By Ray Lamont
A local author whose works include a novel centering on the challenges faced by a teen mother has offered a scholarship to one of the 18 girls at the center of the student pregnancy issue at Gloucester High School.
Janet Ruth Young of Gloucester, a writer who has crafted stories based on a fictionalized version of Gloucester — called Hawthorne, Mass. — said in a letter to the Times she wants to establish a Janet Ruth Young Mother/Scholar Grant to extend to a young woman who graduates from high school and "can demonstrate that she has made arrangements to go on to college (a two-year or a four-year institution)."
Preference would be shown to a girl "who has an interest or talent in English, creative writing, or journalism," Young wrote. The scholarship would be $1,000, she told the Times yesterday.
Young's works include a novel titled "My Beautiful Failure" — a story in which "an overwhelmed teen mother becomes a regular caller at a suicide hotline," she wrote.
"The girl expects to be able to pick up her life as usual after the child's birth, but finds that even attending courses at the community college must be a deferred dream, nevermind going away to college on the scholarship she'd already planned," Young said.
In her letter, Young expressed concern for the 18 girls who became pregnant at GHS over the past school year — including several, ages 15 and 16, who became pregnant intentionally to become moms together, school and health officials have told the Times.
A Time magazine story that appeared online Thursday referred to the girls as agreeing to a "pact," attributing the term to GHS Principal Joseph Sullivan, though Sullivan has not been directly quoted as using the term. City and school officials, including Mayor Carolyn Kirk, have said they have not seen any evidence of any formal "pact." But school and health leaders have told the Times and other media that a number of the pregnancies were intentional. Several girls reportedly celebrated the news of a positive pregnancy test — and others were disappointed when their tests came back negative.
The story — and word of a "pregnancy pact," as reported by Time — touched off a media furor here last week, with Gloucester front and center on major network newscasts, in newspapers around the world, and in entertainment media such as The Tonight Show, where host Jay Leno cracked jokes referring to Gloucester and the pregnancies Thursday and Friday night.
In her letter — which will appear in full on the Opinion Page in tomorrow's Times — Young expresses concern over the "media circus" and offers ideas on potential causes for the problem. Her scholarship offer, she indicated, is aimed at encouraging the girls' future.
"If a girl is not performing well academically and doesn't have a family history of higher education, she might view pregnancy as a way to solve the tricky problem of what to do with the rest of her life," she wrote. "The child's birth could become a good excuse for dropping out of high school. No more homework, no more grades, no more nasty social cliques, and no more early classes.
"... I wish they didn't view the baby as a way to avoid decisions, shun further education, and say goodbye forever to careers," she said.
Young's scholarship offer also comes after school and health care officials noted last week that none of the pregnant girls dropped out of school.
Those officials said the presence of a day-care center in Gloucester High School played a big role in that success; other people, however, have questioned the school's providing of a day-care center in which student-mothers can place their young children, saying it facilitates teen motherhood and thus sends mixed messages to students.
"This scholarship is certainly not any kind of reward for getting pregnant, it's a reward for staying in school," Young said yesterday. "I'm impressed that none of these girls have dropped out, I think their persistence is admirable, and I want to help them continue their education."
Ray Lamont can be reached at rlamont@gloucestertimes.com
The full reports
See all of the Times' coverage of the Gloucester High School pregnancy spike, from March through today at www.gloucestertimes.com.
