Helping the Young : Task Force Seeks Ways to Keep Teen-Age Parents in School

Josefina Mejia considers herself pretty lucky.

She will graduate from the Eastside’s Wilson High School before her baby is due in July, and she is hoping to find child care at Pasadena City College, where she has a scholarship to study nursing in the fall.

“But lots of my friends end up dropping out” after their babies are born, Mejia, 19, told a Los Angeles Board of Education committee hearing on Thursday. “They wanted to keep coming to school, but they couldn’t find anyone to take care of their babies.”

Mejia’s child will be one of 4,000 born each year to school-age mothers living within the boundaries of the Los Angeles Unified School District, according to a task force report. Pregnancy and child-care problems are the most frequently cited reasons for girls who leave school before graduating, the task force found.

The report, sponsored by the district’s Commission for Sex Equity and released at Thursday’s emotion-packed meeting of the board’s Educational Development and Student Life Committee, made several recommendations, including:

* Rapidly implementing the district’s new family life curriculum at all grade levels.

* Designating someone at each school to help pregnant and parenting teen-agers.

* Establishing a districtwide coordinator of programs for such teens.

* Setting up child-care centers at one junior high and one senior high school in each region.

* Beginning a comprehensive parent education program for all district teen-agers who need it.

Committee members, noting that the board faces up to $374 million in budget cuts, fretted about how to pay for the recommended programs. While scores of young women students--many of them cradling infants or comforting toddlers--looked on, committee members debated what could be done.

Providing more child care is out of the question, unless the city, county or other agencies could be persuaded to chip in, committee members said. But appointing a districtwide coordinator and finding a volunteer at each school to see that students get all the help available could probably be done within the budget constraints, they agreed. For example, one of the two attendance counselors assigned to work with about 900 boys returning to school from juvenile detention camps could be reassigned to work with the pregnant teens and new mothers.

The district operates child-care centers on four campuses and has seven sites at which it operates programs for pregnant students, some as young as 12. About 2,300 mothers-to-be attend these programs during the year, usually about 800 at a time.

The most dramatic testimony came from young women who told their personal stories. Among them was 17-year-old Yvonne Parra, a student at the district’s Business-Industry School, which provides parenting classes and child care.

Reading from notes neatly handwritten on a sheet of notebook paper and pausing occasionally to wipe away tears, the young mother told how she dropped out of high school at 14 “to fool around,” then got pregnant at 15.

“At first, my boyfriend and I were happy about it, but we didn’t know what we were getting into,” Parra said. “Then my mother found out and she was very upset . . . I felt sad and lonely . . . I just sat around all day waiting for the baby to be born.”

When her son, Christian, arrived 16 months ago, Parra said she fell deeper into despair.

“I felt so much stress and tension. . . . I knew then I wasn’t ready to be the great parent I wanted to be,” she said. “I wished none of this had ever happened. . . . I tried to go back to school, but I had no money for a baby sitter.”

A friend told her about the Business-Industry School, and it turned her life around, she said.

“I’m going to get my diploma next year, and I want to become a paralegal,” she said. “I’m learning how to be a great parent . . . and now I’m married to the father of my baby.”

By the time Parra finished and returned to her seat, most of her classmates and several adults were wiping away tears.