Teen Parents Get a Push Along the Path to Higher Education

Going to college just didn’t seem like an option to teen parent Martha Arellano.

After all, she was an 18-year-old mother, and her 19-year-old husband held down two jobs to make ends meet.

So when Arellano found a flier about the Teen Parent Program at Oxnard College on the door of her Pleasant Valley Village apartment, she thought it would be too difficult an endeavor and set it aside.

“I kept telling her to go, but she was insecure about the program,” said Jose Serrano, Arellano’s husband.

It wasn’t until a counselor from the program came knocking on her door that Arellano gave it some serious thought.

“I was pretty skeptical to begin with,” she said. “But then the counselor got me to join.”

The counselor helped her fill out applications and make an appointment for the assessment test. Arellano soon found herself enrolled in classes full time. And when Serrano realized the program wasn’t just for women, he joined too.

Now both are heading for even higher education, and higher goals. Without the Teen Parent Program, Arellano said, she would have returned to clerical work, and Serrano would have stayed at the muffler shop.

“It’s opened doors for us and has shown us different things we can accomplish,” Serrano said. “They gave us a lot of support and encouragement.”

Program officials work with the Oxnard Housing Authority to recruit parents from public housing developments. The program provides such services as career and personal counseling, bimonthly workshops, child-care assistance, books, supplies, parking permits or bus tokens, and tutoring. The effort is paid for with a federal grant aimed at eliminating drug abuse in public housing complexes.

Arellano graduated from Oxnard College last year and is now a junior at Cal State Northridge, majoring in sociology. She hopes to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, and is thinking about pursuing a master’s, with which she could become a high school counselor.

Serrano, too, is interested in working at a high school. After he graduates from Oxnard College in May, he plans to study sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Eventually, he would like to teach at Channel Islands High School, where he graduated three years ago and now works as a tutor. Serrano said the program also helped him to get a spot as a counselor with the Oxnard Boys & Girls Club.

Students in the Oxnard program must take child development classes as part of their course work and attend bimonthly workshops on topics such as parenting skills, birth control, domestic violence, drug education, child abuse, and college success and personal growth issues.

Many of the teenagers dropped out of high school or came from homes where there was domestic violence, child abuse, gang activities or prison incarceration, said Guadalupe Moriel-Guillen, the Teen Parent Program coordinator and counselor. And many of their parents were teenage parents as well. “We try to break this cycle and enable them to learn a different way,” she said.

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Each participant’s skills in reading, writing and math are assessed before a course of study is planned. Many need tutoring in remedial courses before entering the college-level courses.

They come in not knowing even how to dress or behave for a job interview, Moriel-Guillen said. “But over time, you see them change. It is beautiful to see their transformation.”

The program accepts both teenage women and men, but most students are single mothers, said Rose Banuelos, resident services assistant with the Oxnard Housing Authority.

“Every day is a struggle for them because of child care, financial resources, domestic violence,” Banuelos said. “We deal with almost every issue with these girls on a daily basis. We try to give them a lot of supportive services and help them overcome these barriers so they can continue with their education.”

Another problem Banuelos finds herself dealing with is that sometimes the male partners don’t want their girlfriends or wives to become educated.

“Our philosophy is that we try to make them better educated so that they can become better parents to their children and be better role models,” Banuelos said.

Since the program began in 1993 with 13 students, it has enrolled 55 teenage parents--25 of those students enrolled in the spring semester. The waiting list has 10 names.

The retention rate was 55% in the program’s first three years, but increased to 83% during the fall 1996 semester. Many of its students have entered the work force, completed certificate programs or transferred to the Northridge university.

“We’re the only program in the county that serves teen parents from very low-income families by helping them to get an education,” Moriel-Guillen said. “We focus on how to become independent, how to succeed in life through education and how to be better parents. If they improve their lifestyle, their children will also benefit.”