A Chicago high school has an ignoble claim to fame: close to one in seven of its female students is pregnant.
Of the eight hundred female students at Paul Robeson High School in Chicago, Illinois, a staggering 115 are expectant mothers.
According to principal Gerald Morrow, the fault lies not with the school but with factors inside the home:
It can be a lot of things that are happening in the home or not happening in the home, if you will.
He went on to add that absentee fathers are another factor.
Regarding pregnant students, Morrow’s approach is tempered perhaps by the fact that he himself was born to a 15-year-old mother.
We’re not looking at them like ‘Ooh you made a mistake,’ We’re looking at how we can get them to the next phase, how can we still get them thinking about graduation?
One wonders if a sexual health curriculum that emphasizes abstinence as the “expected norm” is not working:
The Board of Education of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has taken a big step to standardize and improve sexuality education in its schools. On April 26, 2006 the board voted unanimously to approve the Family Life and Comprehensive Sexual Health Education policy, which will require schools to teach comprehensive, age-appropriate sexuality education programs in grades 6–12.
Students and youth leaders affiliated with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH), who had been working to improve and shape sexuality education policy, celebrated the decision. “We believed that the entire school system needed to make a commitment to providing life-saving information to Chicago schools, so we took our cause to the top,” said Mayadet Patittucci, a senior at Curie Metropolitan High School. Patittucci and other students organized two rallies in August 2005 and again in December outside the district’s administration building that lead to meetings with CPS administrators and a hand in crafting the new policy.
The new policy calls for a curriculum committee to design a program that will provide students with “age-appropriate and medically accurate information concerning the emotional, psychological, physiological, hygienic and social responsibility aspects of family life.” In particular, the curriculum will emphasize abstinence as the “expected norm” but will also include instruction on contraception, STD and pregnancy prevention, and HIV transmission.
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