Trustees examine local teen pregnancy rate

As Ector County’s teen pregnancy rate continues to top state and national averages, the local school board took another look Thursday at ECISD’s current hard-line approach to abstinence-only sex education.

Trustees made no definite plans, but they listened alongside Ector County Independent School District administrators as a handful of experts explained the dismal local teen pregnancy rate.

And then trustees caught a glimpse of alternative sex-ed options from some of the region’s new flock of medical students. 

The ultimate goal of the meeting, Superintendent Hector Mendez told trustees, is for the school district to eventually implement a program that “systematically and coherently” employs education to curb the district’s teen pregnancy rate.

“We’re not here to have answers, for example, but to ask questions so we can have some thinking points, if you will,” Mendez said.

Several prominent members of the local medical community attended the meeting and briefed the board about Ector County’s sobering teen pregnancy rates, which officials estimate are among the highest in the country.

In fact, according to the most recent data collected by doctors at the Permian Basin campus of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, the county’s rate of births to teenage parents between the ages of 14 and 19 years is more than twice the national average at about 108 births per 1,000 people — the highest rate across a state that for the past decade has ranked either at or near dead last in the United States, which itself has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world.

Basically, the experts said, Ector County may have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world. 

“It’s a big, big problem for all of Texas,” said Dr. Moss Hampton, regional chairman of the local TTUHSC obstetrics and gynecology program. “It’s a big, big, big problem for West Texas.”

Dr. Leslie Chupp, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology in Hampton’s department who said she has personally witnessed the area’s high incidence of teen pregnancy, presented research to the board that shows comprehensive sex-ed programs tend to be much more efficient than those that center solely on abstinence or contraception or sexually transmitted diseases.

Scientific data, she said, has proven that a truly effective program will include all three areas.

“It has to be more than just abstinence-only … so that these kids can make an intelligent choice,” Hampton said.

About 75 percent of local high schools have reported that they have had sex at least once before graduating from high school, he said, so he is skeptical about a program that would only pertain to about one out of every four ECISD seniors.

“I’ve kind of taken the point of view that, ‘You’re going to do what you’re going to do. Now let’s not get pregnant,’ ” Hampton said.

One possible option for a more comprehensive sex-ed program at local schools, Chupp said, is one that the Lubbock Independent School District began piloting two years ago that brings Tech medical students into local classrooms, where they give an hourlong, scientifically grounded presentation on the facts about abstinence, contraception and STDs.

Toward the end of the classes, which LISD only authorized in high school classrooms, the medical students fielded anonymous questions that students in the co-ed classes wrote down and submitted.

Now that Tech has third- and fouth-year medical students at its Permian Basin campus, Chupp introduced two students who participated in the Lubbock program who said they’d be interested in bringing the class to Odessa.

The board heard from third-year medical students Jessica Clay and Kaycee Kloeppel, who showed the board the exact same presentation they presented in Lubbock last year.

They said the question-and-answer portion often was the most productive and informative for the teenagers, many of whom had gross misconceptions about sexual health.

“It works really well,” Clay said. “There are some really amazing things out there that teenagers think.”

Laura Mathew, director of health services at ECISD, said the district has offered its current abstinence-only education program to students in the seventh- through 12th-grade once per year for about the past five years.

But its effectiveness, she said, is hard to gauge without more time to gather trend data. 

She, like Hampton, questioned the viability of a program that only pertains to the 25 percent of high school students who reported that they were actually abstinent.

Prior to the district’s current program, she said, ECISD taught its students a contraception-based program that centered on safe-sex practices like the use of condoms and birth control. She said only 20 percent of students were held out of that program by parents.

Mathew said a tri-fold approach that addresses contraception, abstinence and STD education may be the best way to reach all students in the district’s “diverse” population.

“I think that giving students and their families options to choose from would probably be a good idea,” Mathew said. “All we’re doing is educating them, and I’d like to see a more comprehensive program. But every parent has the right to choose what education they want their children to get.”