School Moves to Counter Its High Pregnancy Rate

San Marcos High’s 1-in-5 Pregnancy Figure Shocks Community

--Headline in The Times, March 11, 1985

It wouldn’t seem to have much to do with teen-age sexuality and premarital pregnancies, but junior high school English teacher Qualithy Quinn-Sharp is elated that, so far this year, she has had to loan only 17 pencils to forgetful students.

A year ago at this time, she would have given away 300 pencils.

Sharp credits the improvement partly to a 10-minute program that starts the school day at San Marcos Junior High School and teaches youngsters how to be successful in their lives by accepting responsibility for themselves and for their actions.

The mini-lessons on success, developed by the Thomas Jefferson Research Center in Pasadena, are one of a handful of programs introduced this year at the school to instruct students in how to react maturely and responsibly when confronted with opportunities to engage in sex--or, for that matter, to ingest alcohol and drugs.

It’s a soft and subtle--but some say most effective--approach to a national crisis based on statistics that 10% of all girls between the ages of 15 and 19 become pregnant each year, and that 40% of all 14-year-old girls will become pregnant at least once before they are 20.

Even Higher at School

The numbers were even higher at San Marcos High School, where a counselor reported that, based on her own informal record-keeping, 178 girls--one in five on campus--admitted to her that they were pregnant during the 1983-84 school year. A disproportionate number of the pregnanv girls were freshmen. Only nine of the campus pregnancies ended in childbirth; the others miscarried or were aborted.

District Supt. William Streshly made the figures public last year after first alerting parent leaders to the news. The district braced itself for the outfall of negative publicity that, predictably, then occurred. But Streshly and others figured that the dirty laundry needed to be aired in order to help promote serious conversations about the problem, both at school and on the home front. Other school districts might deny or try to ignore the crisis on their campuses, but not here in San Marcos, officials said.

Indeed, the news got the district off the dime in updating its attitude toward sex and sexuality education. School district officials conferred with parent leaders to decide on the appropriate course of action.

Junior High School Level

On the one hand, candid classes on sex and sexuality could be offered at the junior high school level, as is being done at a growing number of junior high schools around the country. Or the high school could join an increasing number of schools elsewhere that provide on-campus health clinics which, along with more ordinary services, prescribe birth control pills and offer birth control counseling. The San Diego Unified School District is considering establishing such a clinic.

But school and community leaders here, in a strong consensus, opted for a more conservative route: Rather than assume that teen-agers are sexually active and should learn about birth control in order to avoid pregnancies, they felt it would be better to teach their children that they don’t need to be sexually active in the first place.

The target would be junior high school students. By the time the youngsters are in high school, it might be too late to make an impact, everyone agreed. “We had to make our big push in the seventh and eighth grade because by the time they’re 14, we’re too late,” Streshly observed.

Strategy Explained

The game plan was to encourage the children to have an increased sense of self-esteem and responsibility for themselves and toward others--values that would help them confront any number of issues as teen-agers besides just whether to have sex.

“Kids turn to drugs, alcohol and sex when they don’t feel good about themselves. They seek recognition through other sources,” said Joe DeDiminicantanio, principal of San Marcos Junior High School.

“A quick, knee-jerk reaction to the problem about teen-age pregnancies would have been to have hauled all the girls in the gym and all the boys in another gym and shown them some movies and told them where to buy prophylactics.

“But what we really want to do is change behaviors and influence attitudes, and that will take some time.”

When the dust settled after the initial outpouring of media attention, DeDiminicantanio gathered parent leaders, staff members and local clergymen for a series of meetings to determine how the junior high school’s curriculum should be changed. Until then, the only classroom discussion about sex was a seventh-grade science course with a brief unit on human reproduction. There was no outline for discussions on sexuality or how to decide if and when to have sex, and the consequences of those decisions.

New Course Established

The group decided that an entire semester should be spent on a new course, “Decision Making--Keys to Total Success.” It would be made up of three separate six-week units--in addition to the daily 10-minute “How to Be a Success” exercises--and would be spread out over two years. Class time would be carved out of homerooms and the science classes.

The district began shopping the country for published curricula that would fit the local needs, finally settling on three. The fourth component of the program is being developed by a local San Marcos couple.

“Combined, these four programs would do what we wanted to accomplish--to get our kids to feel good enough about themselves to make sound decisions about sex and drugs,” said DeDiminicantanio, who is known to his staff and students as “Mr. De.”

“No one in the country had this kind of a program already packaged, with enough depth to meet our goals,” he said. “A number of programs are six weeks in length, but we wanted to spend more time--18 weeks, altogether--on this.”

Four Programs Described

The four programs are:

- The 180 daily mini-lessons by the Thomas Jefferson Research Center, which show how success can be attained by being honest, dependable, punctual, friendly, polite, cooperative, prepared, determined, courageous and a good listener.

“Whether you’re talking about how 67% of the nation’s high school graduates have tried drugs, or about how one child in America attempts suicide every minute and one is successful every 90 minutes, or about school dropouts or teen-age pregnancy, the underlying issue in all of these is how to make good personal choices,” said Bob Paull, co-author of the program. “We’ve got to teach our children to set good goals, to have the proper attitudes, and to have the self-confidence to reach those goals by making good, strong ethical choices along the way.”

- A six-week program by the Study Skills Institute of California, based in Fullerton, to teach students how to take lecture notes, study a textbook, study for tests, more effectively take tests, and manage their personal and school time.

Learning Skills Taught

“Before we can expect a student to do well in school and feel good about himself, first we have to teach him how to learn,” said Kenneth Standley, who developed the program. “We say to students, ‘Go out and get a good education that will open the door to a bright future,’ but we don’t give them the key to the door. Every job has a training period except going to school.”

- “How to Be You: Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide,” a program being developed by a San Marcos husband-and-wife team, Barbara Peters and Don Sharp, which is designed to help students build their self-esteem, develop values and make wise decisions based on those values and the consequences of alternative choices.

“If a student feels good about himself and is not out to prove anything, then he can develop and operate at higher standards and be responsible for himself and toward others and do what is right,” Peters said.

- “Sexuality, Commitment and Family,” a six-week program by Teen-Aid Inc. in Seattle, steeped in the premise that abstinence is the best form of birth control.

“We don’t want to resign ourselves that our teen-agers will be sexually active with multiple partners and that we should be teaching them birth control. That doesn’t serve our teen-agers,” said LeAnna Benn, founder of the program. “We have confidence that our teen-agers can have physical and emotional self-control.”

Year-Long Offering

The mini-lessons are offered all year long. The six-week study skills program was presented in the fall, the “How to Be You” course will begin in a few weeks and the sexuality course will debut next fall at the eighth-grade level.

Of the study skills course, DeDiminicantanio said: “I don’t want to be too quick to jump to conclusions because it might take a couple of years to really study its impact, but there were four times as many seventh graders on the honor roll this year as there were eighth graders. My initial reaction is that it may be real successful.”

The mini-lessons on success--essentially a series of short writing exercises and pep talks that drum into the child the knowledge that he can succeed if he wants to--seem to be having a positive effect on students, DeDiminicantanio and the teachers say.

Last week in Quinn-Sharp’s classroom, students were discussing the value of making “to do” lists for short-range and long-range goals. Each of the 28 classes in the school is within a few days of one another in progressing through the series.

“We are teaching what most of us had previously taken for granted, that kids knew what it took to be successful. Now, we realize that this is a skill that we can teach,” Quinn-Sharp said.

Behavior Changes

“We see more kids turning in their homework on time, their behavior in class is better, and when they do misbehave, they deny it less and accept the consequences more readily.”

The Thomas Jefferson program calls for the students to employ a decision-making process called “STAR,” an acronym for stop, think, act and review, said Paull, who helped develop the mini-lessons.

“We’re not trying to teach them what to think but how to think, not what goals to have but how to set those goals,” he said.

The third of the four programs, “How to Be You,” is perhaps the most abstract of the package in calling for the students to develop greater self-esteem and standards to live by, and to learn to put responsibility toward others ahead of rights for oneself.

“Monkeys have self-esteem but not values and standards,” Sharp said. “We want the students to consider not only how they feel, but by what standards they are living their life, and how, sometimes, they’re going to have to put their feelings on the back burner in order to live by those standards.”

Sexuality Class Next

The semester-long course will be capped by the sexuality class next year.

“I brought to Teen-Aid my experience of having taught a sex education program that concentrated on the mechanics of birth control and that characterized sexual intercourse more as a biological act rather than as a profoundly meaningful human experience,” said Steve Potter, the curriculum coordinator for Teen-Aid.

“That sort of educational approach simply has not worked, and continuing to teach in this way may in fact be exacerbating the very problems we wish to solve.”

The fact that the Teen-Aid program does not contain information on contraceptives may appear to some people as “naive and certainly outdated,” he conceded.

But, he said, the hazards of teaching the mechanics of birth control outweigh the potential benefits.

“It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a teacher to present detailed birth control information without conveying a sense of presumption of sexual activity to the students,” Potter said. “This message conveys, as well, a tacit acceptance of premarital sexual activity and can weaken the resolve of those who are trying to remain abstinent, and can also act as positive reinforcement for those adolescents who are already sexually active.”

Points to Mixed Messages

To challenge students to abstain from sex, but then to offer information on birth control, sends mixed messages by suggesting that abstinence is an unattainable goal, he said.

DeDiminicantanio suggests that a discussion of birth control at the junior high level would be moot, anyway. “My gut feeling is that most kids at this age know about birth control. But if a girl uses birth control, she’s admitting ahead of time that she is going to be sexually active, and I don’t think girls will do that,” he said. “So they won’t use it.”

Superintendent Streshly said it is his belief that the number of pregnant girls at San Marcos High School has dropped significantly since the 1983-84 school year, although he has no facts to substantiate that.

“Because of all the publicity, I’m not sure how many of our girls would tell their counselors anymore if they were pregnant,” he said. “But for a high school our size, it probably has the lowest number of live births in Southern California--three so far this school year, compared to 15 and 20 for neighboring schools.”

Whether that suggests that fewer girls got pregnant--or more girls had abortions or miscarried--Streshly is not sure.

Tells of Second Thoughts

He said he has had some second thoughts about releasing the startling pregnancy figures a year ago.

“My daughter at home hit me over the head about why we went public, because it embarrassed some students,” he said.