Venice High May Offer Infant Care : Education: The center would help teen mothers finish their schooling. It would be the first district-sponsored program on the Westside.

A group of parents, social workers and school officials is seeking to start a 16-space infant day-care center at Venice High School so teen-age mothers can finish high school.

Members of the group say the center, which has the backing of Westside school board member Mark Slavkin, is needed because a scarcity of affordable infant care forces most high school-age mothers to stay out of school for years--or for good.

By law, a teen-ager who is pregnant may stay in school until her baby is born, and she is entitled to return afterward. But few do, and officials say the lack of child care is the biggest obstacle.

“These are children in the community having babies, and we can’t turn our backs on them,” Slavkin said.

The Los Angeles Unified School District provides infant day care at several schools, but no centers are anywhere near the Westside and all the day-care programs have long waiting lists. A formal proposal for a center at Venice High has been prepared by school officials, and the issue is under discussion within the community, but funding has not been obtained.

Venice High School Principal Andrea Natker said infant day care is critical because interrupting a mother’s education until her child is old enough for regular day care often translates into her never returning to school.

“It’s almost too late if you wait for the baby to get toilet training,” Natker said.

No one knows exactly how many teen-age mothers are out of school on the Westside because the district does not keep track of them. County health department statistics, however, provide some indication of the extent of the problem.

County data provided to the school district shows that 110 girls ages 14 to 18 living within the Venice High School geographic boundaries had babies in 1986, the last year for which information is available. An additional 66 babies were born that year to teen-agers within three neighboring high school boundaries in the Los Angeles school district.

Counselors sent out to determine why a junior high or high school student is not in school recount many instances of calling on listless 14- and 15-year-olds watching soap operas when they should be learning algebra.

“They’re depressed, angry and alienated from their peers,” said Rose Marie Durocher, a district counselor. They also have no idea of how to care for a baby and have a high incidence of child abuse, she said.

Durocher and district counselor Karen Saunders contend that the school district not only has very little to offer the young women, but continues to stigmatize them even by the system’s code word for pregnancy written next to their name on a school attendance roster: cyesis.

Although ostensibly a medical term--it is derived from the Greek word for conception--cyesis is so obscure that it turns up only once in almost 25 years in a medical computer database. It is not in Webster’s New World Dictionary.

District counselors point to its use as symptomatic of the way pregnant teens are treated by the school district and the community. “We don’t even say pregnancy,” Saunders said. “It’s out-of-sight, out-of-mind.”

Even though planning for the Venice center is in an early phase, some opposition has already taken shape. Some parents and other community members contend that the projected cost of $184,000 for a school year is too much and that alternatives, including the use of volunteer child-care providers, should be fully explored.

Opponents contend that the school should take a stronger stance for sexual abstinence, saying that establishment of a day-care center on campus sends an implicit message of approval to other students.

A leader of the opposition, Diane Smith, the elected community member on Venice High’s Shared Decision-Making Council, called the plan an “expensive Band-Aid to take care of 16 infants.”

Advocates of the center contend that it would cut down on welfare costs because the young mothers will be acquiring education and skills, and would prevent child abuse because parenting skills are taught. Prevention of second pregnancies would also be a goal, the supporters say.

A report on the San Francisco School District’s model Teen-Age Pregnancy Parenting Program and Network concluded that a statewide 10% increase in teen mothers graduating from high school would save the state of California $53 million in welfare costs.

“I think one of the most prudent investments we can make with public resources is to assist teen-age mothers and their infants,” said Slavkin, who said teaching abstinence and providing on-campus infant care are not mutually exclusive goals.

Such centers have existed for several years at other Los Angeles high schools, including Jordan and Locke. The Santa Monica School District also has a successful center.

A districtwide pregnancy task force that recently studied the problem of how to keep teen mothers in school has concluded that campus centers are beneficial and will recommend them to the board of education, according to Donna Cassyd, director of the school district’s Sex Equity Commission and a member of the task force.

Venice High PTA President Sue Wong, a proponent of the infant day-care center, said she views the matter as a women’s issue. “A boy can get an education no matter what he does, but a girl who gets pregnant is an outcast. It’s not fair.”

Wong said that she favors teaching abstinence to teen-agers too, but that it is unrealistic to expect it to be a complete success. “We teach reading, writing and arithmetic too. But does everybody read, write and do arithmetic?” she asked.