Affecting Michigan's Public Policy on Teen Pregnancy

Project Investigator

• Jay Connor, Founder/CEO, the Collaboratory for Community Support

Primary Investigator Jay Connor talks about the strategy and purpose of the TPPAGB. Watch the video. (46 sec) (Requires Quicktime player.)

Project Information

This program strives to accomplish the Global Project on Youth's mission of addressing the translation from research to practice and making research applicable to policy makers through connecting similarly positioned Michigan communities addressing teen pregnancy.

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention collaboratory includes representatives of business, non-profit agencies, unions, neighborhood centers, criminal justice, schools, faith-based organizations, and citizens who share the desire that "our daughters not become pregnant while they are still children." Toward this end, these partners work to build agreement around the group's highest aspirations rather than least common denominator compromises. They also accept multiple strategies in order to achieve a focused community impact on teen pregnancy. This principle rests on the community's belief that no one strategy alone will be universally effective in addressing this complex problem. That is, the collaboratory partners believe that neither abstinence programs nor comprehensive human sexuality education will be able to reduce teen pregnancy by itself. However, these strategies together with others including youth asset building and service learning can have a positive effect on the teen pregnancy rate. They also use a broad range of technology capacities to enhance communication, education, mapping (needs and asset) and measurements.

In 2004, the Teen Pregnancy Prevention collaboratory has broadened to other communities the lessons learned in Battle Creek regarding teen pregnancy prevention. This collaboratory began work in Muskegeon and Wayne Counties, two other communities in Michigan with high rates of teen pregnancy. Building community ownership and identifying leadership for teen pregnancy prevention will be critical to advancing the work in Muskegeon. Romulus (Wayne County) has organized a teen pregnancy partnership with Romulus schools and selected a Chair for the partnership.

Project Ventures

The collaboratory partners were also interested in learning more about the attitudes of youth toward teen pregnancy and which prevention strategies are most likely to be effective. A study called, "Identifying Middle School Students' Knowledge and Attitudes about Teen Pregnancy" was conducted by Evaluation & Measurement Specialties, Inc. Two hundred local students from grades 6, 7, & 8 were surveyed. Results were that:

• Three quarters of the students knew an unmarried pregnant teen
• About three quarters of the youth in the sample either did not know the meaning of the term 'abstinence' or were unsure about what it meant
• More than half of the youth polled believed that it was okay to have sex after age 18
• Parents were perceived as the best source of information about sexuality
• Teenage sex is most likely to occur in any situation in which the teens did not have adult supervision
• Pre-teens and young teens were naïve about the role alcohol and/or drugs played in sexual behavior

Results also indicated that more than half of students believed that it was possible to influence teens' intentions regarding sexual activity. With regard to teen pregnancy prevention strategies, the respondents indicated that:

• "Real life" teenage mothers may be the most powerful messengers for delivering information about refraining from sex as a teen
• Teenage sexual behavior can be influenced by fear, such as fear of sexually transmitted diseases, fear of becoming pregnant, and fear of developing a bad reputation
• Greater knowledge about ways to say "no" could help teens avoid sexual behavior
• Teaching 'safe sex' is seen as the best way to reduce or prevent teen pregnancy
• Religion-based strategies to discourage sexual behavior are not likely to be effective
• Print materials and television messages were not thought to be particularly powerful ways to influence teens about sex

Additionally, the Battle Creek community has leveraged their growing systems understanding toward addressing a significant underlying causal factor in teen pregnancy, community literacy. New partners in this endeavor include eight school district superintendents, the City of Battle Creek, the Salvation Army, and the University of Michigan School of Education, Department of Psychology, and School of Literature, Science, and the Arts. A press conference announcing the start of the School-Parent-Community partnership to improve community literacy was held in December 2004 and included the participation of the President of the Michigan Senate. Senator Mark Shauer endorsed the collaborative and vowed to assist in every way he could, including pushing for policy change at the state level.

Functional illiteracy is a critical problem in Battle Creek. Community-wide, 22% of adults read at or below a seventh grade level. Fourth grade MEAP results reveal that 30% of the children in Battle Creek fail to read at a fourth grade proficiency level. The community-wide literacy plan will prepare the youngest in the community to enter school prepared to learn. The plan also aims to improve the lives of those now held back by illiteracy and to strengthen the community through literacy efforts that will improve job skills and the ability of adults to function in an increasingly complex technology based environment. In an exciting recent development, partners involved in this collaboratory have been awarded a $1.02 million W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant to improve reading and writing skills at elementary schools in Lakeview and Battle Creek.

Outcomes

• Provided a strong foundation for addressing community problems comprehensively to achieve impact. The community now has the necessary tools to empower themselves and confidently proceed to establishing effective strategies that will tackle the issues such as teen pregnancy, community literacy, and many other issues.
  
  
• Formulated a plan to improve community literacy, raised funding for the initiative, and began implementation of the project, as low literacy is correlated with teen pregnancy. This plan demonstrates the commitment of these partners as well as their newly developed capacity, through a collaboratory framework, to develop comprehensive, preventive solutions to community problems.
  
  
• Helped local leaders be more forthright in dealing with teen preganancy. Teen pregnancy has been a historically controversial issue for Battle Creek and has ignited heated conflict. However, the collaboratory's success in engaging the community has affected attitudes and resources from many community members including the faith community as well as the schools. The collaboratory's work to increase public awareness, provide relevant information, and develop the capacity of the community to implement teen pregnancy prevention programs contributed to these successes.
  
  
• Resources, across sectors, are fully deployed to address teen pregnancy. Before the collaboratory began its work, teen pregnancy was such a divisive issue in the Battle Creek community that beforehand no agency submitted an application for United Way allocated funds (in excess of $100,000) to address this problem.
  
  
• The Battle Creek School Board has approved a new curriculum that will prevent teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases and will discuss contraception and abstinence. This nine-week health class is targeted toward high school freshman and is designed to give students more comprehensive resources to prevent risky or unhealthy behaviors. The impact of the class will be evaluated through student surveys and assessments of community perceptions.
  
  
• Lessons learned from this collaboratory project have been translated into the curriculum of University of Michigan School of Social Work classes within the practice area of community and social systems. (See 'Lessons Learned' on this web site)
  
  
• Master of Social Work interns working with this collaboratory project have been able to garner in-depth, hands on experience working with communities. The students have found clear connections between the curriculum they are learning in the classroom and their work with the collaboratory.
  
  
• Dissemination of the work of the collaboratory. Visits to the Web site increased threefold (up to a monthly average of 1,350 hits) once the Global Program on Youth influenced book, Community Visions, Community Solutions, was published in February 2003.
  
  

Next Steps

The work done in 2004 is the result of an expanded focus which includes both teen pregnancy and community literacy. As these problems intersect, simultaneous work on both issues in the coming year will yield interconnected community solutions that will have a deeper and longer-term impact. That is, the collaboratory is moving from addressing an issue across systems and as an isolated problem to addressing it at its root cause, bringing it to a greater level of comprehensiveness.

The collaboratory has been able to leverage other funding and/or in-kind support to sustain its work from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the City of Battle Creek, the Calhoun County Health Department, Kellogg Community College, Battle Creek Community Foundation, and others. These opportunities will allow the collaboratory to develop a Community Support Organization to support the work of the collaboratory on teen pregnancy, community literacy, and other issues with regular, full time staff. The staff of the community support organization would ensure that efforts continue by managing data, tracking records, and maintaining communications between agencies.

Last updated: 04/28/05

University of Michigan Global Program on Youth, School of Social Work Building, Room 3743
1080 South University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106 ssw.global@umich.edu

W.K. Kellogg Foundation

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