A Richmond, Virginia High School is taking a very controversial step in order to lower the dropout rate.
Last month, Armstrong High School opened up a child day care lab as a to better serve the needs of students who have children.
The day care facility will be inside of the school and will provide parenting skills classes for teenagers who have children, and also act as a hands-on lab for students who are interested in becoming licensed child care workers.
Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Yvonne Brandon said ”With this lab established, more students and parents will be impacted. What you see here is a fresh start for a lot of our students.”
Some folks feel like this onsite daycare will encourage more teens to become sexually active and have children. Others think that it’s just a sign of the times, and daycares inside of the schools help to make it easier for young mothers and fathers to finish school without the burden of finding reliable childcare.
This isn’t the first time that a school has opened a daycare for their students. In 2007 USA Today profiled a high school in New York that provided day care services for teen parents who wanted to continue their education after having children. At that time, West Side High School was one of 40 schools in New York that had a daycare.
I’m sure most people have an opinion on this issue, but I am not quite sure where I stand. I can see both sides of the argument. On one hand, I think that teen parents have it very hard and we should do everything that we can do to keep these children in school. We have got to do a better job of encouraging our teens and lifting them up even when they don’t make the most responsible decisions. But on the other hand, if we would spend more time talking to our kids and helping them make better choices before they get into these situations we wouldn’t need to have daycares in our school systems. If we used our resources to provide these kids with more extracurricular activities, they would’t have as much time on their hands to make the babies.
I just don’t know if I would want my child to attend a school where instead of talking to her friends about music, movies, and TV at lunch time the topics of discussion are breast feeding, diaper changing, and c-sections. Maybe I’m just the over protective dad who wants to shield his little princess from most of the things in this cold world, but something about it just does not seem right to me. I’m not knocking anyone who approves of this, but if my child was attending this school, I would have to get more knowledge on how the school’s administration plans on handling the center and what affect it will have on the student body.
The fact of the matter is that we need to spend more time and effort helping our children before they get to this point instead of trying to put a bandage over a wound that has already been bleeding for years and is only getting worse. I don’t think that this center will necessarily encourage teens to have more children, but I do think that some young people may look at it as one less thing that they have to worry about if they do have children while in school.
What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know…
Should high schools provide daycare services for their students?
Originally appeared at The Single Fathers Blog
Photo courtesy of Flickr/stahrdust3
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“Some folks feel like this onsite daycare will encourage more teens to become sexually active and have children.”
Why wouldn’t they assume the opposite to be true? If people see how hard raising children can be, wouldn’t it act as a deterrent?
Because the standard reaction to acknowledging reality is to hysterically claim that it will ‘encourage teens to have sex,’ as though the only thing holding them back was the lack of encouragement.
When I was in high school (class of ’91) there was a program for students who were pregnant or already mothers. They could bring their babies to school with them. I am pretty sure the existence of that class, which had all the cache of the sp.ed. classes, had no part in each of the parents’ decision-making process to have sex, but that it did have a positive role in keeping them in school til graduation. There was such a stigma in that time and place that I had classmates who were basically forced to marry, ones kicked out of their homes for having sex, and one successful student who had two children. We say that having babies in your teens is reckless and assume it’s part of an overall lifestyle that we should be changing, but I don’t know that’s true at all. Every one of the mothers I knew in high school was different. The party girl got married and divorced before I was through community college. Another girl had abortion and was later raped and murdered. One good friend has had several more children and relationships. She’s always worked in the lowest rung: gas station clerk and the like. But I don’t think her life would have been dramatically different if she’d not gotten pregnant in her teens. It makes things harder, of course, but each of these people reacted to the situation with their own personality and personal resources. Painting them all with a broad brush stroke, you lose sight of what their whole lives look like, instead of boiling it all down to one decision to have sex and another to keep an unplanned pregnancy.
While there is a risk that having such a facility available in a school could “normalize” teen pregnancy and lead kids to high-risk behavior, I personally think the benefit outweighs that risk. I think some people are a little bit too paranoid about anything and everything that might prompt or encourage a sexual thought in a teen.
What I would want to know is, are students who aren’t parents also able to take the parenting classes if they want to? Those seem like good Life Skills to have, even if they don’t need them immediately (or may never need them, if they decide to not have kids).
Teen pregnancy was uncommon at my high school – with class sizes around 300-400, maybe one or two girls per grade level would get pregnant and have the baby. But we did have a Life Skills class that taught, among other things, some basic childcare, including the use of one of those baby-simulator dolls that has to be changed/fed/etc.
While I loved academics and intellectual pursuits, in hindsight I sort of wish there’d been more emphasis in the general school curriculum on Life Skills (filing taxes, applying for a mortgage or rent, budgeting, professional networking, to name a few). At my school the Life Skills classes were buried as electives, and few students elected to take them – I think the class I was in was 7 or 8 girls? But I think a good number of students graduate high school unprepared for some of the more boring, mundane but necessary skills of being an adult. Sure, to some extent the parents are responsible for teaching these skills, but a Life Skills curriculum couldn’t hurt.
We have a law that says you are not mentally, physically mature enough to hold your liquor till you are 21. The list of things people can legally do before 21 is baffling. If either parent is under 21 the baby should becomes a ward of the state. This would be seen as cruel. It would increase abortions. It would also decrease drop out rates, divorce rates, and poverty in general.
It’s a compassionate policy and probably an effective practical solution. At the very least, it’s the least bad option among the imperfect options available.
I don’t think it will encourage more students to be irresponsible or have more sex. Or, if it does, the number helped by the day care policy will be much higher than the number encouraged to be irresponsible.
My beef with it is that it kind of privileges one sort of irresponsibility or mistake over every other kind. The school helps with a student’s individual responsibilities when it comes to childcare, but what about all the other kids who aren’t parents but who still have responsibilities? The school is not about to mow the lawn, do my household chores, or put gas in my car. If I get into trouble with the law, the school isn’t going to send someone to serve my jail time for me. Maybe a better analogy: if I’m a high school student who has to help take care of my sick mother, the school isn’t going to set up a caregiver for her.
I do see some great educational value here, though. Take the sex ed class on a field trip down the hall to the daycare center. Don’t just show kids how to put a condom on a banana, but show them what it’s like to change a dirty diaper. Quite sobering, I imagine.
I see what you’re saying re: other responsibilities, but in the case of childcare, there’s a human life at stake – not so much with mowing the lawn. And those other responsibilities don’t tend to boost the drop-out rates the way pregnancy/parenthood does. Even with the example of a student who has to take care of a sick parent, that obviously is not something so common that teens are dropping out because of it, meriting a schoolwide approach to fixing it. That would be more of a case-by-case thing.
What’s sad to me is that a school district would have so many kids getting pregnant that they have to act this way to prevent those kids dropping out. I’d be curious to know if this is also an abstinence-only school district or what kind of sex ed they provide pre-highschool.
You make a good point, and I apologize for redirecting the topic a bit, but the correlation between abstinence-only and teen pregnancy can only change minds if those minds are either open to change or not actually happy about that correlation. It’s easy to forget how many American minds are still stuck in the mindset of WANTING teen parents and VD’s around as a way of shaming anyone having sex outside marriage for the sake of childbearing. Filling pews is more important to them than filling out college applications. Ignorant parents also make for desperate labor (excuse the poor taste pun) thus the connection between our religious and economic policy makers.
Having a daycare system in school will make it more possible for young parents to stay in school, but it’s really no guarantee. It will probably make a difference of a few kids a year. Bear in mind that students drop out of high school for a hundred different reasons, and having a kid is only a minority of the cases. You could provide daycare for the student’s child and the student still drops out of school. The basic fact is that past the age of 16 (in most places), kids are not required to be in school and there’s no way to make them stay in school. You can cajole and lecture and guilt-trip and encourage them, but ultimately if they want to leave they will.
Student retention is a massive headache all over the education system. And, it always has been – we just keep rediscovering it and acting like it’s a new epidemic, when it’s always been there. At some level, students will make their own choices for good or bad. A 16-year-old may not be a full-fledged adult, but he/she isn’t really a child anymore either. If we have to let them make a sex/reproductive mistake, then don’t he have to let them make educational mistakes as well?
Requiring parenting classes is essential for teens to become more mature parents. And yes, they must have the support to finish and succeed in school. In decades past, pregnant teens just “dropped out,” I doubt these numbers statistically have changed. Supportive environments and education are vital to reducing the child abuse epidemic in this country, much of it caused by horrible uneducated parenting, people in their 20′s and younger. Frankly, states should require parenting classes for anyone under 25.
At this point, the young parent crisis has reached the point of damage control. For now, assisting high school age parents with child care will be the right thing to do, and hopefully as teen pregnancy rates decline, it will no longer be a necessity.
I think it’s great, as long as they are teaching comprehensive sex education in the schools to prevent secondary pregnancies among teens who are already parents, and primary pregnancyies among teens without children.