Julie Benta is a high-school student with a part-time job and hopes of becoming an elementary-school teacher.
But, like thousands of other young women, she is facing adult life with a significant strike against her: At 17, she is unmarried and the mother of a nine-month-old son.
Most teen-age mothers, unable to find affordable child care and catch up on the studies they missed during pregnancy, drop out of school. Many wind up on welfare, and for most of them, studies show, long-term job prospects are bleak.
Ms. Benta is luckier.
She is a student at the New Futures School here, an unusual public school for pregnant teen-agers and teen-age mothers.
At her school, Ms. Benta can at-tend classes while her son, Brett, plays in the child-care center on campus. During her pregnancy, Ms. Benta missed few classes for medical appointments, because doctors from the nearby University of New Mexico School of Medicine come to the building once a week to provide free prenatal checkups.
Every morning, the school provides a hot breakfast for Ms. Benta and her child; the teen-ager learned how to take care of her newborn in special classes on child development.
Through a job-skills class, she landed an evening job at a local health club. And New Futures offers her counseling help, the services of a federally funded Women, Infants, and Children program clinic, and the aid of four full-time nurses.
Next year, Ms. Benta expects to graduate.
“I know that if I tried to keep going to my regular school,” she said, “I would have just dropped out.”
‘Already Given Up’
Since the New Futures School began operating out of the basement of the local Young Women’s Christian Association in 1970, school officials have compiled an impressive list of success stories like Ms. Benta’s.
While fewer than half of all school-age mothers nationwide finish their schooling, the officials note, the majority of New Futures students earn at least a high-school diploma. A 1987 five-year follow-up survey of all New Futures students found that 77 percent either had graduated or were still attending school.
“You have to remember,” said Carolyn Gaston, who has been principal of the school since it opened, “that this group of students has already given up and the regular school system has given up on them.” She said nearly half of her pupils had dropped out before coming to New Futures.
Fewer, Healthier Babies
Recent studies have also shown that New Futures students have fewer repeat pregnancies and give birth to healthier babies than many of their counterparts across the nation.
One year after giving birth, the studies found, the Albuquerque school’s students had repeat-pregnancy rates ranging from 6 percent to 11 percent. In comparison, between 18 percent and 25 percent of teen-age mothers nationally become pregnant again within one year.
And only 6 percent of the school’s mothers bore low-birth-weight infants during the 1986-87 school year. Nationally reported rates of such births have ranged from 9.4 percent for 15- to 19-year-olds to 14.5 percent for 14-year-olds.
‘The results have been so tremendous,” said Esther Marquez, the assistant superintendent in charge of instructional support services for the Albuquerque Public Schools, that the New Futures program “is something that is supported from the board of education all the way down.”
‘Directly Address’ Problems
The school’s well-documented track record has drawn considerable national attention in recent years. Recognized as a model program for teen-age mothers, the school has been featured on national and international television, in newspapers, and in professional conferences.
Despite all the attention, New Futures is not alone. And the handful of other schools with similar programs—in states as diverse as Delaware, Oklahoma, and California—report similar successes.
Though some program characteristics may vary, such schools have a basic approach in common: They attempt to “break the poverty cycle” often brought on by teen-age pregnancy by pulling together a wide range of needed non-educational services and providing a small, supportive classroom environment.
“The important thing about schools like New Futures,” said Karen Pittman, director of adolescent-pregnancy-prevention policy for the Children’s Defense Fund, “is that they really do directly address the major factors that have to be dealt with for these young women.”
Changing Attitudes
Though it is difficult to gauge whether such schools are growing in popularity, their existence represents a changing attitude toward student parents in some school districts, ac-cording to Elizabeth McGee, director of the Academy for Educational Development’s support center for educational equity for young mothers.
“My sense,” she said, “is that there bas been a growing tendency for districts to be recognizing that young parents have a right to be in school and that obstacles remain to their remaining in school and doing well.”
But the number of districts that have adopted such attitudes is still relatively small, Ms. McGee and others said. Among those that do make an effort to address the special needs of pregnant students and young parents, they said, the programs often serve a small fraction of the students who need their services.
“It’s often seen as enough that a district has one good program,” said Ms. McGee. ‘They don’t see it as a districtwide responsibility.”
At New Futures, the average enrollment has increased from approximately 30 to 40 students in the early 1970’s to as many as 275 students from throughout the school district this semester. Some students—carrying their children, a supply of diapers, baby bottles, and textbooks—must travel for up to two hours by public transportation to come to class each day.
The school’s three child-care centers and nurseries, already filled slightly beyond capacity, must turn away some children.
In an effort to address the growing need for services, the Albuquerque school board voted a year ago to spend $1.7 million to build a larger facility for the program, which had long been housed in “leftover” school buildings across the city. When the new school opens in August, school officials said, it will be the first public high school built specifically to meet the needs of pregnant and parenting students.
‘Dumping Grounds’
The idea of establishing separate programs for such students has not always enjoyed the support of experts on teen-age pregnancy. They say the forerunners of schools like New Futures were often considered “dumping grounds” for students whom school officials preferred not to see in regular classes.
“Many districts automatically transferred girls to these schools as soon as they became pregnant,” Ms. McGee said.
Sometimes staffed by noncertified teachers, the academic programs offered at many of the special schools were considered inferior to those at the regular schools, and support services were rarely available.
In contrast, emphasized Ms. Pittman of the E.D.F., New Futures and schools like it with proven track records are part of a “new batch” of schools that provide the extra services their students need while maintaining a strong academic curriculum.
A ‘Hard Juggling Game’
But striking that balance is not easy, experts and school officials say.
“I think we really don’t do justice to the really sharp students who were at the top 5 or 10 percent of their class,” said Mary Schwartz, who has taught mathematics and computer applications at New Futures since 1978. “It’s adequate, but it’s not quite the same as an honors class in their own high school.”
For those young mothers in particular—and for all the school’s students—New Futures officials try to encourage an early return to a regular public school. But many students come back to New Futures within weeks of their return to neighborhood schools, students and school officials say.
Sheila Delaney, who has been a student at New Futures for three years, says one reason they come back to the special school is that they find they no longer fit in with their former classmates.
“A lot of times, with other kids your age after you’ve had a child,” she explained, “they’re talking about what they’re going to do on Saturday night, who’s going to go out with who, what they’re going to wear. You can’t do any of those things.”
“They’re ‘I, I, I,’ ” she added, “and we’re sort of ‘we, we, we.’ ”
Other students said they felt “safer” at New Futures.
“There’s not fighting like in a normal school,” said Ms. Benta.
In addition, noted Julie Sisneros, one of five counselors at the school, students often cannot find afford-able child care elsewhere. And some are suspended from their regular schools after missing too many classes to stay home with a sick child.
“The regular school environment doesn’t allow the kind of flexibility we have here,” she said. “The girls find it’s just a really hard juggling game.”
Sharing the Cost
Providing “flexibility” and special services is an expensive proposition.
At New Futures, according to Ms. Gaston, 75 percent of the nearly $1-million annual budget is provided by the district. Sources of support for the remaining costs include grants from private foundations and three state agencies: the department of human services, the department of health and environment, and the education department’s vocational unit.
The program also qualifies for federal aid, because most of its students come from low-income families. Nearly 90 percent of New Futures pupils meet federal requirements for free school lunches, a traditional indicator of student poverty levels.
In addition, the school makes use of donated services—such as the labor of “foster grandparents” in its nursery-from various public and private agencies.
“I think this can work anywhere if a community is willing to pool its resources,” Ms. Gaston said.
No Controversy on Shift
In 1970, when the school first opened, it was primarily staffed by volunteers and entirely funded by the Y.W.E.A.
The association’s officials, Ms. Gaston said, were motivated by concern for the health of the mothers and their infants and by worries about the teen-agers’ futures. At the time, she noted, the Albuquerque district routinely expelled pregnant students.
District officials agreed to grant credit for the classes offered through the fledgling project. The program had already established a significant record of success by 1976, when the Y.W.E.A. sought to shift responsibility for the project to the school district.
“By the time it came time for us to put it in our operational budget, there was no controversy,” said Ms. Marquez, the assistant superintendent. “People have accepted the fact that teen pregnancy is something we’re going to have to deal with.”
The problem is one that is particularly acute in New Mexico. A recent survey found that the state ranked 11th in the nation in the percentage of births to mothers under age 20. An estimated 15.7 percent of all infants born in the state in 1984 had mothers who were in their teens or younger. And New Mexico ranks first among 16 Western states in percentage of mothers who receive little or no prenatal care.
Ms. Marquez said any controversy over the program now is limited to an occasional telephone call from a taxpayer contending that the existence of New Futures encourages students to become sexually active.
Ms. Gaston, the principal, scoffs at such complaints.
“It’s not like a boy and a girl in a romantic embrace are thinking, ‘Well, if l do this, I can go to the New Futures School,’ ” she said.
The widespread support for the program was underscored last year, when the school board voted unanimously to construct a new building to house it.
“We’re dealing with human lives,” said Gina Sisneros, who teaches parenting skills and directs the child-care center at the school, “so I don’t see how anyone could not see the benefit of this.”
