School district drops Teen Parent Program

In its more than 20-year history, the Sonoma Valley Unified School District’s Teen Parent Program has been a welcoming resource for teenagers with babies as they worked to complete their high school educations. They could come to Sonoma Valley or Creekside high schools, leave their babies in the care of trusted childcare providers, then turn their attention to school.

Founded by former teacher Marcia Roberts and a small cohort of other district personnel, the program — administered at Creekside but available to all students attending SVUSD schools — has provided free daycare for more than 170 infants and toddlers while helping develop parenting skills in their young moms and dads.

“We taught them a no-shaking, no-spanking approach to parenting,” program coordinator Tracy Dorrance said. “Teens need to be taught how to parent gently and positively.”

A change in course

In April the district began dismantling the program. The toys were donated and the cribs hauled away. The rocking chairs were re-homed and the changing tables, too. The sunny room with the big windows and small kitchenette on the Creekside campus will be repurposed for some other use next year.

Even before the pandemic forced everyone to stay home, there wasn’t a single baby enrolled for the 2020-21 school year. Previously, the program had been fully utilized. “We used to have 12, 13, sometimes as many as 18 babies a year,” Dorrance said.

Since 2018 there have been just seven infants and parents attending, a data point that district leaders read as success.

“There are no parents or babies on the horizon that need access to the program,” Creekside principal Liz Liscum said in an email, explaining the decision to end the program.

Trending down

Nationwide, pregnancy rates are dropping in almost all demographic categories, but particularly among U.S. teens. In 1991, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 61.8 out of every 1,000 teens became parents. By 2017, the birth rate for young women aged 15 to 19 was 18.8 per 1,000, a reduction of nearly 30 percent.

Pregnancy and birth are significant contributors to high school drop-out rates for girls. Only half of all teen moms go on to earn their high school diplomas by age 22, compared to the 90 percent completion rate for girls who do not give birth while in high school. The Teen Parent Program tried to change that.

“We really put that expectation on the girls,” Dorrance said, adding that her team preferred to be direct with the young mothers, telling them: “We’re giving you this daycare and all these extra services because we expect you to graduate.”

Those extra services included teaching the young parents about proper nutrition, providing all the food needed by the babies while they were onsite, and routinely sending the moms home with organic groceries provided by an anonymous donor. There were parenting classes, lactation specialists, academic support and a range of community alliances providing further assistance. Sometimes program staff even helped the kids get to and from school. “There was one student — she’s still going to (SRJC) — that I was picking up and bringing to school so that I could keep up with her,” Dorrance said.

There was also a heavy emphasis on birth control and pregnancy prevention. “The goal was to keep them from having a second baby,” Dorrance said.

But what the Teen Parent Program was perhaps most essentially about was breaking the cycle for the babies themselves. Young parents without education are likely to end up with limited job prospects, and poverty leads to a host of other punishing outcomes. “They become reliant on welfare and all the other programs,” Dorrance said. “Our program was designed to keep them out of all that.” By saving their parents from potential economic hardship, the Teen Parent Program aimed to save their babies, too.

Success stories

Hilda Ojeda, 20, who will graduate from a professional program to become a medical assistant this summer, credits the program for getting her through high school. “It helped me a lot through my whole school journey,” Ojeda, who had her son at 16, said. “I feel like I wouldn’t have graduated without it. They help you with your baby and give you a lot of resources. For girls without a lot of family support, they remind you that you’re not alone.”

Leonela Armenta, 30, graduated from Sonoma Valley High in 2010, and is a full-time employee at the school now. Her success wouldn’t have happened without the Teen Parent Program, she said. “I was on a very bad direction in my life when I became pregnant,” Armenta said. “Without that program I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I was almost at a point where I wasn’t going to graduate. The people I met there helped me get scholarships and continue with my education.”

Her son, now 13, helped with Armenta’s course correction, too. With the right kind of help, she learned to embrace her new responsibilities. “He is my angel,” Armenta said of her son. “He saved me.”

Dorrance has witnessed many similar rescues in her years at the helm of the Teen Parent Program. “Many moms who were not doing well fell so in love with their babies that they wanted better for them,” she said. “The babies were like an intervention.”

End of an era

Next year and in the years ahead, teen parents in the Sonoma Valley will have to find alternatives for the support previously offered by the district’s Teen Parent Program, and Liscum believes their needs can be met.

“We have donation funding support to offer parents and babies of SVUSD students. The Creekside community will act as a conduit to get services through the Teen Parent Connections within Sonoma County,” she said.

But Dorrance worries that terminating the program she’s worked so hard to sustain may be shortsighted, and wonders why the approach to declining enrollment needed to be so extreme. “It took years to build this program. We had thousands and thousands of dollars in supplies. Why couldn’t we have just put those things in storage?” Dorrance said.

It’s the young parents themselves who attract her most ardent concern, and — by extension — the communities in which those teen parents live. “The community will suffer in the long term,” Dorrance said. “It may have been a short-term savings, but it’s going to cost a lot more in the long run.”

Contact Kate Williams at kate.williams@sonomanews.com