A couple of months after Carin Ford gave birth to a baby boy last fall, the 10th-grader was ready to return to Laurence G. Paquin Middle/High School, Baltimore's school for pregnant students and teenage mothers.
The 15-year-old had reserved a place for her son in Paquin's infant day care program, glad that he would be looked after in the building where she attended classes. But then, she received a phone call telling her that the day care program had been scaled back because of budget cuts and there would be no room for her son.
"I cried," said Carin, who had laid out a new baby outfit for her first day back at school. "I had to stay out of school for an extra three weeks to find him day care."
Carin is among about 200 students whose lives were turned upside down when the school system cut Paquin's staff nearly in half in the middle of first semester. With the loss of teachers and aides, the school was forced to eliminate several courses and programs, shuffle students into different, larger classes, and turn away new teenage mothers seeking day care for their babies.
"This is really the decimation of the Paquin program, if it's allowed to stand," said City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke, a longtime supporter of the East Baltimore school. A hearing is scheduled for Feb. 15 on a resolution sponsored by Clarke and other council members urging the school system to undo Paquin's budget cuts.
Although Baltimore's teen birthrate has reached its lowest level on record - 7 percent of the city's girls ages 15 to 19 gave birth last year - it continues to be higher than the national rate of about 4 percent.
To advocates for pregnant teens, that makes Paquin, established in 1966 as one of the country's first schools for pregnant girls, as necessary as ever.
"It was established at a time when the schools weren't even retaining girls after they became pregnant," said Laurie Schwab Zabin, a professor of family health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. After state law was changed and other schools began admitting pregnant girls, Paquin distinguished itself through its expertise in educating girls in parenting as well as academics, and by the medical services and work force training it provided.
"It was then that it proved its importance," Zabin said of the later years. "The other schools did not provide the additional training [the girls] needed."
