Education And Training

Story By: by Saul Gonzalez

Sherry Medrano, chief nurse at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, hands condoms to a student in her office. The school has teamed up with Planned Parenthood to combat teen pregnancy.

School nurse Sherry Medrano has more than Band-Aids stored in her cabinets. She has an armory of birth control options: condoms, the pill, the patch, the ring and emergency contraception.

The teen pregnancy rate in the United States is the lowest it’s been in nearly 40 years. However, in some communities, the number of young girls getting pregnant remains stubbornly high.

Planned Parenthood On Campus

Medrano is the chief nurse at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles’ predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood. The campus is in what health officials call a pregnancy “hot spot,” where teen pregnancy rates are two to three times higher than in other L.A. neighborhoods.

In fact, the teen pregnancy rate has been so high for so long here, the school has teamed up with Planned Parenthood to operate this on-campus clinic.

“What happened at Roosevelt is that the nurse reached out to us and said there was a tremendously high rate of teen pregnancy, could we help?” says Sue Dunlap, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.

The program at Roosevelt High is the only Planned Parenthood-funded family planning clinic in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“So what we do at Roosevelt is we make sure that they have the support and resources that they need to cut down their teen pregnancy rate, whether that means access to condoms, access to information, access to our medical director,” Dunlap says.

They also help with student peer advocates. The advocates’ job is to talk to fellow students about safe sex and publicize the family planning services offered by the clinic.

“The whole reason behind being peer advocates is having a better line of communication within the students of the school,” says advocate Christian Juarez.

Christian is a 15-year-old sophomore at Roosevelt. Although enthusiastic about what he’s doing, he says his parents weren’t so thrilled when he broke the news to them about his new school activity.

“I come from a very strong Catholic family, and when I told them I was doing this, they were … a little iffy about it,” he says. “I told them this is normal. I am going to do this because I feel this information should be passed around my school.”

‘Very Concerned’ Opponents

Of course, at a time when even adult contraception has become a national political issue, not everyone is happy with the idea of Planned Parenthood’s presence on a public school campus. That includes Valerie Huber, the executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, which promotes abstinence-only instruction in schools.

“We are very concerned when the sex education that teens are receiving in a school is doing little more than normalizing teen sexual behavior rather than encouraging them to avoid all risk,” she says.

Huber says a program like Roosevelt High School’s, with its easy access to birth control, only encourages teen sex.

“A program like this is setting an expectation that teens are going to have sex,” she says, “and rather than giving them the information, skills to encourage them to wait, it is normalizing that behavior.”

Medrano says they do talk about abstinence with the teens.

“But I would say that 90 percent of the time, abstinence just isn’t working for them,” she says. “Abstinence doesn’t happen, especially when they’re in a relationship.”

Medrano says the year before the partnership with Planned Parenthood started in 2008, there were 32 pregnancies on campus. There were only three the following year.

‘Peak Season’

Spring dances and other social events helped Medrano detect what she calls a “seasonal pattern” to pregnancy at Roosevelt High.

“What I call my peak season is March 1 through June 1. … I attribute it to several things — Valentine’s Day, prom, different events that happen,” she says. “I know everybody laughs when I say that, but you know, that’s the only thing [to which] I can attribute the peak in teen pregnancies during that time period.”

Although still well below what it was, the number of teen girls getting pregnant on campus has inched up in the years since this program was started.

In preparation for summer vacation, Medrano gives students extra birth control and starts referring them to other clinics in the area.

Story By: by Kim Green

Daniel Furbish works with a student during his class in Nashville, Tenn. Students learn to build bikes from donated parts.

In a cave-like basement bursting with rickety old bicycles, tires and churning middle-schoolers, Daniel Furbish barks orders.

Close-cropped beard, pen behind his ear, Furbish is an artist-turned-teacher from a military family — creative and disciplined. He started his Nashville, Tenn., bike-building workshop as a summer experiment. He thought, “What if I take donated bike parts and teach kids to put them together?”

These kids started with a frame and some greasy bicycle parts. Some picked a working bike from the pile. Furbish says when they found out they had to strip it down and start from zero, their disbelief was priceless.

“I love seeing the expression on their face when we tell them, ‘OK, now take the whole thing apart.’ And they’re like, ‘What?! This is gonna take forever!’ ” he says.

Furbish ignores all the groaning and sticks to the deal he’s made with the kids: Build a bicycle, and it’s yours. Over the course of six weeks, that’s what they do.

An hour into the class, there is order from chaos: The kids are absorbed in threading chains over cogs.

Ninth-grader Lamarkus Shannon gets a thumbs-up from Furbish as he winds bike chain around gears. The two met in an after-school program that Furbish taught for kids who struggled in class. Lamarkus got in trouble a lot because he couldn’t sit still and focus for hours at a time. But in smaller groups, doing hands-on work, he shined. He started writing poetry with a spoken word group. Today, he’s just built himself a bicycle.

“It makes me feel good. Makes me feel different than a lot of other kids that have bikes because they just went out and bought one,” he says. “Or some people even steal bikes or whatever. And I … made my own bike from scratch.”

Furbish lives for that burst of insight. A lot of these students are from tough neighborhoods. Some end up dropping out of school or turning to crime. Here, though, they see that it’s actually fun to work hard, see a project through and learn something new about the world.

Furbish also teaches the kids how to take what they’ve built and use it to navigate their world. He briefs them about practicalities: It’s illegal to ride on the sidewalk; storm drains can send you toppling over the handlebars.

He unfurls a cyclist’s map of Nashville and points out bike lanes from the students’ neighborhood to a park with miles of greenways. His point is that these bikes aren’t just toys for doing wheelies. They’re tools that can impart freedom to go places and explore.

Story By: by NPR Staff

On Jan. 1, the Missouri State School Board revoked the Kansas City public school district’s accreditation. Now parents have a hard choice to make: leave or keep their children at a failed school?

- Stephen Green, interim Kansas City school superintendent

- Ximena Pecina, high school sophomore

“We think there’s some things here that we should fight for,” Adriana says. “Because if we all run away, we’ll never fix the problems.”

But one of the Pecina kids, high school sophomore Ximena, is more transparent about her worries. She says she has had to say goodbye to friends.

“Many students are leaving. There’s kids saying, ‘Oh, well, I’m going to this private school. I’m going. I’m actually moving out of this state; I’m going to Kansas,’ ” she says. “And it’s tragic.”

She wonders sometimes why her family is sticking with the public schools.

“I have cousins and a lot of friends that aren’t part of the district. I get jealous at times. I get asked a lot, ‘Well doesn’t your school do that? Our schools do that.’ And I get asked questions that just make me feel really sad. And they make me feel like I’m part of a school that doesn’t really have anything. Like, I feel really poor.”