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Diapers and diplomas
By LORRI HELFAND, Times Staff Writer Ivanna Rubio doesn't need an alarm clock. The smacking of her baby's lips is enough to awaken her at 2:30 in the morning. She climbs out of bed and walks a couple of feet to her 6-week-old son's crib. She peeks at him over the Winnie the Pooh bumper pad. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut. Ahh, she can crawl back under her comforter for a few more minutes. Then she hears Sebastian's trademark wail. She pulls him from his crib, slides to the back of her bed, showers him with soft kisses and begins to nurse him. When he's full, she'll change his diaper, grab a few more winks and pop out of bed at 4:30 to get ready for school. That's a typical morning for 16-year-old Ivanna, who juggles the responsibilities of school and motherhood with the help of the Pinellas County Schools Teen Parent Program. She's one of about 350 students in the program, which provides education and support services to teen parents. A key goal of the program is to keep the teens in school. Research shows that teen mothers are far more likely to drop out than other students. Thirty percent of teen mothers complete high school by the age of 30, compared with 76 percent of their peers, according to a 2000 report for the National Association of State Boards of Education. But 85 percent of students in the Teen Parent Program graduate, said Susan Todd, a specialist for the program. "Without the program, I wouldn't go to school. I would be stressed out. Then I would look at him as an obstacle, and a baby shouldn't make you feel like that," said Ivanna, who attends Pinellas Technical Education Center in Clearwater. The comprehensive program began in 1990 in response to a state mandate that districts offer child care, health care, social services, parenting courses and transportation. The program is funded by the school district through state allocations. Children of the teen parents in the program are registered in school and counted as students. Currently the program serves about 250 children. Ivanna found out she was pregnant last summer after the baby's father broke up with her and joined the Army. "I wanted to go back to school, and I just didn't know how," she said. "I knew there has to be a way for you to keep on studying, but I just didn't know what was out there." She stopped by the Women Infants and Children nutritional program to fill out paperwork. And there she met a young woman who told her about the Teen Parent Program. The main draw for her was free, licensed child care, which is provided for all teens parents who need it. Six program locations have on-site day care, including PTEC in both Clearwater and St. Petersburg, and Project HELP, an alternative high school program for pregnant teens. Eight high schools have on-site social workers or teachers who provide daily support and link teen parents with off-site day care and other services. No matter what school teen parents attend, they can be referred to services through Teen Parent Program social workers who visit all high schools. Those services include Healthy Families, which uses voluntary home visits to help new mothers become better parents, and Healthy Start, which provides health care for pregnant women. Most sites offer teen parenting skills classes. Those classes are required at Ivanna's program at PTEC. She devours advice on raising Sebastian and said the program provides a "ton" of information from the basics of feeding him and changing his diaper to how to take care of him when he's sick. "They don't just help by teaching you how to care. They give you support," Ivanna said. "It means a lot that they're there for you to help you. You feel secure about having a baby." The program provides teen parents with free transportation to school, day care and medical facilities. For Ivanna, that means each morning at 6 a.m., she and Sebastian, in his car seat, ride the bus to PTEC from her house in Palm Harbor. And each afternoon, they ride the bus home. In addition to services that keep teen parents in school, the program provides options for their futures. On April 12 the program held its second full-scale senior seminar, which offered information on college and vocational courses, financial aid, money management and housing resources. According to an informal survey of teens graduating from the program, 85 to 90 percent of them plan to pursue some form of postsecondary education, Todd said. Ivanna is a good student now. But she wasn't always. Seven years ago, after her father died, Ivanna came to America from Bogota, Colombia. She struggled to get acclimated to her new country. By high school, she was hanging with the "wrong crowd and skipping school practically every day," causing her to fail her freshman year. "I needed control of my life," she said. The reality of her pregnancy, she said, helped her take responsibility for her own life as well as Sebastian's. "If I'm going to take care of a person then I have to prepare myself not just mentally but physically and economically," she said. When she broke the news of her pregnancy to her parents, her stepfather was understanding, but her mother was angry, Ivanna said. Now, the shock has worn off, and both are supportive, she said. As for Ivanna, she is a sophomore who makes A's and B's and is caught up in school. She is a mixture of womanly maturity and childhood innocence, and she's hard-pressed to find anything negative about being a young mom. Like many new mothers, her general routine involves a series of feedings and changings and random naps. In a cushy terry-cloth book, she keeps mementos for Sebastian, including his first nail trimmings, the remnants of his umbilical cord and a record of her pregnancy weights, which ranged from 94 to 1111/2 pounds. "In my culture, we save everything," Ivanna said of her family custom. After high school, she plans to get a job and go to college to study business and psychology. And she doesn't plan to have another child for a few years down the road. "I want to be married and have my own house. My mom is not going to have another grandson living with her, so I have to be married by then," she said.
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From the Times South Pinellas desks |
