeth,'' her mother, Robbie Crenshaw, says.
That August Robinson is a typical unmarried teen mother should come as no surprise to members of Roanoke's Teen Pregnancy Task Force, convened more than a year ago by City Manager Robert Herbert. After 11 meetings and the distribution of a communitywide survey, the task force has come up with a mission statement: to reduce teen pregnancy by promoting "abstinence, self-respect and responsible decision-making.''
But just how to reach August Robinson and others like her remains a divisive question for the group, which has been plagued by low attendance, problems getting organized and clashing philosophies on birth control and abstinence.
Meanwhile, state and federal politicians wrestling with welfare reform have decided to work on the other end of the problem - figuring that without the enticement of a $231 monthly AFDC check, fewer teens will get pregnant in the first place.
August Robinson, who receives AFDC and Medicaid, didn't know about the city's task force, nor did she have much of an opinion on welfare reform. But she does have some news of her own:
She's pregnant again, three months along.
Asked if she'd wanted a second child, she said, "Not really.''
Asked if she'd been on birth control, she said she had been on pills, "but I stopped taking them...I mean, I forgot, and then I'd missed too many, and I stopped taking them.''
Although Roanoke's teen-pregnancy rate for 15- to 19-year-olds dropped from No. 1 in the state in 1991 to fourth place in 1992 (the latest-available figures), August is typical of many teen parents in her Northwest Roanoke Zip code, which had the highest number of teen births, repeat pregnancies, unwed pregnancies and low-birthweight babies in the city. In fact, with her grades pulled up and graduation pending, she's doing better than most.
"We're just trying to get her graduated this May,'' says her mother, Robbie, who was a teen mother herself. Robbie also hopes August will marry the babies' father, who is finishing a Job Corps program in Lynchburg and has promised to begin supporting his family.
Robbie says she was surprised and crushed by the news of August's second pregnancy.
"I didn't think she was having sex because she stayed under [my watch] so much. And I had stressed strongly - no hanky-panky. I talked to her and talked to her and talked to her.''
Robbie is her grand-daughter's primary caretaker. She baby-sits while August goes to school and even gets up with the 2-year-old in the middle of the night to scramble her some eggs.
At 22 pounds, Tamaria is considered underweight for her age, so doctors have recommended the family feed her high-calorie foods. August says she potty-trained her at 22 months during her Christmas break from school "because I got tired of Pampers.''
"Trying to get her disciplined is the hardest,'' August says.
"Sometimes I tap her on the hand, and other times I sit her down and tell her not to move. And sometimes I do nothing. I don't want to hit her too much.''
She and the babies' father plan to marry on her 19th birthday this August, six weeks before their second baby is due.
"He's just now coming around,'' Robbie says of her future son-in-law, who is 21. "I really don't know him well, but he seems like a nice guy. I've told him that my main concern is him doing good by his children.''
Robbie also worries about her 10-year-old and 13-year-old sons, bombarding them with constant church and sports activities in hopes of diverting them from crime, drugs and premature fatherhood.
She worries about toddler Tamaria, too, who in her zest for using the toilet has taken to running around the house without any underwear.
Robbie Crenshaw is not at all joking when she says:
"I tell her not to take her panties off for nobody but me, her mama and a certified doctor.''
|n n| Seventeen-year-old Love Pate was livid when she found out that several parents at Patrick Henry High School wanted her removed from the cheerleading squad.
"Having a baby didn't make me cheer any worse,'' the honor student says.
"I don't cause trouble, I keep my grades up.
"I mean, if they took all the fathers off [the teams], we wouldn't have any'' high school sports.
The mother of 7-month-old Dakeise, Love is in the top 10 percent of the senior class. She has a 3.5 grade-point average and a schedule that includes cheerleading, advance-placement courses, the track team and a part-time job at Hardee's.
She may not be a typical teen mom, but she does reflect what one counselor sees as an emerging trend.
"The most startling thing I've noticed this year is that more of our academically inclined girls are keeping their babies,'' says Deneen Evans, a counselor for the Roanoke Adolescent Health Partnership centers at Patrick Henry High and Ruffner Middle schools.
Feeling more support from students and faculty at their home schools, more pregnant and parenting teens are opting not to attend the schools' half-day Maternal and Infant Education Center program, where advanced courses are not offered and fewer school credits can be earned.
Though the pregnant-teens school has beefed up its day-care offerings this year, providing day care to the older children of at least 10 students who would have otherwise dropped out, many pregnant and parenting teens with extended-family support are staying in their home schools at Fleming, Patrick Henry and Alternative Education. Counselors say about 30 pregnant students are attending Patrick Henry this year.
For Love, who has already been accepted by one college and is waiting to hear from two others, becoming a teen mother and succeeding in life aren't mutually exclusive.
She wants to study landscape architecture in college and maybe go to law school. Though she knows she'll have to work harder - and longer - to get through college, she insists she won't let her mistake ruin her future.
She lives in Northwest Roanoke with her mother, who works two jobs, and her grandmother, who watches Dakeise while she goes to school. Love receives little help from the baby's 17-year-old father, who was recently ordered to pay child support of $65 a month. He has not yet complied, she says.
"If I have to work and go to school, then he should, too,'' she says.
Distraught by her pregnancy, Love initially called for an abortion appointment, but later realized, "I wouldn't be here today if my mom had done the same thing'' when she became pregnant at 15.
Public opinion on teen pregnancy has never been so divided by generation, she believes. Society is really looking down on teens who get pregnant,'' but among her peers "it's so much of an in thing,'' she says.
"I don't think the abstinence movement stands a chance,'' she says.
"So many teens are so far out there now, there's no turning back. I told some friends of mine that I hadn't had sex in a year and two months, and they couldn't believe it. For them, it's like Pepsi or Coke: Ya gotta have it.''
|n n| Charles Eades is a conservative Republican, a police officer and a 38-year-old grandfather. He says he's all for reforming a welfare system that does nothing to break the cycle of government dependency.
But when his teen-age daughter Beth gave birth in May 1993 - putting his family near the edge of financial collapse - it gave him a new perspective.
"Before this happened, I didn't want my tax money going to welfare, either. This has made me see what a lot of politicians can't - because they're so out of touch. It's made me feel a lot more empathy.''
The ordeal has also strengthened his opinions about where welfare reform should focus: Getting beyond the shaming and blaming of the mother, and getting both parents to take responsibility.
"Anybody can be a Monday-morning quarterback,'' he says. "It's easy to point out Beth's mistakes.''
Especially when you learn that the 18-year-old has just delivered her second child - and the father-to-be is, once again, absent from the picture.
The teen-age couple was engaged to be married when Beth found out she was pregnant last summer. They were planning to live together in a Northeast Roanoke apartment, for which Beth's dad co-signed a lease.
"But a month or two later, he decided he just wanted to be with his friends,'' she says, and dumped her.
Why did she allow herself to get pregnant again?
``I don't know,'' she says.
Was it intentional?
"NO!''
She'd been taking birth-control pills, but at $22 a pack, the expense stressed her monthly budget. She says she didn't learn about sliding-scale-fee prescriptions issued at Planned Parenthood and the Roanoke health department until it was too late.
Beth Eades said she ekes by each month - not with the help of AFDC, though she does receive WIC stipends, food stamps, Medicaid and day-care supplements.
The Lord Botetourt High School graduate pays her $600-plus monthly living expenses - with an income of $585 a month - by working full time at a school-supply store for $4.75 an hour (the maximum she can earn and still receive aid for food, medical bills and day care).
What her salary doesn't cover, her parents pay: utilities, car insurance, the installment payments on the delivery bill for her first child.
Charles Eades is suing the baby's father for half the rent on Beth's apartment, and Beth plans to file for child support soon. They're also awaiting review of the $65 child-support payments she now receives from the first baby's father (a different man). Assigned nearly two years ago, the payment should be upped because the father makes more money now than he did then, the Eadeses say.
Child-support enforcement needs to be strengthened, they say, with automatic wage garnishments, immediate reporting of job changes and stricter punishments for males who refuse to pay. "Put 'em in jail if they don't pay,'' Eades says.
And day-care should be available to all working-class mothers, especially those forced to forgo AFDC to work.
"If the state can build new prisons, it can come up with regulated day-care centers. What it'd save in [supplements it currently pays to day-care providers] it could pay its employees, and the mothers could work there, too.''
Eades foresees a dramatic rise in crime when the two-year AFDC cut-off is imposed - unless transitional aid is made available to the working poor. "People will steal to feed their families - that's being human.''
Corinne Gott, Roanoke's social services superintendent, predicts a dramatic rise in child abuse and neglect among the cut-off AFDC families who can't or won't work, causing a parallel rise in foster-care placements. Foster care costs $600 a month for one child, versus $231 for a mother and child on AFDC, she points out.
"They're overlooking one little piece,'' Gott says. "And that's the fact that they're talking about children who are going to be hurt.''
Charles Eades doesn't have all the answers. He only knows that illegitimacy and teen pregnancy will never go away, despite attempts to punish the perpetrators. "So what can you do? You can talk. You can take 'em out behind the woodshed and beat 'em, but that won't solve anything.
"What's done is done; you can't change it,'' he says. "For us, I'll keep doing the best I can for Beth and my grandkids.
"It's breaking me up, but I really have no choice.''
|n n| Ellen Ferrell's vacant seat at city task force meetings is perhaps the most telling indicator of all of Roanoke's continuing teen-pregnancy problem.
Ferrell doesn't go to task force meetings, she claims, "because they don't know what they're talking about.''
But sitting in her mother's Hunt housing development apartment last week, it was obvious that another factor played into her decision to quit the group.
It's the same reason she dropped out of Patrick Henry High School this year, and the same reason her younger sister Christy, 16, is attending MIEC this year.
Both girls are pregnant - again.
Meanwhile, their 40-year-old mother, Catherine Ferrell, is fed up. She's counting down the 15 months till Christy is 18, old enough to move into her own subsidized-housing apartment. Ellen, who is already 18, moved to a subsidized apartment down the street, though she still spends most of her time at her mother's home.
There are days, Catherine Ferrell says, when she is so depressed she doesn't get out of bed. "I moved back into the projects so everyone could finish school and get on their feet,'' she says.
"As it is now, we moved back to the projects and got stuck.''
She left her job as a Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority drug-prevention specialist when she learned she had throat cancer last year. She says she declined chemotherapy because it makes her too sick to baby-sit for her grand-daughter, Tim-Mera, while Christy attends school.
Catherine believes the two-year AFDC cut-off is unrealistic, especially for high-school drop-outs with poor reading skills.
"How in two years can a girl get a GED, get a job, plus get day care and make enough money to be self-sufficient? Take her children away from her and put them in foster homes?
"She's not self-sufficient because we haven't given her the tools to work with.''
Ellen, who worked at McDonald's until the last part of her pregnancy, believes she'll still be able to get her GED, then take secretarial courses at Virginia Western Community College.
Ruffling through her mother's copy of TV Guide, she says:
"If I do have to get on welfare, once I leave it, I'm not turning back to it.''
It is mayhem in the Ferrell household, and not just because the toddler girls are crying and acting up, past due for their afternoon naps.
Catherine Ferrell, who vowed once that she would never again turn to the government for help, has given up hope.
"I'm fed up with society,'' she says. "The more we talk about things in Roanoke, the worse they get.
"I mean, look around here. Some days you just can't see past all this.
"Some days you look around and you're just depressed.''
COMING MONDAY: YWCA director Harriet Lewis and others aren't waiting for answers from the city manager's task force; they're pounding away at teen pregnancy at the grass-roots level.
"We need to get everyone involved individually and say, 'This is my commitment. Now, city fathers and mothers, federal and state government: What is your commitment?' "
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by CNB