Sex education for teens seen regressing in Yuba-Sutter

When Janet Theiss attended Live Oak High School in the late 1960s, her sex education classes were remarkably detailed, she said, right down to pictures of venereal disease.

Around the same time, legislation was passed to ensure minors had access to sexual health care and contraception without informing their parents. She, like many people, thought it would be the end to teen pregnancies.

More than 40 years later, Theiss was dismayed Saturday as she listened to local officials emphasize that quite the opposite is the case.

Though pregnancy rates in Yuba-Sutter have declined in recent years, they are still higher than the state average, and 250 to 300 girls between the age of 15 and 19 become mothers each year.

"It's shocking to think we've gone backward in sex education," she said. "Teens needed to be informed."

Theiss attended a forum hosted by the local chapter of the American Association of University Women to discuss the local effects of teen pregnancy and parenting. About 25 women gathered at Fremont Rideout Conference Center to listen to authorities in education, health and child care speak about community and individual impacts.

"As a community, do we care? Or is it 'Too bad for that family'?" asked Carrie Ozeran, a health educator with Planned Parenthood. "I've had people say that to me, 'They have to pay the consequences.'"

But most often it is the community that also pays for teenage pregnancies by means of social support, she said. Nationally, teenage pregnancies cost $9 billion a year. That's $2 million a year for Yuba-Sutter.

The impacts

Becoming teenage mothers, most often unplanned, impacts health, education, families and finances, Ozeran said.

Because most teen mothers are not fully physically developed, they can suffer stunted growth, high blood pressure and other complications from giving birth, and their babies often have low birth rates, are born prematurely and have higher rates of birth defects, said Dr. Lou Anne Cummings, Sutter County health officer.

Many teen mothers sacrifice or compromise their education, with less than 40 percent completing high school and less than 2 percent finishing college. Incarceration, divorce and physical abuse rates are higher in families with teenage parents.

And financially, families that start with teenage pregnancies often remain low-income for generations.

Pregnant and parenting teens need all the help they can get, said Chuck Whitecotton, a Yuba City high school principal. They want to do well and are giving their best attempts at overcoming barriers but they need role models and assistance to bypass them.

"It really takes a team to overcome challenges," he said. "They need feedback from others in their lives."

Yuba-Sutter once had a variety of programs to prevent and help teen pregnancy and parenting, but many have disappeared for mostly budgetary reasons, said Jorgine Rogers, of the Child Care Planning Council of Yuba and Sutter Counties. Other programs, like CalSAFE, the counties opted out of more than a decade ago.

There are still a few organizations, like Planned Parenthood's Teen Success Program, but the rest of the support comes through Women, Infants and Children and county health departments, and is largely reactive instead of targeting the issue.

"We are paying for these services when prevention is what we really want to see," she said.

Sex in schools

Rogers' biggest hope now is for a new round of sex education funding that has become available to Yuba County through California Personal Responsibility Education Program. If awarded, the county would receive $50,000 a year for the next five years, and Planned Parenthood — the only local agency eligible to apply — would implement the program.

Ozeran said most sex education in area school starts with the basics of puberty in fifth or sixth grade. In seventh grade, students are supposed to learn the biology of reproduction and anatomy.

The question is how many students are actually learning about pregnancy and contraception, Ozeran said. Some school districts, such as Live Oak, teach a detailed sex education program, but in her experience as a parent, Yuba City Unified does not.

Sharman Kobayashi, a Yuba City school trustee, was surprised by what she heard. She said she plans to look into what kind of sex education students are actually receiving. In her 16 years as a school board member, she could not remember either teen pregnancy or sex education as an issue brought before the board.

Liane Carlsen marveled at the lack of education for teens, although the effects were obvious in her years as a social worker.

"It's too bad we can't create a sex education program that isn't as much about moral issues as supporting teens with education and the information they need to make choices," she said.

Ozeran agreed. The science is the same regardless of religion or personal beliefs, and it is the family's responsibility to teach teens their moral views.

Ozeran said it sometimes surprises her that people who do not work in a field that would interact with pregnant teens are not aware of the problem. But it exists, she said, and something needs to be done to address it.

"They are my girls, your girls, our neighbors, our grandchildren," she said.

CONTACT Ashley Gebb at agebb@appealdemocrat.com or 749-4783. Find her on Facebook at /ADagebb or on Twitter at @ADagebb.