Offering Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs through Agency/School Partnerships: Challenges in Access, Coordination and Evaluation

One of the leading causes of school dropout in America today is early pregnancy. One-third of school dropouts cite this reason for leaving school.  Schools have recognized that preventing early pregnancy is not only a worthy goal for the well-being of their students but important for the school as well.  Community agencies often try to partner with schools to offer pregnancy prevention programs, sending their staff into the school to offer an after-school or in-school program or by training school personnel to incorporate the program into a suitable class (like health).  This would seem like a “win-win” partnership providing the community agency access to young people while giving the school an evidence-based program to prevent teen pregnancy.  But often the differing structures, politics, schedules, and goals of schools and community groups make the process frustrating.  This paper discusses the experiences of the authors as evaluators of more than 100 such partnerships, detailing how they struggled with and solved issues of 1) access (school agreements, school board cooperation, reaching the most at risk students); 2) politics (community views, program approvals, handling findings); 3) coordination (parental and student consent, scheduling, mobility, teacher and agency staff pairings), and 4) evaluation (randomization, collecting data, tracking students).   The goal is to share lessons learned about how to handle these everyday issues in such partnerships.