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...South Carolina is the only state in the country that mandates a certain number of hours that schools must devote to sexuality education. In 2004, Jewels' school district in Anderson County decided to do even more. The district partnered with a local teen-pregnancy-prevention organization to implement an innovative relationship and sex-education curriculum that runs through all three years of middle school and into high school, as well as an after-school program for at-risk kids. And that's when the life of Jewels Morris-Davis began to turn around...
...South Carolina has reflected the overall trend of falling teen-sex statistics: birthrates in the state fell 27% from 1991 to 2006. But it still lags behind, with teen birthrates almost 12 points above the national average. Those numbers alarmed a group of women at the local United Way in Anderson County, a semirural, conservative community that is home to 175,000 people. So in 2004 they contacted Impact, a teen-pregnancy-prevention organization in the area, to find out what they could do to help. "They had a curriculum," remembers Carol Burdette, executive director of United Way of Anderson...
...South Carolina passed the Comprehensive Health Education Act, which requires sexuality education from elementary school through high school, including at least 12.5 hours of "reproductive health and pregnancy prevention education" at some point during a student's high school years. It doesn't limit teachers to abstinence-only lessons; rather, it allows each school district to make its own decisions about what sex education should involve. But with federal funding limited to abstinence-only programs, local districts have a powerful incentive to restrict their sex-education curriculum...
...social and economic costs of teen pregnancy. Researchers working with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy have calculated that in 2004 alone, teen pregnancies cost U.S. taxpayers more than $9 billion in health care, foster care, public assistance and lost tax revenue. The cost for South Carolina taxpayers that year came to $156 million...
...started my career more than two decades ago as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, working with churches to help neighborhoods that had been devastated by plant closings. Block by block, we fought to create job-training programs, improve housing conditions and help people live their lives with some measure of dignity. And eventually, I realized that I wasn't just helping other people - through service, I also found a community that embraced me, a church to belong to and the direction I'd been seeking. Through service, I found that my own story fit into...