Success Stories

Presidential candidates George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis are both stressing the American family in their campaigns. They are concerned, as are other Americans, with trying to help those mired in poverty. What, for example, can possibly be done to change the bleak future facing pregnant teen-agers, the rotten diet of infants living in city slums or rural shacks, the indifference of an over-loaded school system? Those questions already are being answered somewhere, according to a recent book.

“The knowledge necessary to reduce the growing toll of damaged lives is now available,” writes Lisbeth B. Schorr, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and an expert on efforts to help poor families. In her book, “Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage,” Schorr both describes projects that work and documents the cost of not undertaking them. It is a solid agenda for change.

Schorr starts at the beginning--with teen-agers who have babies. Teen-agers are often uninformed about sex. The price of that ignorance is high.”One out of every five girls gets pregnant during the first six months of sexual activity,” Schorr writes.

Teen-agers thus must be reached early. The place to reach them is in school. The pioneering effort of St. Paul, Minn., with school-based clinics, now being adapted in Los Angeles, reduced by half the child-bearing among students in the four high schools with programs. Fewer than 2% of students have second pregnancies before graduation. Nine of 10 students with babies now finish school.

Once teen-agers become pregnant, they are especially vulnerable to health problems. South Carolina has started a program that uses what it calls “resource mothers” to counsel pregnant teen-agers. Most of the counselors were teen-age mothers themselves, and were selected for their warmth and ability to cope. They talk to the teen-agers in their homes about family planning, labor and delivery, and the infant’s safety and diet. One study found that the teen-agers counseled by the resource mothers had 55% fewer underweight babies than did a group receiving no such visits. The babies remained healthier during the first year of life as well, because the teen-agers knew more about taking care of them.

Social agencies trying to help families must handle many problems, not just the one--like child abuse--that immediately brings a child to the attention of an agency, Schorr writes. In Tacoma, Wash., social-service workers found themselves confronted with the choice of removing abused children from their homes or leaving them there and possibly endangering their lives. Tacoma’s Catholic Children’s Services created a third alternative called Homebuilders. This staff went to a family’s home, let the family talk about its own problems in its own terms, and stayed for days if necessary to defuse potentially violent situations, clean up the house or find basic necessities.

This intense service costs money. But Homebuilders “compares the cost of its intervention (which averaged about $2,600 per family in 1985) with the projected long-term cost of the foster care, group care or psychiatric hospitalization that was prevented, and finds a five-to-sixfold return on every dollar invested.”

Schorr presents case histories of a Head Start program for inner-city children in Baltimore who had been victims of lead poisoning, of an elementary school near a New Haven public-housing project that was converted from a maelstrom of battling youngsters to a model program for learning, and many more.

These programs are not expensive luxuries. They reduce teen-age pregnancies. They help babies thrive rather than die. And they help families understand how their children can do better in school. They are, however, beyond the immediate reach of strained local agencies beaten down by lack of money or burned out by overwork.

Those who aspire to federal and state leadership must commit themselves to spreading the word about these success stories and then providing help in setting up the projects. It can be done, because it has been done.