Tuesday, December 16, 2008
It's time to ring alarm again
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Shanna Flowers is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
Shanna Flowers
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Roanoke needs a refresher on the pitfalls of teen pregnancy.
Since the city recorded the highest teen pregnancy rate in Virginia in the 1990s and the community forged together to cut that in half by 2004, the message seems to have lost its urgency.
Following a national upswing in teen pregnancies, the local rate again has climbed to the second-highest in the state, behind Petersburg.
The disturbing trend comes at the same time local prevention programs are in a fight for their lives to keep their state funding.
The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Project will find out Wednesday whether the $160,000 it receives each year to fund three teen pregnancy prevention efforts is in jeopardy.
The project's coordinator, Brooks Michael, went before Roanoke City Council on Monday to urge council members to support calls for the funding to be maintained.
In 2004, the Roanoke teen pregnancy rate was 39.4 per 1,000 girls, Michael said. Recent figures released by the state show that Roanoke's rate had more than doubled to 71.1 last year.
Prevention is a no-brainer in a city where that many teen girls became pregnant, according to statistics from the Virginia Department of Health. Petersburg had a rate of 85.5.
The upfront investment in prevention is a pittance compared with the social and economic costs of kids having babies.
Michael didn't make a financial plea before city council. But privately, she and a small group of prevention workers said they need reinforcements.
They believe parents, church, government and civic leaders, and schools need to pull together with the same urgency as they did a decade ago.
"As the rate went down," said Trish Jackson of the Roanoke Adolescent Health Partnership, "the urgency went down."
Michael said that of 900 youth the prevention project worked with last year, 95 percent of them did not get involved in a pregnancy while enrolled in programs, which cater to both girls and boys.
But the fight is continual. Teen pregnancy prevention should not rise and fall with the ebb and flow of state budget revenues.
Each year, new crops of teens grow up. The message needs to be reinforced to each of them that becoming a parent before their time is bad news.
The task of telling teens that pregnancy is bad news requires another, sustained communitywide effort. This time, the urgency should not be allowed to wane.
