Teen to tout Nevada program in D.C.

Friday, Feb. 14, 2003 | 3:09 a.m.

When the Governor's Youth Advisory Council came up with its "Abstinence Works" program in 2001, the participating teen leaders knew they had a winner.

Employing the program in middle schools in counties statewide, the council has found success after overcoming one significant hurdle -- teaching kids what the word "abstinence" meant. A survey found that 28 percent of the students attended the seminars with no clue as to the word's definition.

"Maybe we should have called it 'Don't do it,' " mused 16-year-old Bradley Keating, a Coronado High School junior whose two-year term on the advisory council ends in May.

"Even though 845 of the 3,030 students who have heard our presentations didn't know what abstinence meant when they came in, they knew the meaning when they left," he said.

Nevada has dipped from the nation's leader in teen pregnancy in 1998 to No. 10 this year.

Now Keating will take the advisory board's program on the road -- all the way to the nation's capital. He recently was appointed by Gov. Kenny Guinn to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy's Youth Leadership Team, which meets March 1 in Washington, D.C.

"We will show how Abstinence Works has been effective," Keating, a native Las Vegan, said. "That's our primary message for this meeting."

While the Governor's Youth Advisory Council deals with all youth issues including suicide, drugs and smoking, teen pregnancy has been the No. 1 issue since Gov. Bob Miller started the group in 1996.

Teenage pregnancy, down significantly since the mid-1990s, remains a national problem according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

More than 900,000 girls and young women, ages 19 or younger, become pregnant each year, the national campaign says, noting that each hour 100 teenage girls get pregnant and 55 give birth.

Teen childbearing costs taxpayers $7 billion each year in expenses associated with health care, foster care, criminal justice, public assistance and lost tax revenues, the organization said.

And the United States has the highest rates of teen pregnancy, birth and abortions in the industrialized world, the organization said.

"Teen pregnancy hits just a few students at a particular school, but it is devastating to those few students it hits," said Keating's principal, Monte Bay, a 41-year-old native Las Vegan who graduated from Valley High School.

"Our primary duty is to educate students, and we do have basic health education that addresses the issue. But we depend on parents and organizations like Brad's to get the word out."

Keating said when he was appointed to the governor's council last year, he was initially hesitant to get involved with the pregnancy issue because he knew he would take ribbing about it from his peers.

But Keating said he kept thinking back to when he was a freshman when a classmate got pregnant at age 14.

"One day she left school and hasn't returned," Keating said. "She later told me how she regretted missing so many things, how she will not be able to get a good job without a diploma and how she was forced to instantly become an adult with the responsibility of having a child."

That, plus having a 12-year-old sister, helped Keating overcome his apprehensions. He devoted himself to the campaign. He has spoken at several of the advisory council's 136 seminars at middle schools and even addressed a summit of local nurses on the issue.

"The message is simple -- abstinence is the only way to effectively prevent teen pregnancy," he said. "Students ask about (birth control methods). Short and sweet, they are not 100 percent."

Keating, who also volunteers at the Boys and Girls Clubs and is a member of his school's student council, said he is fortunate to have supportive parents and accepts that many other teens do not.

"If they do not get the support at home, teens have to find ways to channel their energies into positive things on their own as opposed to just hanging out and putting themselves into a position to get into trouble," he said.

"It is a difficult for us because of the reality TV shows and music videos that show sex as being glamorous. We try to show that it's a fake message and that the consequence of unsafe sex is pregnancy or STDs (sexually transmitted diseases)."

In Washington, Keating hopes to learn about programs that have been successful elsewhere.

The Youth Leadership Team of the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization consists of 24 teens from across the nation. Their views will help shape the organization's policies and programs to help raise awareness about teen pregnancy and prevention practices. Each member serves 18 months.

The organization's goal is to reduce teen pregnancy by one-third between 1996 and 2005. It is well on its way, having seen the national rate reduce by 16 percent between 1994 and 1999 for 15- to 19-year-olds.

However, that decrease came following three stagnant years in the mid-1990s and an alarming period between 1986 and 1991 when the teen birthrate skyrocketed 32 percent nationwide.

The organization said the significance of that is if birthrates had stayed at the level they were in the early 1990s, 125,468 more babies would have been born to teens.

Joining Keating on the trip to Washington from Nevada will be the state's former attorney general, Frankie Sue Del Papa, a member of the National Campaign board of directors that includes actress Whoopi Goldberg and former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young.