Madison Park nursery has teen moms on track

Liz Hoffman

It is 10 a.m. at Madison Park Technical and Vocational High School in Roxbury, and class is in session. The hiss of soldering irons echoes through the hallways on the ground floor, home to the construction and transportation academy. The hum of hairdryers floats out of the cosmetology school. A teacher hustles a few stragglers into a classroom.

But at the end of the hallway on the second floor, the sounds are different. There is laughter — and a few tears. Blocks crash, babies babble, and in the preschool room, a teacher runs a color matching exercise, asking her students to point out the white computer and the blue chair.

As the sounds of creation and construction float up from the technical and vocational academies below, the sounds of children fill the Crittenton Early Education Center at Madison Park.

Madison Park is one of two Boston public high schools with on-site early education centers; English High School in Jamaica Plain is the other. While the center is open to the Roxbury community, its focus, like its physical space, is firmly entrenched in Madison Park High.

Eleven of the 18 mothers enrolled in the center’s Teen Parent Program attend the high school, which has seen a jump in pregnancies among its students in the past year, despite a birth rate than continues to drop state- and nationwide.

“We’re very integrated at the high school, and we’re trying to become more integrated because it seems like the need is rising,” said program director Melissa Silva. “As well as raising a healthy child and teaching them about child development, our main focus is to keep the mothers educated. What we do stretches far beyond a normal childcare setting.”

As the pressures and costs mount, teen parents often see school as a disposable source of stress. A 2001 study found that only 41 percent of teens who start families before the age of 18 ever finish high school.

“The biggest challenge is being overwhelmed,” said Cynthia Smalls, 19, who went through the Teen Parent Program with her son, Antoine, four years ago when she was a student at City on a Hill Charter Public School. “It’s a lot to handle, and it’s easy to look at it and say, ‘I can’t do this.’”

Located in the heart of the high school and with a program designed especially for young parents, the Madison Park center is taking a swing at dropout rates by serving both sets of students that come through their doors — the ones in the strollers and the ones pushing them.

The center’s staff — Silva, 10 teachers and a full-time teen parent case manager — provides a multilevel support system designed to keep their 20 young parents in the classroom.

“A big part of our job is to try to keep them in school, because that’s fundamentally why we’re here,” Silva said. “Our purpose is not only to educate, nurture and support the children, but also their parents, who ultimately are students themselves.”

Enrollment also comes with specific conditions. Childcare is free, as long as the mother is in school or working at least 20 hours per week. Young mothers are also required to spend one hour per week interacting with their child at the center, and eight hours per month in family-related activities.

“As long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing with work or school, we’re here to meet them halfway and help out with the childcare stuff,” said Samantha Stevens, the case manager in charge of the Teen Parent program.

Those family activities include monthly workshops and weekly individual meetings with Stevens, with topics ranging from education on shaken baby syndrome, children’s literacy, and community expectations and perceptions of teen parents.

“The rules keep you in school, keep you working, keep you doing something that gets you moving forward,” said Smalls, a Roxbury resident whose 7-month-old daughter Shaniyah is enrolled at the child care center. “It’s a good structure, especially for people in a situation where structure is hard and they’re feeling overwhelmed.”

The Madison Park team is filling a crucial role in the high school and the Roxbury community — and the need may be growing.

Massachusetts has the third-lowest teenage pregnancy rate in the country, and that rate has been falling since the early 1990s, according to state Department of Public Health data. The drop has mirrored a national decrease in teen pregnancies over the past decade, and has been most pronounced in the African American population, which saw a 29 percent reduction in teen pregnancies through the 1990s.

But anecdotal evidence at Madison Park paints a different picture. Both Silva and Stevens noted an increase in the past year in pregnancies among the high school’s girls, especially among ninth-graders.

“I don’t have any hard numbers, but the overall temperature of the Madison Park community is telling me that the rate is up,” Stevens said. “Teachers and faculty are very concerned about the situation right now. We’re not exactly sure where it’s coming from.”

While its hands are tied with respect to sexual education in the high school, the center has responded by remaining committed to a broad framework of social services, including counseling its teen parents to prevent second pregnancies.

“The students that come to me really have a wide range of needs, all across the spectrum of everyday life,” Stevens said. “We start with those, because those are going to be the barriers to them being successful in school and as parents.”

Housing is the biggest concern, according to Stevens. Many pregnant teenagers become what she calls “couch surfers,” bouncing between friends’ houses with no permanent home.

“Until you make sure that they have a stable place to live and some kind of income, you can’t do any of the school-related or childcare work,” she said. “Once we whittle away those problems, the student usually does much better in getting to class and becomes a pretty active participant in our program.”

That comprehensive aid mentality goes all the way up the center’s leadership to its parent organization and funding source — the Crittenton Women’s Union, a Brighton-based nonprofit human services organization whose mission is “supporting at-risk and low-income women in reaching self-sufficiency,” according to director of communications Barbara Trevisan.

“Madison Park fits right into that mission,” Trevisan said. “They are allowing young parents to continue their education, and that’s the key to finding a family-sustaining career.”

For the young women — and more than a few young men, Stevens said — the Crittenton Early Education Center provides a way to make the undoable doable: to manage the logistical and emotional stress of being a teen parent.

“This is more than just dropping your child off at day care,” Smalls said. “I get to interact with the teachers and know how [my] child is doing throughout the day, and anything I need, everyone is there to help. You don’t get that anywhere else.”