The Chicago Public Schools plan announced Monday to open 10 new day-care centers for teen mothers is being touted as a way to lower the dropout rate among female students and ultimately head off the chronic poverty associated with teen motherhood.
But the new centers, which would join the only one currently in operation, at Orr High School, also raise the question of whether such taxpayer-funded programs glamorize or legitimize the idea of having children at an early age. It is similar to the argument some give for opposing distribution of condoms in schools.
“Some people say it’s glorifying teen pregnancy to build a day-care center in a school,” said schools chief Paul Vallas, speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony of the first of the day-care centers, at Bowen High School on the Southeast Side.
But with some schools already at a 50 percent to 60 percent teen pregnancy rate, Vallas said, “There is not much more encouragement that can be going on.”
Mary Jean Schumann, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting and Prevention, cautions that in-school day-care might provide some of the teen mothers the attention they crave.
“For some students, having something that loves them unconditionally is pretty romantically attractive, and they don’t realize what it takes to raise a child,” Schumann said. “They want to show these babies off.”
The announcement by school officials of the new Infant/Toddler Family Development Center at Bowen High School, scheduled to open in the fall, is part of a growing number of such centers nationwide, especially in large urban school districts, researchers say.
“Legislation around the country provides for more and more assistance directed toward teen parents in public schools,” said Fern Marx, a senior research scientist at the Wellesley College Center for Research for Women. “The other piece is welfare reform because it has the requirement that teens complete education.”
Exact figures are unavailable. But according to the Washington, D.C.-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, roughly 600 schools across the country provide child care.
Most are in urban areas like New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago, but rural towns are also offering child care. New Jersey has a strong network of school-based health centers.
Some say the issue is one that should be handled at home, not at school. But Tamara Kreinin, director of state and local affairs for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said the unfortunate truth is there is a huge connection between educational success and teen pregnancy.
“Educational failure is a huge predictor for teen pregnancy. We need schools working with us to help keep them in schools and give them some sense of a future,” Kreinin said. “We have to do everything we can to support pregnant and parenting teens, but at the same time, we have to take great care and send messages to teens and their siblings that teenage pregnancy isn’t OK.”
Locally, Vallas said the teen mothers also will be enrolled in the 2-year-old Cradle-to-Classroom initiative, a mentoring program that has successfully prevented repeat pregnancies.
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“Rather than losing two generations of children, this is an opportunity to save two generations of children,” he said.
He did say, however, that Orr’s center, which has been criticized as little more than a baby-sitting service, was not the model for the new centers.
Cynthia Anderson, a spokeswoman for Jane Addams Hull House, which has run the Orr program since it began in 1992, said that an average of 75 percent of the teens who enroll in the program graduate from high school. Roughly 75 percent do not become pregnant while in the program, she said.
The 10 new centers will provide child care for 32 children each, up to 23 months of age. The centers will cost between $100,000 and $250,000 to build.
In addition to Bowen, three other high schools, King, Marshall and Westinghouse, will have centers by the fall. By the fall of 1999, six more centers will be opened–at Englewood, Phillips, Clemente, Manley, Farragut and Austin High Schools.
The schools were chosen because of the high numbers of teen births in the communities where they are located, Vallas said. In 1996–the last year that figures were available–there were 9,686 births to teen mothers in Chicago.
Among Bowen’s 1,500 students, 132 female students have children who are under age 3. An additional 32 are pregnant.
Teen mothers interviewed at Bowen thought it unlikely the new day-care center would lead to more teen pregnancies.
“School is six hours a day,” said Lucero Alvarez, 18, whose daughter, Dulce, is 10 months old. “There’s 24 hours in a day. It’s not like they are going to watch your child while you are having fun. What it means is a lot of girls will no longer have an excuse for why they can’t come to school.”
Yvita Smith, 17, a Bowen junior who is three months’ pregnant, will be one of the first students to use the new center. “I’m still going to finish school,” Smith said. “No matter what.”
As for having other children, Smith said: “No. This is it.”