When I started teaching high school science in Oklahoma in 2007 at the age of 55, I knew almost nothing about teaching. I’d taught Freshman Composition at a local college part time for a few semesters, but I’d never taught science, and never to pregnant or parenting teen girls. You’d think having a degree in education or having taught science courses elsewhere would be important experience. But nope. I was offered the position, even though I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
Photo by Vivek Kumar on Unsplash
A few months in, I realized I’d been mistaken in thinking I could pull it off. I began looking for support in the form of other science teachers at schools for teen moms. In the 1960s and 70s, many “pregnancy schools’ opened across the US to accommodate pregnant teens who typically dropped out of school because of their pregnancy. Most didn’t seek prenatal care. They and their children suffered a great many health issues as a result, including an increased infant mortality rate.
By the time I started teaching and looking for comparable programs, most of those schools had closed. There were a few, but the closest one was all the way across Oklahoma. I sent someone there an email, but they never answered. I suspect now they were no longer open. Internet research wasn’t as sophisticated then as it is now and I found nothing more … anywhere.
Most of our students came from the large suburban high school a few miles from our campus, but teachers and classes there couldn’t have been any more different from ours if they’d been on Mars. When I shared my uncertainty with my principal, she encouraged me to make appointments to shadow some science classes at the district high school. She had previously been an administrator there and recommended a few science teachers she knew. She approved a substitute teacher for the day, so I had no excuse not to go, despite feeling I’d make a fool of myself with the “professional teachers.”
I scheduled some time to sit in on a few classes that I was also teaching; I taught four different science courses in three hours a day, some years five, if we had an eighth grader. The teachers I met with were gracious, but the wonderful projects the environmental science and anatomy teachers were working on with their large classes and a supply budget quadruple mine were intimidating.
My classes could be as small as three or four and as large as nine or ten. It was difficult to create the same kind of synergy on an internationally recognized aquaculture project with six environmental science students, compared to a full complement of 150 or so students. Instead, I focused on designing labs and small group projects possible on a shoestring budget.
After I’d taught for several years, I became aware of another program similar to ours in Denver, the Florence Crittendon High School, which is now called Florence Crittendon Services, or FloCrit for short. They describe themselves as “the premier two-generation wraparound service provider for teen moms and their children in the Denver metro area.”
Four elements of the FloCrit program are the childhood education center, student and family support, a high school, and a health center. Academic classes are offered in partnership with Denver Public Schools. The facility is a year-round resource for families.
These services are similar to the ones we offered through the Margaret Hudson Program, although our only year-round service was our childcare center. The most impressive feature to me is the FloCrit Public Policy Committee, which advocates for teen moms in establishing community public policy.
By the time I learned about FloCrit, I was much more confident in my teaching skills than I’d been when I started. I didn’t feel I could benefit from advice offered by an unfamiliar teacher in another state. One thing I’d learned, in addition to better teaching skills was that every population is unique. The teen moms in Oklahoma were likely different from the teen moms in Colorado.
One of the greatest mistakes I made when I started teaching was to assume that all pregnant or parenting girls are alike. They aren’t. A lesson my students taught me early in was the value of observing their specific needs and responding to those needs as specifically as I could. Each girl had a story, and because of our small campus and small class sizes, we could treat each student as the individual she was.
I’m pleased to know that FloCrit is still open and still serving their unique population of students. As far as I know, they’re the only one of the original pregnancy schools left. They opened in 1984, but the organization originated a century earlier, when four-year-old Florence Crittenton died of scarlet fever.
Her father formed the Florence Crittenton Mission in NYC in his daughter’s honor in 1883 to serve single women who were pregnant or parenting with housing and workforce skills. In 1899, the mission incorporated in Denver, Colorado. In 1984, they partnered with Denver Public Schools. Their current campus opened in 2015.
When the Margaret Hudson Program closed in 2017, I was saddened by the reality that teen moms in the Tulsa area had no choice but to return to the large high school or enroll in the district’s alternative school, which had no services focused on healthy parenting or family support.
What I’ve learned since that time is that many larger school districts, including several near where I now live in Texas, have stepped up and created services for their pregnant students. Some have childcare services open to students’ children and most provide support programs for teen parent families.
None of the schools look like a Margaret Hudson Program or a FloCrit program, but staff make a point of determining what their students need and then supporting them through to graduation, whatever that takes. And really, this is the point. I’ve spent the past several months researching services for teen moms throughout the US and celebrating their efforts. It’s been a gratifying exercise.
I’m delighted to know there are so many wonderful, caring people who work diligently to meet the needs of teen moms and their children in large and small communities all across the country.
Janice Airhart 