It was a typical school morning in mid-April. Maria Pastor put her 4-year-old son on a school bus near their Mott Haven home in the Bronx at 7 a.m. The bus took her child to a special needs school on Nelson Ave. The 20-year-old then headed off to Bronx Community International High School on 345 Brook Ave., where she is now a senior with plans to graduate in June.
For the Honduran refugee who had escaped violence and poverty as a 16-year-old in her country, the path to an American high school diploma was riddled with more than the usual obstacles. Besides having to learn English and adjust to a new culture, Maria also found herself unexpectedly pregnant, only four months after she arrived.
“How can I be a mom and a student at the same time?” Pastor asked herself at the time. “Now he is four years old and I’m proud of him.”
Unknown to Pastor, she had also landed in the borough with the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the city. Though the Department of Health and Human Services reports that the teen birth rate for 15 to 19-year-olds has plummeted by more than 70 percent since 1991, the Bronx’s rate has not kept up. The borough’s rate has declined by only 50 percent since 2003, and is still 75 percent higher than the rest of the city. Among all ethnic groups in the Bronx, Hispanics have the highest teen birth rate, times higher than for white teens, four times higher citywide.
Teen parenthood is a key reason why students drop out of high school, said Eva Sievert-Schiller, an assistant principal at ICHS, where 100 percent of the 350 students are new immigrants, and 80 percent are Hispanic. One-quarter of the school’s first 100 dropouts left because they became parents.
The cost of childcare, she said, is the biggest obstacle blocking a young girl’s path to graduation and higher education. The burden of being a new immigrant, a student, and a new parent, particularly one with little support, can be overwhelming.
In Pastor’s case, she has the help of her grandmother and her baby’s father, along with the teachers and counselors at Bronx International Community High School. Her counselor worked with her to reschedule her curriculum so she could drop off and pick up her son at the Living for Young Families through Education (LYFE) daycare center.
LYFE runs 30 sites across the city, serving 700 families, offering free childcare and early education for children ages six weeks to four years old. Only parents enrolled in the city’s public schools are eligible to apply. Maria’s son attended the South Bronx Education Campus near her high school.
“If they don’t take advantage of that, the childcare issues are constant,” said Joanne DiLauro, a guidance counselor at ICHS about the LYFE centers. Although the subsidized day care program can remove part of the burden, some students who are new immigrants don’t know they have access to it or to other resources.
Hence, DiLauro and her colleagues make it their business to reach out to students who might need it. “It’s very supportive and nurturing to the parents. It helps them also build a network of other kids that are in the same situation,” she said.
“The LYFE program helped me a lot,” said Pastor. Her baby’s father is working and has little time to care for their son. “Without LYFE, I wouldn’t be able to make it.” At age four, her son has now aged out of the LYFE program and is currently enrolled in a pre-K program, a free early childhood care and education service for three-year-olds, provided by New York City Department of Education.
In addition to providing support, the staff at ICHS has also adjusted the city’s sex education curriculum to meet the needs of their students who come from all over the world, and from a wide range of religions and family values. The city’s Teen Health Project was originally designed to teach students about preventing HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. ICHS staff modified it to include more contraception strategies.
“We are teaching this from a science point of view,” said Jesusa Merioles, a science teacher who has been working in this school for ten years. “We tell them, look, your penis or vagina is part of your body’s reproductive system, right? You should treat it the way you look at your heart and lungs.” Teachers use graphics and models to make this knowledge easier to understand for the school’s English Language Learners.
Due to the different cultural backgrounds and religious beliefs, some students have opted out of the class in the past. But for more and more students, accepting sex education is no longer the taboo it once was.
Merioles said that once, when one of the lessons coincided with Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, some Muslim students hesitated to go to the class. But they gradually accepted the idea that “this is information for them.” Free contraceptives and supplies are supplied by the clinic in school. The teen pregnancy rate went down, according to Merioles, although the school doesn’t have a solid data point to support this.
Concerns still exist. “I would always emphasize abstinence. The first and foremost prevention is don’t do it,” said Merioles, who is from the Philippines and understands the conservative views of sexual issues. “But just in case you are in some situations, you have to know how to use a condom.”
For 20-year-old Pastor, whose home country has the world’s most restrictive abortion laws, her choices were traditional.
In the past four years, the hardest part for her was juggling being a mother and a student. When her son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disorder that affects communication and behavior, she was anxious. She had to find a therapist and send him to a special needs school far from home. She tried a couple of times to apply for jobs in order to support her family, but the recruiters never got back to her after saying, “I will call you back.”
Her son also suffers from asthma, and on occasion has to stay home for weeks when the condition flares up.
Despite all the odds, Maria has persevered, for herself, and for her son. When she graduates in June, Pastor hopes to enroll in Bronx Community College and to get a certificate in early childhood education to become a teaching assistant. The scholarships she received will cover most of the tuition — about $20,000 for one year. If her plans work out, she will become the first in her family to go to college.
“My dream is to become a teacher for kids,” she said.
