Educating Children Who Are Mothers

First, her doctor told her she was pregnant. Then she told her a lot of other things.

“She was so negative,” the patient said. “She told me it would ruin my life.”

But that is not what 14-year-old Carlotta Mitchell wanted to hear. “Having a baby is positive and negative,” Carlotta said confidently, a few weeks before her due date. “Babies can be fun. When you’re mad, they cheer you up.”

So Carlotta found another doctor. And then she found a school where everyone would understand her special situation. She enrolled in the pregnant minor program run by the Los Angels Unified School District.

In Los Angeles County every year there are an estimated 18,000 Carlottas, girls between the ages of 10 and 19 who are having babies. For most of these girls, the beginning of their pregnancy marks the end of their education. A few, like Carlotta, have discovered that there is a way to stay in school.

Carlotta is attending Nellie Blanding High School, a small school for pregnant teens in Compton, not far from her home, one of seven branches in the district. “It’s better than a regular school where everyone would be staring at you,” said one of Carlotta’s classmates. “Here, everybody’s got a belly.”

Special programs like the one they attend have existed in Los Angeles schools for almost 30 years. But those who run the programs agree that they don’t come close to meeting the needs of pregnant and parenting teens.

More than 90% of today’s pregnant teen-agers keep their babies, according to a variety of studies. And while the overall number of pregnant teens appears to have leveled off, there has been an alarming change: Teen-age mothers are getting younger. The number of pregnant girls 14 and under is increasing. And more than one in every five births to a teen-ager today in California is a second child, according to the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UC San Francisco.

Teen-age pregnancy remains the primary reason that young girls leave school, educators say. Many of these girls who drop out simply fall through the cracks and disappear. They do not show up at school, and in the words of one administrator, “No one goes to look for them.”

“I don’t feel that (these) teen-agers are a priority to the district,” said Renetta Jenkins, who runs one of the district’s pregnant teen programs on the grounds of the Salvation Army’s Booth Memorial Center in East Los Angeles.

Jenkins’ students can request live-in care at the Salvation Army center, and all students are scheduled for group counseling sessions. Limited child care is available when they want to return to school.

But Jenkins laments what is not being done. “I feel that sometimes it’s like, ‘You made a mistake so you have to suffer the consequences,’ “she said. For example, she has been told that her staff cannot grow even as the demand does.

School board member Jackie Goldberg agreed that the pregnant minor program deserves more attention. “I don’t think it’s a priority at the moment, but one of the things we want to do is bring it closer to becoming a priority,” she said. “This is not an issue that’s ignored. It’s just that no one knows what to do. All the programs cost money, and no one can identify where the money would come from.”

The pregnant minor program--which seeks to give the girls a way to continue their education while also ensuring that they have healthy babies--gets $1.6 million out of the district’s $2.5-billion budget.

Several months ago, Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed a measure that would have modestly boosted state funding for teen-age pregnancy and parenting programs. He said expansion of these programs would compete with private programs.

The problems go beyond funding. Educators said they are stymied by a lack of coordination among agencies and a weak outreach program to draw more girls into the schools. For instance, Thomas Riley High School’s branch doesn’t have a listed phone number.

Nevertheless, the district program serves about 1,300 girls a year, a sizable number but only 10% to 30% of pregnant teen-agers in need, according to principals. The district has no precise idea how many girls go through the program, what happens to them after they leave or how many pregnant or parenting girls drop out each year.

What they do know is that the program is not doing enough.

“There are thousands and thousands of girls out there who are mothers and quitting school,” said Howard Marcus, principal of Harold McAlister High School, a cheery place built around a courtyard near downtown Los Angeles.

Marcus cited a recently approved grant for a special job-training and infant-care program at the school as a sign that gains are being made but noted that they are treating the symptoms of unplanned pregnancy rather than the causes.

“We cannot resolve the problem,” he said. “But we can do a lot to deal with it.”

“We’ve talked about ways to be able to reach out to more pregnant girls,” said Deborah Callahan, who oversees the Los Angeles district’s pregnant minor schools. She puts year-round status for Riley High School as an immediate goal, along with increased child care.

The district’s pregnancy program was reorganized in 1972 into two schools, Thomas Riley and Harold McAlister high schools, each with branches in Gardena, Compton, East Los Angeles, Reseda, San Fernando, San Pedro and Baldwin Hills.

“A lot of girls come here because it’s a cocoon of sorts,” said Sandra James, coordinator of Blanding. “Some think the classes are easier, but they aren’t. They are just smaller, and you get extra help if you need it. Sometimes it’s the first time they’ve passed classes. Sometimes it’s the first time anybody’s sat down and talked to them.”

The classroom environment is clearly different. Each classroom has a cot for occasional morning sickness and bulletin boards that are a patchwork of baby pictures sent in by former students. The school campuses are all groups of one-floor bungalows, so none of the students have to rush up and down stairs.

An important addition to their studies is parenting classes that help to prepare the girls for motherhood by emphasizing good nutrition and prenatal care. There are visits from former students who can tell the girls what motherhood is really like and discussions about birth control and child abuse, all while the girls continue their regular courses. Some schools also offer vocational training.

The schools work on an individual basis, as in continuing education. The girls work a shorter day at their own pace, with time off for clinic visits.

The students are referred by a school nurse or doctor or more often by word of mouth from a girlfriend or relative. And there is a lot to learn.

“The most important thing I learned is that just because I’m pregnant I don’t have to stop my education or put my life on hold for my baby,” said 15-year-old Rosa Barajas, a student at Blanding.

“I didn’t know the stages of delivery,” said Carlotta, just a few days before she went into labor. “I thought there was just contractions, and the baby was here.” But after a semester of tough, demanding physical education classes, she felt ready.

“He taught us breathing, how to time contractions, what to do, step by step. He practically told us everything that would happen--that we’d get hot and cold, we’d want to throw up, we wouldn’t want no one to touch us, we’d get water through ice chips, they’d hook us up to a fetal heart monitor. That we wouldn’t leave the labor room until they could see the top of the baby’s head.”

A Healthy Boy

A few mornings later, she left school and went to the hospital where she gave birth to a healthy boy, whom she named after her boyfriend, Fidel.

“I want the baby to go to college and get a good job,” she said, adding that she hoped to go to college, too, “but there’s no guarantee I will. My goal is to finish high school.”

Carlotta had the support of her mother, her boyfriend and his family. She returned to school three weeks after her baby’s birth, while Fidel’s mother baby-sat her child. When the child is old enough, she plans to send him to the child-care center where her mother works.

In that way, she is luckier than some. Some girls have to deal with their pregnancy alone, having been thrown out of their homes or abandoned by the father of their children.

And educators stress that intervention at the right time in a young girl’s pregnancy can be more than comforting. It can be critical.

“Someone is guiding these girls,” said Grace Hibma-Smilde, a curriculum consultant for the county Office of Education. “Without that guidance, we’re really leaving them without any resources. We’re talking about having a good outcome for these infants, as opposed to infants born at low birth weight, which is a staggering cost to the taxpayer, or birth defects. . . . It’s one of the most cost-effective programs in our society.”

Even if the pregnant minor program is more successful in reaching pregnant students, the new mothers are still faced with the problem of finding a way to care for their child when they want to return to school.

In the Los Angeles district, only four high schools (Locke, Ramona, Roosevelt and Jordan) have on-site infant-care centers for mothers attending those schools. At the Locke Child Care Lab, the largest of the facilities, there is room for 35 children--and 55 are on the waiting list.

School administrators and teachers said they are frustrated by the high number of repeaters they are seeing, girls who are back in the pregnant minor program for their second pregnancy, sometimes within a year of the first. Being out of school, they said, can contribute to the conditions that make a second pregnancy much more likely.

A Task Force on Teen-Age Pregnancy reported to the county supervisors in 1987 that “unless appropriate child-care services and transportation are available to teen mothers, dropping out of school becomes an inevitability.”

“Everyone has been yelling for years that we’ve got to have a way for them to stay in school,” said Mary Lou Williams, who runs a widely respected pregnant minor program in Montebello. But unless affordable, convenient child care is provided, she contended, “you’re programming them to failure.”

However, since 1982 when the minor program’s special education classification was removed, no new funding has been allocated for pregnant teen-agers, and over the last 10 years only one new child-care facility has been funded in the county.

One attempt to provide more assistance was vetoed by the governor. The measure by Sen. Dan McCorquodale (D-San Jose), which would have doubled the state’s contribution for teen-age pregnancy and parenting programs to $20 million, was characterized as merely a drop in the bucket by a fiscal manager at the state Board of Education. New legislation is going to be submitted this year.

Starting earlier could be the key. “If we started in sex education in a broad sense,” said Mary Ann Shiner, a curriculum coordinator at Riley High, “with sex education, family education, life-making choices, what it’s like to raise a child, we’d have a lot less pregnancy.”

State education officials have recognized this and formed the critical health unit to study how best to teach children that they have choices to make in life.

But sex education is approached with great ambivalence. Children are bombarded with sexual images everywhere, from ads to music videos, television and movies, yet, school board member Goldberg said, legislators have determined that the suggested curriculum must teach that the best form of birth control is abstinence.

Looking at the way budget priorities are set, Shiner said, “In a way we really don’t love our children as a society. We tend to do as little as possible and only when it becomes really necessary. When they’ve broken the law or become pregnant, (then) do we do something.”

But even that little something, if it comes at the right time in their lives, can sometimes provide an impetus for change. For some girls, having a baby makes them take life and their schoolwork much more seriously and gives them someone else, someone perhaps more important, to care about. For some, having a baby is their first success.

Cynthia Bolton, who was 13 when she had her first child, is back at Blanding, 17 months later. Both pregnancies were unplanned, but bringing up a healthy baby has made Cynthia feel good. But she wants to do even more for her children. She wants to finish school.

“I want to set an example for my two kids. I want them to be independent, to depend on themselves,” she said. “I want to make my kids proud of me.”

Merica Hudgens, who has worked as a school nurse with pregnant minors for more than 18 years, was talking the other day at Blanding about one of her former students.

“She was one of those girls who you had to pry to get to school. But she can tell me today that she’s going to (Cal State) Dominguez. We don’t know how many we salvage. Don’t give up on them. You might get the shock of your life writing off people.”