newjerseynewsroom.com

BY SUSIE WILSON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

SEX MATTERS

Our state could get very lucky: There's a strong chance that it will become a replication site for the successful Children's Aid Society Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program.

The goal of the Program is to help young people growing up in poverty improve their life's chances and avoid the rough seas of teen pregnancy.

The Carrera program, with offices in New York City, has nine sites in Manhattan and replications in Georgia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Michigan, and Ohio. Recently, it was designated a "Top Tier Youth Program" by The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy's "Top Tier Evidence Initiative," which was started by Congress.

Three thousand youth are presently enrolled in the program and it has a seven-year plan to quadruple the number of young people it serves every year. A replication site in New Jersey, possibly in Newark, is right at the top of the plan's list of potential sites.

I heard the good news this past week at a gala celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program and the man who created and guided it since its inception: Dr. Michael Carrera. It was an uplifting and moving occasion, showing how one person can make a real difference in the world.

As the evening unfolded and a hundred or so of Dr. Carrera's supporters, colleagues, and program graduates milled about the Harvard Club in New York City, I thought about how our paths had crossed and how his program evolved.

I first met Dr. Carrera in 1974 when he was teaching sex education to his daughter's class at a private co-educational school in the city. His energy was legendary – many people refer to him as the original Energizer Bunny – as was his comfort in talking about sex and answering any question that a student asked him.

In the early 1980s, The Children's Aid Society, a highly regarded organization focused on youth development, hired Dr. Carrera to offer sex education classes stressing responsibility for teens and their parents at three centers in the city.

After delivering his messages to rapt audiences, Dr. Carrera began to see that messages of sexual responsibility were insufficient when the youth – mired in poverty and hopelessness – returned to their own neighborhoods and homes. He saw the need to develop a more comprehensive teen pregnancy prevention program that would go beyond sex education. Thus, his program, now judged "Top Tier" by a panel of experts, was born.

Dr. Carrera always refers to his work as "a long-term, above-the-waist approach that is guided by the principle that youth are ‘at promise' not at risk.'"

The program works with boys and girls beginning at the age of 11, six days a week, 50 weeks a year, and follows them through high school and beyond. It helps them avoid too-early pregnancy by offering them after-school, weekend, and summer activities based on seven fundamental components: general education; employment and the opportunity to open a bank account; lifetime sports, including golf, tennis, swimming, squash, and bowling; comprehensive, no-cost medical and dental services; mental health services; self expression, including dance, drama, music, and writing; and family life and sex education! (He believes that when young people can see little hope for themselves in the future, sex education cannot do the job alone.)

Until its recent designation as "Top Tier" that will make it eligible for federal funding, Dr. Carrera has raised only private money from foundations and individuals to support his program. Thousands of young people and their families have participated in the program during its 25 years of existence. It costs less than $10 a day per student and reduces pregnancies by 50 percent in the communities served.

About 70 percent of program participants enter college and have found employment in education, law, medicine, media, science, engineering, and social work. As the program expands to serve more students, Dr. Carrera believes the costs will further decrease.

Guests at the 25th anniversary celebration received a booklet that detailed the high rates (and high costs) of unplanned teen pregnancy: "One hundred teens get pregnant every hour of every day in America. Fifty adolescents give birth and twenty-five adolescents have a pregnancy termination every hour of every day. The taxpayer cost of teen pregnancies, including public assistance, housing, food stamps, health care and other factors, is nearly seven billion dollars annually."

In New Jersey in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, 2,201 young women ages 15 to 17 gave birth and 4,958 young women between the ages of 18 and 19 had babies. Ninety-one percent of these babies were born to unmarried mothers. In Newark in 2006, 695 young women under 20 had babies and 96 percent were not married. Most babies were born to black and Hispanic teens.

Last week, for one brief evening, Dr. Carrera set aside his passion and let he and his accomplishments be celebrated. The crowd applauded and cheered for several hours. The speakers of the evening were numerous and included Jane Fonda, actress, author, and founder of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, which has adopted his approach. When it was Dr. Carrera's turn to speak, he characteristically thanked everybody else for his Program's accomplishments.

When I asked Dr. Carrera for a timetable for the New Jersey site, he e-mailed: "We are doing a capacity analysis of several Newark community-based organizations [with a grant from a private foundation]. Hope to do a full replication in the fall of 2010."

For a community-based organization to be selected, it must accept the entire concept of the Carrera program with its seven components and be willing to have Dr. Carrera serve as the overall supervisor of the replication.

I like to think of the good fortune of the community-based organization that is chosen to replicate the Carrera program and welcomes Dr. Carrera as he begins his next 25 years of devoted work to poor, minority young people in our country. I just hope everyone concerned is prepared to meet the original Energizer Bunny.

Susie Wilson, former executive coordinator of the Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University's Center for Applied and Professional Psychology (now renamed Answer), is a national leader in the fight for effective sexuality and HIV/AIDS education and for prevention of adolescent pregnancy. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .