Teen Pregnancy Conference Aims To Improve Services

No matter your thoughts about teen pregnancy, the county’s high rate of teenage girls giving birth and teen parents is a fact.

Carole Johnson, the director of Local and Regional Community Programs for the Johnson Foundation, said the community needs to accept teen parents to help the young parents and their children develop well.

That’s the point of Friday’s conference of Racine County Pregnant and Parenting Teens Programs at Wingspread in Wind Point: to bring together the people and the programs in the county that serve pregnant and parenting teens.

“These folks have not ever really gotten together as one group,” she said. “They don’t really know a whole lot about what the others are doing.”

Part of the conference hopes to erase that knowledge deficit. Each group will present information on their programs and services they offer to pregnant and parenting teens.

The second portion of the conference is where the hopes of Johnson, and the other organizers, are pinned, however.

“This is not a duplicated area,” Johnson said of the programs, including the Central Racine County Health Department, which serves Caledonia, Mount Pleasant, Sturtevant and North Bay. “We are trying to look for common ground and find out where there are gaps in services.”

The conference, also sponsored by Racine Unified School District, United Way of Racine County, the Junior League of Racine County and Foundations for Life, will also hopefully produce a comprehensive information booklet that will be designed to be handed out to pregnant and parenting teens in the county.

“There are a lot more teens needing something – having babies,” Johnson said, noting the county’s highest in the state teen birth rate. “We wanted to look at how do we get the best out of every program that we have, and find out what more needs to be done.”