Chester Youth Program

This web page was written by Brandon Sullivan, a concerned recent graduate of Chester High School.

Imagine that you are a 15 year old girl. You've never known your Dad, and you live with your Mom. However, she's always drunk and always yells at you when you are at home, but lets you come and go as you please because in truth, she doesn't really care what you do.

You go to school, and you are the odd person out. You don't really have any close friends. Everyone at your school is jaded and seems to care about nothing---except for one person. A 20 year old man who comes in and is the only one who makes you feel loved. You start dating, and in the heat of the moment you have sex a lot because nobody is telling you not to, and nobody is telling you about protection, either.

You get pregnant. You become the laughing stock of the school, and someone writes 'Pregnant Bitch' on your locker. Your boyfriend doesn't like condoms. To make sure you don't get pregnant again, you get an I.U.D. but your Mom makes you take it out because she doesn't like the way it looks. You get pregnant again. Your mother, more and more addicted to alcohol as time goes by, screams at your kids before they can even talk---but your boyfriend can't support you enough to help either you or him move out. As can be expected, having kids makes your relationship rocky.

This is the real story of someone I won't name here, and in Chester, teen pregnancy is all too common---roughly according to DHEC statistics, about 50% of girls in Chester have already been pregnant by the time they reach age 20. The story I told you is an extreme case of someone who became a parent early for a lot of reasons that she can't control, but in Chester there are a lot of similar situations that may not be this extreme, but could have been prevented.

If someone is equipped with the resources and information to make a good decision and they make a mistake, it is their responsibility; but if society did not provide them with those resources and that information to make a good decision, it is to a great extent our responsibility. I am making an effort to start an afterschool program in Chester to help decrease teen pregnancy not to mitigate the responsibility of persons for their own decisions, but to help equip them to be able to make good ones.

Of course, such a program is only helpful if it works, and the reason I had this idea in the first place is because before I moved to Chester, when I was in 5th grade and lived in Charlotte, I was a student in a program called Project HOPE, which is my inspiration for this program. It was proven to work; while it continued to exist, there is only evidence that one graduate had ever become a teen parent. There may have been an instance of abortion that we can't track, but overall compared to the area, the participants of Project HOPE clearly received a great benefit.

Project HOPE not only benefited its participants, but it benefited the community as well. The teens often did community projects, the decrease in taxes that would result from a decrease in teen pregnancy would be great (Chester County taxpayers pay about $2 million a year in taxes to support the children of teen parents), and Project HOPE also helped us academically which resulted in students who otherwise may have been more violent behaved better because of their experience with Project HOPE in the schools.

One of the biggest things to remember is that you can't punish the child for the mistakes of the parent, and the problem with teen pregnancy is that the children experience more health consequences, are more likely to be abused, are more likely to live in poverty, only have one parent present, perform worse in school, become violent and most significantly, are more likely to become early parents themselves. Something must be done to help prevent those situations if nothing else, so all children can be born with a more equal chance at living a successful life.

In addition to equipping teens with the resources and information to make good decisions on themselves, another thing that I want to do is help them develop positive goals for themselves and work toward them, because it is proven that teens who have positive goals are less likely to become early parents. Students in Chester schools are jaded and there is a perception that most students have that they can never amount to anything due to the problems with this community, and a perception by the better students that they must leave this area and never come back because while they may feel like there is hope for them personally, they don't feel like there is hope for the area. I should know---I recently graduated from CHS myself and saw the attitude with my own eyes, and I've never seen anything like it---people born and raised in Chester so willing to give up on it. Well, I'm not. Are you?

There is also a perception that there is nothing to do in Chester for people in our age group, what with the lack of a movie theater and other normal forms of amusement. I believe that the afterschool program would help in a lot of ways because it will be taking teens who would otherwise be sitting at home doing nothing and giving them something positive to do with their energy. It is almost to be expected that teens who have parents that barely care what their kids are doing who are sitting around doing nothing but "hanging out" will wind up having sex, and you can bet when that happens they will be unprotected.

In a lot of ways the fundamental attitude of adolescents is a problem as well. 40% of teenage boys agree with the statement 'getting a girl pregnant makes you a man.' A lot of girls who grow up in churches don't prepare for sex with contraception because they feel like that means they are planning to sin, but if they get swept up in the passion of the moment that is somehow less sinful. I don't think I need to explain why people with these ideas are misguided at all.

In order to make this happen, I need a lot of help and I am not ready to ask for donations, but whether or not this will be a school district program, a DSS program, a program under another outlying county's domain, or independent, the process with getting those legal issues taken care of, the process of getting every detail to match up with eachother---all that is tedious. Part of the process right now is getting the word out because if the people make it clear that they want this project to happen, one way or another it will work out. If you think you can now or in the future will be able to and will want to help out in any way, e-mail me at the e-mail address below (it is not a link, you will have to type it in) and we can go from there. Let's improve our community!