In the winter of 2005, Heather Foradori had choices. She could keep showing up at Langley High School, her belly getting bigger each week. She could ignore the taunts sliding past her as she walked down its hallways. She could try to keep her grades up and try not to accrue too many absences. Or she could drop out, have her baby and try to earn her G.E.D. some time in the future, maybe when her child was a little older.
Jan McKee, the principal of Bryant Alternative High School, said she doesn’t know what choice she’d have made in the same situation. “I don’t know that I could have done it at their age.”
The strain begins at pregnancy. “It’s very hard on a young girl’s body,” McKee said. Delivery can mean weeks of maternity leave, each day an absence in the school calendar. Then the young mother must find someone to care of her infant every day while she’s in class. Each time the baby gets sick, another choice presents itself — her child or her education. For most mothers, there is no choice, they make a trip to the pediatrician and swallow one more absence on their attendance file.
As McKee sees it, teenage mothers have accepted a burden of responsibility that most high school students will put off for years. This responsibility is a terrible trap. Being a good mother today means risking an already tenuous tomorrow.
For 20 years, Bryant has tried to offer teenage mothers the opportunity to be responsible in the present and the future. “The girls have a lot of responsibility, and we want them to take that responsibility and be good moms,” McKee said. Project Opportunity is a program designed to help pregnant and parenting teens complete one, two, three or four years of high school to earn their diploma. “We want them to be self-sufficient, and you’re not going to be able to do that at minimum wage and you’re not going to move up the ladder of your job without the minimum of a high school diploma,” McKee said.
FORADORI CAME TO BRYANT in March 2005, when she was 17 years old and four months pregnant. “I wanted to go somewhere where other people would be like me,” she explained. Project Opportunity’s flexible classes allowed her to graduate in February 2006, while caring for her baby boy, William. Now Foradori is married to the man she’s been dating for six years, and caring for a curious 15-month-old toddler while enrolled in classes at George Mason University to study respiratory therapy. Her husband takes care of William during the day and works as an assistant Wal-Mart manager at night.
Foradori said Opportunity’s parenting classes have made her a better mother. Asked about something specific she started with the fundamentals. “I know how to change a diaper. That’s something basic, but I’d never changed a diaper.”
She also said she been asked to think about her own upbringing. “If I did something bad, I was spanked, and that’s bad. I didn’t like that. My goal is to discipline [William] in other ways that are more appropriate.”
Mary Anne Mahoney teaches Opportunity’s Child Development and Parenting class, which incorporates stress management and coping skills, preparation for delivery and lessons on children’s development from the womb to age six. She said she’ll ask students to think about the “holes” in their upbringing, and how they will fill those holes when raising their own children. “These moms have made the decision to parent and once they make that decision they are trying to be the best moms they can be,” she said.
The class, Mahoney added, is concerned with “continually reinforcing the bond between you and your baby. All the girls here are so focused on being a good parent.” This focus is what often forces girls to drop out of school. They must choose too often between things like a trip to the pediatrician and a day’s attendance at school.
Mahoney said drop-out prevention “is the key to this program.” She tries to convince her students of one message. “If you keep coming, you will complete high school.”
Project Opportunity director Elizabeth Link started the program 20 years ago, after securing a grant from the state department of education. In the years since, she said more than 2,500 girls have taken regular high school classes plus parenting classes and more recently, job trainings provided by the non-profit group Jobs for Virginia Graduates.
McKee said the 80 or so students now in Project Opportunity make up about 22 percent of Bryant’s student population, which also consists of teenagers and adults who for various reasons were unable to succeed in their “traditional” public high schools. She summarized the opportunity program simply. “It’s to help the girls stay in school.”
Challenges persist. Mahoney has been teaching with Project Opportunity for 19 years. She said her students are getting younger and younger. When she began, her typical students were 17 and 18, now many are 15 or younger. She first met some of the students she teaches today when they were newborn babies brought to class by their teenage mothers.
UNITED COMMUNITY MINISTRIES runs a daycare out of Bryant, and 20 of its 100 spots are reserved for the children of Opportunity students. Other students use daycare providers in their communities. The county subsidizes the cost as long as the mothers keep coming to school.
But daycare wasn’t necessary on Oct. 27. The school was hosting one of its twice-yearly Parenting Education Days, and mothers, children (and at least one father) were able to dance with their babies at a workshop created by the Wolf Trap Center for Performing arts, laugh at the antics of Sesame Street’s Elmo and take yoga lessons sponsored by the non-profit Many Hats Institute, which will offer bilingual yoga classes each week to Opportunity students.
Yoga instructor Libby Wilkinson said that in their first effort, mothers enthusiastically tried the novel poses, including squats that strengthen legs for childbirth. “We used music to help them get out of their heads,” she said. “I’m sure it looks pretty funky.”
Barry Glenn, the president and CEO of Jobs for Virginia Graduates, and state senator Jeannemarie Devolites Davis (R-34), who sits on JVG’s board, also attended. Devolites Davis said the students, who can be “pulled in different directions because they have responsibilities as moms,” will need job skills. “They’re the ones who are going to have to support the kids. They’re now the primary caretakers for these little ones.”
Fathers were absent from most discussions about the mothers and their children. McKee said Opportunity teachers encourage their students to ask the father to take responsibility, but there are no programs for fathers. “That’s more of a family issue. We can’t demand it.”
Foradori, who said she doesn’t know if she could have kept her baby if her husband had abandoned them, had a message for young mothers. “Finish school,” she said. “You’ll be able to get a job, be self-sufficient and not depend on other people. And love your children. And life will be different after you have a child. Nothing’s the same.”