San Antonio Independent School District recorded a significant drop in pregnancies among its students this past school year – to 348 from 535 in 2010-11. A decrease of almost 35 percent is worth celebrating in a city where the teen birth rate is still 47 percent higher than the national average, and 85 percent of high-school students who reported having sex in 2010 didn’t use birth control. More than 50 percent didn’t bother with a condom, either. Meanwhile, the number of reported cases of syphilis, HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases increases annually. Perhaps most discouragingly of all, in 2011 more than 21 percent of teen births were a second baby, although that percentage has also dropped in recent years.
But you have to start somewhere, and on that first, happier note, two middle schools contributed to the district’s notable improvement in teen births: one dropped from seven to four pregnancies, and another went from five to zero. The district gives at lease some credit to the decline at those two schools to a sex-ed program titled Draw the Line/Respect the Line, which has operated as a pilot program on a handful of SAISD campuses since spring 2010. The program encourages students to wait before engaging in sexual behavior, but it also provides information on using contraception and condoms to prevent pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. It expanded to six middle schools in fall 2011.
Two weeks ago, City Council gave Metro Health the green light to apply for a three-year grant worth up to $2.7 million through the federal Personal Responsibility and Education Program that would fund the expansion of the program to all 14 middle schools in the district.
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