“The program no one wants to talk about”

SAPAR helps teen moms stay in school, but is losing funding

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When Lyla Perez was growing up, her mom would tell her stories about how hard it had been to go to high school while raising her and her older brother. So she never imagined she would be in the same position as her mom — 15 years old with a son of her own.

“I was 14 when I got pregnant,” says Perez. “My mom always talked to me about birth control, and I was on the pill, but that doesn’t always work when you forget to take it.”

After having her son, Tyler, Perez dropped out of school. In the fall of 2015, almost two years after her son was born, her mom suggested she enroll in SAPAR, the same program she had used as a teen mom.

SAPAR, which stands for School Aged Parents, is an alternative, transitional program for pregnant and parenting girls to learn prenatal care and parenting skills while working on a regular curriculum. The program is located in Marquette Elementary School on Madison’s near east side.

Students can attend SAPAR for two semesters and have access to the Dane County Parents Council’s Wee Start Child Care Center, right down the hall from SAPAR’s classrooms.

Lesa Reisdorf, the program director, has been helping teen moms through SAPAR since 1996.

In her 20 years with the program she has seen pregnant sixth-graders, homeless moms kicked out by their families and former students’ daughters — like Perez — in the program years later.

The odds are not in favor of teen moms. According to the CDC, only 50% of teen mothers receive their high school diploma by age 22. County Health Rankings, a collaboration between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the UW-Madison Population Health Institute, reports that multi-service programs like SAPAR substantially increase the likelihood that teen moms will graduate from high school.

But the Madison program will soon face an enormous drop in funding when a four-year InSPIRE grant from the state Department of Public Instruction dries up on June 30, 2017. The $535,000 grant allowed SAPAR to provide even more resources to young parents, including daycare for children and transportation, and to award 35 $1,000 college scholarships to teen parents.

After next year, Reisdorf fears the program will either be cut completely or drastically scaled back. “Ever since I took this job in 1996, every year I hear they’re going to cut it,” Reisdorf says. “We are the program no one wants to talk about.”

Wisconsin state statute section 115.915 requires school districts to make accommodations for teen parents. Through a similar statute, districts that invest in programs like SAPAR are eligible for reimbursements to help offset the costs.

While only about 30 to 40 students are served each year, there will continue to be a need for special services for teen moms.

“It’s a small population, and it’s gotten smaller,” says Reisdorf. “But kids are going to have sex. A lot of them are using birth control, but it’s ‘I skipped a pill, we were using condoms every single time except for that one night.’ Well, it only takes one night. It really can happen to anyone.”

Without SAPAR and the ability to bring her son with her to school, Perez says she never would have gone back to the classroom.

“I would not be at school,” says Perez. “We’re all so young and don’t know much about kids, and SAPAR prepares us for that and life afterwards. They really help us adapt to being a mom while doing school and also working.”

For Perez, the biggest challenge to going back to school was spending time apart from Tyler. “I was really worried because he was a year and a half, and I hadn’t been back to school and I was going to have to try to put him into daycare,” says Perez. “I knew he had really bad separation anxiety because I held him for the first year of his life. I never put him down.”

With daycare right next door, Perez was able to study while having the peace of mind that she could always go down the hall to check on Tyler.

Teens in the program take classes on parenting and life skills to learn about women’s health and signs of domestic abuse and child abuse. Students also learn how to navigate the court system to deal with paternity tests, custody and child support.

Perez’s parenting class for toddlers explored healthy ways to discipline her son, alleviating her frustration with the terrible twos.

“I was really struggling on what was a good, healthy way to discipline him for his age group. I was like, is this normal? Is his acting like this okay, or is there something wrong with him? Was the way I was feeling normal too? Because he was driving me nuts,” Perez says. “They talked to me a lot about how to deal with his tantrums and now...I think I do a pretty good job.”

For Reisdorf, these anecdotes underscore the program’s importance.

Reisdorf says it’s tough for teens who barely know how to take care of themselves to suddenly have to care for a child. “We’re talking about mostly girls that are from nonsupportive families or families with a single mom, [and] their grandmothers are single moms,” she says. “It’s just sort of a cycle that keeps going on.”

Cheryl DeWelt has partnered with SAPAR for several years in her work with the Madison Children’s Museum, which hosts family nights and gives each SAPAR student a free membership to the museum to encourage baby bonding and play.

DeWelt discovered how tough it is for teenage parents when her daughter, Jesse Robinson, got pregnant and enrolled in SAPAR. “There’s a reason so few teenage moms graduate high school,” says DeWelt. “It’s because they’re not supported in any way. If they go to SAPAR, they have a chance.”

Robinson graduated from high school last June and is now working toward a bachelor’s degree in Madison College’s Liberal Arts Transfer Program. She’s well aware of the challenges she faces.

“Everyone always mentioned the statistics to me, looking at me like a statistic because a lot of teen moms do end up living in poverty,” Robinson says. “It’s a cycle. But it’s nice to break that cycle.”

Perez hopes to break the cycle as well. With the school year ending, her time at SAPAR will end too. She plans to get her GED back in DeForest, where she went to school before she got pregnant, and then attend Madison College to become a dental hygienist.

After next year, SAPAR may not be able to offer as much support as it has. This year, the school district provided $300,000 to the program. According to Rachel Strauch-Nelson, the district’s spokeswoman, this primarily pays for staff. The preliminary 2016-2017 budget earmarks $241,000 for SAPAR, a decrease Strauch-Nelson says is due to a drop in the program’s enrollment over the past couple of years.

The loss of the state grant will hit hard. SAPAR will no longer be able to provide free daycare, the transportation budget will be slashed, and the grant money for college scholarships will disappear. Emily Holder, a spokeswoman for the state’s DPI, says that money for the InSPIRE grant comes from the federal government. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is expected to announce another funding cycle this winter. “If DPI is eligible to apply and we successfully compete for funding, we will run a new grant competition for Wisconsin schools,” Holder says. “The timing of all this is unknown, but [Madison schools] would be eligible to reapply.”

Karyn Stocks-Glover, principal of innovative and alternative education programs, says the district will also look for other grants to make up the funding loss.

But Reisdorf fears for the program’s survival. “I honestly don’t even know if we can do it,” says Reisdorf. “I just hope they keep us around.”

While both Perez and Robinson have the strong family support that makes a college degree more attainable, most SAPAR students come from shakier backgrounds.

“Many of the girls have told me they would either be dead or in jail; some said they would have been a drug addict; many have said they would have just dropped out,” says Reisdorf. “But the fact that they became pregnant made them stand straight up and fly right.”

Talking about what she hopes for her students’ futures brings tears to Reisdorf’s eyes.

“I get emotional. So many of them just have really crappy lives and feel worthless. They put up with crap from their boyfriends and their families. They’re just so much better than that,” Reisdorf says. “We try to give them a little extra oomph. Yes, everybody is saying you’re never going to make it, but you can do it, it’s going to be hard, but you can stick with it.”