Researcher decries teen-pregnancy’s toll

Arkansas ranked third in nation for young mothers, UA audience told

ROGERS -- High teen pregnancy rates in Arkansas affect not just one generation but also the next, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville assistant professor Kristen Jozkowski said Wednesday at an event to discuss recently completed reports commissioned by the Women's Foundation of Arkansas.

"Teen pregnancy and parenthood perpetuate a cycle of poverty through continued low educational attainment among teen mothers and their children," Jozkowski said.

Her report studying the effect of teen pregnancy on education notes that Arkansas has 73 pregnancies per 1,000 female teens, citing research from the Guttmacher Institute.

This puts Arkansas at the third-highest teen pregnancy and childbirth rate in the United States, Jozkowski said. The state's rate -- despite falling by nearly 29 percent from the late 1980s -- is about 28 percent higher than the national rate, according to her report.

She told an almost entirely female crowd of about 80 gathered at UA's Global Campus in Rogers that 43 percent of teen moms never finish high school. As a group, they rarely finish college, she said.

"Less than 2 percent of teen moms will graduate college by age 30," Jozkowski said. Her report cites the National Council of State Legislatures for the statistic. The council's website states the statistic is for women who have a baby before age 18.

Children of teen mothers also are less likely to complete high school, she said.

"Over time, we also see an economic impact on an entire community and state," she said.

Jozkowski, who co-wrote the report with Mara D'Amico, advocated implementing medically accurate, evidence-based sex education in schools, telling the crowd that Arkansas is one of only 14 states that does not mandate sex education in schools even as data show Arkansas teens are more sexually active than their peers nationally.

Other speakers noted that state leaders have shied away from the topic of sex education in schools.

"In my seven years on the state Board of Education, there was one discussion once about sex education, and that is the sum total that it comes up," Brenda Gullett, who served on the board from 2007 to 2014, said as part of a panel discussing Jozkowski's report and findings from two other reports commissioned by the Women's Foundation of Arkansas.

One of the reports featured responses from focus groups about issues related to women, such as education and differences in pay between genders. Another report focused on educational attainment of Arkansas women, noting a lack of women in well-compensated fields such as science, technology and engineering.

"I think what we lay out for young women and the expectations we have and the dreams we help them to envision for themselves make a huge difference for what they are going to be attracted to," Gullett said in a discussion about women joining more technically oriented fields.

Much of the talk, however, returned to teen pregnancy and sex education.

Another panelist, Helen Reid, director of population health policy for the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, said she would like to see a survey of Arkansas parents to find out how interested they are in having sex education taught in schools.

She said she has had discussions with an Arkansas Department of Health official about the lack of discussion about sex education in Arkansas.

"I think there's just some general frustration about a lack of community and political will to push these issues," Reid said, later clarifying that she was referring to local and state elected officials. "That's why I think the Women's Foundation report is so important. I think it's going to reignite some of these conversations in communities."

Metro on 01/15/2015

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