Inwood House Recommendations made in summation at the hearing:

• Poor school performance and school disengagement are precursors to teen pregnancy. The DOE must have an active placement & retention policy with empathetic trained staff at each school for retaining and returning pregnant & parenting teens to school for graduation. This includes staff to conduct outreach to pregnant and parenting teens and provide referral services for tutoring and/or home-based studies, health, family issues, housing, day care, etc. Better communication to students, parents and CBO’s on new alternative programs is required – right now, Central Education Counseling is unaware of the several new programs for re-entering school and cannot provide a list of the LYFE centers.
• A separate hearing is recommended on the current requirement for LYFE services enrollment that the baby's father be sued for child support. This may be impacting the low utilization rate of LYFE centers.
• The DOE must have a policy in place which inhibits principals from “pushing out” pregnant and parenting students from regular community-based schools – the regulation which protects these students’ right to attend the school of their choice has been flouted for decades.
• The DOE should consider a new full-service model of a specialized school for pregnant and parenting teens, which combines rigorous, college-track academic standards and on-site comprehensive health and social services, such as the Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit.

Testimony delivered before the New York City Council Education Committee

Inwood House Director of Residential Care, Gwendolyn Carroll's testimony to the New York City Council Education Committee. We thank Phyllis Eckhaus for her generosity in drafting this testimony.

Good morning. My name is Gwendolyn Carroll and I am the Director of Residential Care at Inwood House. Established in 1830, Inwood House provides a multitude of services to help teens become healthy, self-reliant adults, from pregnancy & AIDS prevention to teen family support. But we are best known for our Maternity Residence, the agency’s original program and our Continuum of Care for pregnant and parenting teens. Every year, we are the temporary home to more than a hundred pregnant adolescents, sent to us by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services or abandoned by their parents and homeless. I am here today to talk to you about our ongoing battle to help these girls get an education, a battle made infinitely more difficult by the restructuring of the alternative high schools.

We felt shock throughout Inwood House when we opened The New York Times on May 24th to discover that the Department of Education was closing the schools for pregnant girls without discussing the needs of these young women with us or other similar service providers or establishing an alternative service plan that would ensure they had a place in the New York City school system. Yes, the academic programs in these schools were lacking. But since the schools also provided supportive services that both prepared them for parenthood and encouraged their continued education, we maintain that keeping them in place with greatly improved academic rigor would better serve these students.

It was an extraordinary slap in the face to all of us who work with pregnant girls to learn about the closure through the newspaper instead of through the Department of Education. Can you imagine the DOE using The New York Times abruptly to announce the shutdown of Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech? There would probably be a riot. It seems as if the DOE is pushing these girls out rather than dealing with the challenges they present.

Certainly, that has been our experience within regular New York City high schools. Routinely, our young women are approached by teachers and administrators who, pretending concern, urge them to transfer out, in violation of Chancellor's Regulation A-740 and federal law. Daily, they are made to feel not merely unwelcome but freakish -- barred from extra-curricular activities, forced to sit conspicuously on the sidelines in gym class, even refused assistance from the school nurse.

Last year, one of our girls was actually suspended for getting a drink of cold water. She had left class with the permission of her teacher and been given cold bottled water by staff, but the dean -- seeing her with bottled water -- presumed she had cut class and had left school grounds. She was a good student in regular attendance at school, and the suspension caused her to lose weeks of instruction.

This incident is an extreme illustration of problems we see all the time: Regular New York City high schools, boasting "zero tolerance" discipline policies, do not accommodate pregnant students. Furthermore, the schools are so eager to rid themselves of our girls that they look for and sometimes invent infractions to create a pretext for discharge.

By contrast, the pregnancy schools, despite their faults, accommodated the special needs of our girls. Our P-school based program, THRIVE, offered numerous classes to prepare them for the responsibilities of parenthood, including parenting skills, job readiness skills, pre-natal care yoga, how to secure appropriate housing and day care. Furthermore, the staff had the sensitivity to see that the girls’ pregnancy could provide a window of educational opportunity. Poor academic performance is a well-known precursor to teenage pregnancy. Many girls desperately lacked credits and reading skills, and the p-schools were sometimes the first to pay individual attention to their academic needs, offering special tutoring. It is our experience that many girls who have not done well in school previously are now open to learning due to their deep desire to be good mothers.

The DOE did not merely close the p-schools. For reasons beyond our understanding, it also removed Inwood House's on-site teacher, whose services are supported through the Alternative Schools program. For years, our teacher has ensured that girls who could not commute to school for medical reasons, or while school records were being located -- could keep up with their schoolwork. A caring and steady presence, the teacher made it possible for us to make educational progress even with girls who had been AWOL from the schools, or whose behavioral problems or need for bed rest prevented their school enrollment. She also tracked former students to facilitate their re-enrollment in school after maternity leave. The two other maternity residences for foster care teens -- both smaller than Inwood House have each retained their on-site DOE teacher as they are apparently funded by another Dept. of Education division. Surely, this is an unfair application of services.

We currently have 24 girls in residence. In preparation for this hearing, we reviewed their cases, and at least half have been severely disadvantaged by the restructuring. We estimate that 7 would be attending pregnancy schools and at least another 5 would be served by Ms. Cunningham, the on-site Inwood House teacher who also helped girls without credits work toward their GED.

Federal law and school regulations make clear the right of pregnant girls and student parents to participate fully in school, yet that right is rarely respected. Few school administrators know -- let alone implement -- the provisions of Chancellor's Regulation A-740, which requires that every school have designated staff who will identify pregnant and parenting teens, report them centrally, and refer them to appropriate academic, medical and social service services as needed. With the restructuring of the system, the little centralized oversight and accountability that previously existed appears to have disappeared.

For example, although Chancellor's Regulation A-740 has been in place for years, last spring was the very first time we succeeded in securing home instruction for girls who needed it, patiently working with designated central DOE staff. As best as we can tell, there are no longer central DOE staff whom we can call upon for help, either to assist us with individual girls or to redress systemic problems.

And, the systemic problems keep multiplying. We have literally no school options for pregnant girls with IEPs, the Individualized Education Plans for young people with special education needs. They used to be served by the Martha Nielson pregnancy school, but now there's no school and no one we can find at the DOE to help. We used to enroll our girls in LYFE on-site school child care programs so they could easily continue their schooling once the baby was born, now there's not even a centralized list identifying which schools have LYFE programs (The new enrollment requirements for LYFE, demanding that the baby's father be sued for child support, deserve their own city council hearing).

New York City's pregnant girls need educational alternatives. They need pregnancy schools done right.

There are models New York can follow. For example, the award-winning Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit educates girls from pregnancy through graduation, operating on a quarterly system over nine months, so that students with high absences don't risk losing half a year's credit. Fridays are set aside for appointments and make-ups. There is on-site childcare for newborns, babies and toddlers, as well as a host of medical and social services. And -- most exciting -- there are high academic expectations along with challenging and relevant classes. The school offers community college classes, career internships, and even a farm where girls learn "urban agriculture."

New York City's pregnant and parenting young women deserve similar support -- schools that accommodate their medical and social needs, while providing intellectual challenge and career possibilities. We at Inwood House stand ready to assist the City Council and the Department of Education to develop pregnancy schools that will truly address the need, schools that give pregnant girls reason for hope and that help them forge a self-reliant future.

Thank you.

Testimony on Health Education delivered before the New York City Council Education Committee

On November 27th, Patricia Maloney, Director of Inwood House's Teen Choice Program, delivered the following testimony on the matter of providing sexuality education in New York City's public schools.

My name is Pat Maloney, and I am the Director of Inwood House’s Teen Choice Program. Established in 1830, Inwood House provides a continuum of services to help teens become healthy, self-reliant adults, from pregnancy and STI prevention, to family support for pregnant and parenting teens.

In 1978 the Board of Education asked Inwood House to help stem the tide of escalating teen pregnancy rates at a time when city resources were dwindling. We created Teen Choice, a unique small group counseling program model for comprehensive sexuality education, which is the centerpiece of our community outreach efforts and partnership with public schools. Over the years we have served thousands of students, and continue to do so today in 9 middle and high schools throughout three boroughs.

We commend the Department of Education for creating an Office of Fitness and Health Education and recommending the use of two research-based curricula: Reducing the Risk in grades 9 through 12 and Health Smart in middle schools. This is a positive step forward, after unfortunately having taken many steps back. Throughout the advent of AIDS, a sharp spike in teen pregnancy rates which did not plateau until the early 90’s, and the increase of abstinence-only programs, we lost considerable ground in protecting kids’ health. Ironically, when Teen Choice began, there was far greater acceptance and awareness of the need to provide comprehensive sexual health education in our schools. The age-appropriate, K - 12 Family Living Including Sex Education Curriculum was mandated and implemented citywide with the support of dedicated staff, resources, and ongoing training from the Board’s Health and Physical Education Unit. FL/SE is no longer used, and was never replaced, despite the ongoing need.

We know that our teen pregnancy rates are still unacceptable - 30% higher here than the national average - and that kids are still getting sexually transmitted infections, sometimes more than one at a time. The lack of sex education makes our students vulnerable to these diseases, unintended pregnancy, physical coercion, and unhealthy behaviors. Yet today we have fewer than 200 licensed health teachers in some 1,200 middle and high schools, and a set of rigorous academic standards that inexplicably exclude health. We must do better because a good school IS good protection, leading to better academic performance and less risky behavior.

We know much more today about what works. Reducing the Risk and Health Smart are tested and effective curricula, if delivered faithfully and consistently.

At this time we strongly urge D.O.E. to:

• Adequately and regularly train and sensitize teachers to deliver these lessons within a holistic framework so that sexual health education is not stigmatized. Given the severe (indeed, shameful) shortage of health teachers, instructors who impart this information to students must want to do so, be non-judgmental, and fully trained;
• Integrate and implement these curricula system-wide, not just as a patch-work pilot project in a handful of isolated schools;
• Ensure that Health Smart is presented in totality to middle school teens, including the Abstinence, HIV/STD Prevention, AND Reproductive Health and Pregnancy Prevention components;
• Evaluate the use of these recommended curricula to make sure they effectively meet the needs of our youth. While Reducing the Risk worked in Arkansas and California among predominantly White student populations, that may not be so here in N.Y.C. ;
• Advocate that there be a CITY K-12 health license mirroring the State’s, and ensure that teachers must be certified to teach health in the future; and
• While piloting these health curricula, DOE should make funds immediately available for community-based programs to operate in schools that may not be able to dedicate appropriate staff to get trained or start teaching these topics now. There are existing program models such as Teen Choice that work, and have been evaluated. Key characteristics include creating a safe, supportive environment for students to practice responsible decision-making and role-plays; ensuring that they have access to teen-friendly health and mental health services; and increasing and improving family communication through parent outreach, education and support.

In the absence of a required system-wide sex education curriculum, DOE continues to put young people’s health in jeopardy by not providing them the information and guidance that they desperately need. Our staff are regularly asked questions such as: Can I get pregnant if I just have oral sex? What birth control should I use? Contraceptive information changes rapidly but students rarely learn about current methods. Condoms are mentioned in the HIV/AIDS lessons, but there is no longer classroom demonstration of how to use; and not all schools have the required condom availability rooms.

We are a richly diverse city, and there is not just one approach or curricula that works when addressing complex health and social issues. Youth health outcomes improve through skills building, consistent messages, accurate information, and adults who show they care. Accordingly, Inwood House urges that continued steps be taken so that all of our students receive the highest quality, comprehensive health education possible. There are many competent C.B.O.’s willing to partner with and assist D.O.E., and we would welcome the opportunity to share our resources, expertise, curricula and professional training in this laudable effort.

Thank you.