Teen-Agers Getting Pregnant and Sexually Transmitted Diseases? Offer More Contraceptives in School, Lowell Officials Say
By NBP Staff | July 6, 2019, 23:53 EDT
School officials want to provide girls at Lowell High School other kinds of contraceptives in addition to the condoms they offer now.
“In this day and age we need to do everything we can to support our students,” Lowell School Committee member Connie Martin said during a subcommittee meeting earlier this week, according to the Lowell Sun.
The Lowell Community Health Center has run for more than a decade school-based health centers at Lowell High School and at grades 5-through-8 Kathryn Philbin Stoklosa Middle School in Lowell. But for contraception the school-based health centers provide only condoms.
To get contraceptives other than condoms girls currently have to walk about 10 minutes from Lowell High School to the Lowell Community Health Center. The services are free and confidential, a clinic official told the School Committee on June 19.
But many girls at Lowell High School don’t make it there.
In 2016, 62 percent of the girls seeking contraception referred by Lowell High School’s school-based clinic to the Lowell Community Health Center did not make their appointment, according to a presentation made June 19 to the Lowell School Committee by the Lowell Community Health Center called “Trends and Opportunities in Adolescent Health.”
Expanded access to contraceptives is already available at school-based health centers in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Everett, Lynn, Chelsea, Revere, Peabody, and Gloucester, and in a vocational school in Lawrence, according to the Lowell Community Health Center presentation.
“School-based health centers are nationally recognized as a best practice for providing comprehensive adolescent health care including reproductive health. They are uniquely positioned in a safe, non-judgmental space which meets the students social, emotional, and physical needs in an easily accessible location,” says the Lowell Community Health Center Report.
In 2012, 39 percent of seniors at Lowell High School said they were sexually active, and 40.5 percent of students in Lowell who said they were sexually active also said they weren’t using contraception, according to a Lowell Communities That Care Survey of that year cited by the Lowell Community Health Center.
Lowell had 54 teen births in 2016, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. That’s about twice the teen birth rate statewide. The Lowell Community Health Center presentation points out that 31 of them (or 57 percent) were to Hispanic girls, even though Hispanics make up only 24 percent of the student population in Lowell public schools.
The Lowell Community Health Center presentation also notes that chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis have all increased sharply in Massachusetts in recent years, according to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Chlamydia cases were up 38 percent between 2010 and 2017; gonorrhea cases were up a whopping 329 percent between 2010 and 2017; syphilis cases were up 56 percent between 2013 and 2017.
Lowell is one of about 25 cities and towns in Massachusetts with the highest rates of sexually transmitted disease (more than 100 cases per 100,000 people), and a disproportionate number of cases statewide are among young people.
Lowell Community Health Center officials noted the high incidents of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis in Lowell in the report but did not explain how offering expanded contraceptives to students would decrease rates of sexually transmitted diseases.
Lowell’s newly hired superintendent of schools, Joel Boyd, supports the proposal.
“I believe that our community-based partnerships should be true community-based partnerships. Any service provided in the community should be accessible in our schools and I believe that’s our best path forward to make sure we can support our community as a whole,” said Boyd, who got the job May 20, according to the Lowell Sun.
One member of the Lowell School Committee, Dominik Hok Lay, asked during the subcommittee meeting Tuesday, July 2 whether school officials promote abstinence as a means of avoiding teen pregnancy.
“Once we provide this service to the students at the high school, do we have a program so that we’re not insinuating the kids say ‘Hey, it’s O.K., we have protection for you?” Lay said, according to the Lowell Sun.
A nurse practitioner at Lowell High School said she talks about all options with students, including abstinence.
The full School Committee could vote on the proposal as early as Wednesday, July 17.