Posted on 05/23/2007 10:18:04 PM PDT by neverdem
A dozen girls, some perched awkwardly with their pregnant bellies flush against the desks, were struggling over a high school geometry assignment on a recent afternoon.
No pencils, no textbooks, no Pythagorean theorem. Instead, they sewed quilts.
That is what passes for math in one of New York City’s four high schools for pregnant girls, this one in Harlem. “It ties into geometry,” said Patricia Martin, the principal. “They’re cutting shapes.”
Created in the 1960s, when pregnant girls were such pariahs that they were forced to leave school until their babies were born, the city school system’s four pregnancy schools — or P-schools, as they are obliquely referred to — have lived on, their population dwindling to just 323 students from 1,500 in the late 1960s.
They have been marked by abysmal test scores, poor attendance and inadequate facilities, and even some of their own administrators say they suspect that most of their students are pushed there by other schools because they are failing academically. In place of proms and computer labs, they have Mother’s Day parties and day care centers with cribs lining the walls.
Now in recognition of their failure, the city plans to shut them down at the end of the school year as part...
--snip--
It’s not for lack of spending: the Education Department spent $33,670 on each student this year, a cost of more than $10.8 million — more than double the citywide average of per-pupil spending. Ms. Anderson, the superintendent, said she hoped that starting next year, pregnant girls would remain in their regular high schools or switch to small specialized high schools designed for struggling students. “The most powerful thing we can do for parenting teens is help them get their diplomas,” she said. “Your brain does not die when you become pregnant.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I am at a loss for words.
Michael Bloomberg's War on Guns
FReepmail me if you want on or off my New York ping list.
Oh, almost $34k a year is expensive, but $17k a year - WHAT A BARGAIN! On a related note, the anti-voucher crowd throws around $6k as the "cash equivalent" value that each voucher would bestow to school age children for their education every year. Is that a Milton Friedman heyday number (1980's) that never got updated? Because it would be consistent with the component-wise breakdown of the change in the consumer price index for that particular commodity over said time period.
They could have paid tuition at a private ivy league prep school.
Thanks for the ping!
Perhaps they should have kept their legs closed.
Thanks for the chart.
“Perhaps they should have kept their legs closed.”
That’s what I wanted to say...
Obviously the American Petroleum institute did not look at NYC rents when they compiled this list.
“The most powerful thing we can do for parenting teens is help them get their diplomas,”
Yeah, never mind the education, just pass out the diploma. ‘Learning shapes’ is something my 4 year old has already mastered. Should he be awarded a HS diploma now?
Pregnant girls with an education are more likely to be able to raise their children successfully, thus less likely to hve abortions and less likely to be dependent on government.
Those things are anathema to liberals.
Most of the staggering growth in per pupil average spending isn't education for regular students, it is "special ed" - and specifically the "special ed" that encompasses medical care and personal nurses for the most severely broken kids. Never mind $34,000 for these pregnant girls, think $50,000 a year as a floor. The DC public schools spend nearly 25% of their budget on crackbabies in what amount to private contract nursing homes at an average of $70,000 a body a year. These kids aren't going to take advantage of vouchers.
$6,000 yearly for a regular student is on the low end in most places, certainly a place with the cost of living of NYC, but not by so much as you'd think.
Source please?
2007
806 million dollars total DC school budget
49,000 pupils
Unwed mothers in black community there...77%
crack babies?
40% of births in DC are to drug moms
sources :
Google- dc budget per pupil, illegitimacy dc, crack babies dc
btw...i researched that for my own curiosity...i did not know either
the 70K figure seems unsubstantiated
Long time, no see. I was afraid you were just lurking, if that much. I switched from Google to Yahoo, because Google only donates to dems. Not that Yahoo doesn’t have its problems, e.g. helping the Chicoms censor the Internet.
Anyway, the last studies that I looked at stated that the mothers of “crack babies” are almost always multiple drug users, legal and illegal, and that once the babies had undergone physical withdrawal they were normal, with the exception of fetal alcohol syndrome. Maybe that was a few years ago or longer. Crack doesn’t seem to be in the news much anymore. I haven’t heard of meth or crank babies.
Some of the high schools in my area (Syracuse, NY) have day-care centers. And they’re not for the children of the staff. Probably more efficient than seperate high schools for pregnant students.
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