Quality redo for women dropouts

About half the Care Center students enroll in a Spanish-language program and take English classes simultaneously. But even for those who don't face language barriers, their hopes and self-esteem may have been stymied early on by domestic violence, substance abuse, or gang activity. Contrary to common assumptions, many of the participants dropped out of school before they became pregnant.

"One thing adolescent mothers face is the very low expectations that most people have for them," says Jill Taylor, an associate professor of education and women's studies at Simmons College in Boston. By exposing them to experiences normally found at elite schools, she says, the Care Center "has the mothers learn that they are capable of doing all sorts of things that they might not have thought they were capable of."

That's why rowing on the Connecticut River has become a tradition here. At first, when they go onto the nearby campus of Mt. Holyoke College to learn crew, "the girls look at you with disbelief when you tell them they're going to lift up this long boat and carry it on their shoulders," Teschner says. But they go on to compete in a regatta for young parents that evolved after other agencies in the Northeast picked up on the idea. "For many of them, it's their first time being cheered publicly in their lives. It's transformative."

Villegas agrees. "It's extremely hard work, but the stress that you have at home is gone. You're just thinking about moving that boat."

Some students arrive at the center grudgingly, in order to fulfill an educational requirement and receive welfare benefits. But when educators look beneath the hardened surfaces, they see girls who are still dreamers.

Tzivia Gover, the creative writing teacher, tells about a student whose T-shirt summarized her whole attitude: "Whatever," it read. She sat slumped in her chair and wrote in tiny, almost illegible print. "Everything she did seemed to be saying 'I'm not here,' " Ms. Gover says. But week by week, her writing got bigger, and she became a prolific writer of romantic poetry. Gover has also watched girls who had never used a thesaurus become very attached to it.

"When you've got a really good [teacher or] case manager, the kids learn to trust them, to really love them; they're starving for positive adult relationships," says Dennis McBride, a research director at the University of Washington and an evaluation consultant to the federal Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs (OAPP).

As part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the OAPP has given a modest demonstration grant to the Care Center, to help measure its effectiveness and potentially promote it as a model. Forty other private and public sources contribute to the center's yearly budget of about $1.4 million.

The mission has broadened to include other women from the community, too. Since many of the young mothers will be the first in their family to contemplate college, Teschner says, it's helpful to bring their family members along. So the center offers the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a blend of history, moral philosophy, literature, and writing. It's taught by local professors, and students who attend can earn credits from Bard College in New York.

Some of the teen mothers have even taken the course with their own mothers. "There will be times when I go out to the parking lot and hear people arguing about Aristotle and I'll think, 'Someone needs to see this!'" Teschner says.

After her golf lesson, Villegas talks about her first week auditing the criminal-justice class at Holyoke Community College. "I was afraid to go for it at first," she says. But she's been able to keep up with the reading at night before she snags four or five hours of sleep. Already, she can envision herself studying the subject after she leaves the Care Center, and maybe even going on to study law. "Now it looks like it's in my reach," she says.

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