6 Denver high schools may offer birth control

DENVER — At least once a day, a teenage girl walks into North High School's health clinic, wanting to find out whether she's pregnant.

Frequently, it turns out she is.

The city's teen birth rate is more than double the statewide rate of 24.3 births per 1,000 girls age 15 to 17, and Denver school officials are considering a proposal to dispense contraceptives in its six high-school-based health clinics, which serve the district's most impoverished students.

The recommendation by a task force studying the future of the clinics comes shortly after a highly publicized case in Portland, Maine, where a local school board allowed a clinic to dispense birth control to middle-school students.

The Denver proposal would affect only high school students, but it has raised similar concerns: Opponents say the easy availability would encourage youngsters to have sex.

Proponents counter that sexually active teens should have as much access to birth control as possible.

"While it's not a panacea to unplanned pregnancies, access is extremely critical," said Lori Casillas, executive director of the Colorado Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Parenting and Prevention.

Most of the country's school-based health clinics do not dispense contraceptives, said Divya Mohan, spokeswoman for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care. Some school districts prohibit it.

That's the case for Denver Public Schools, whose students can visit school-based clinics for pregnancy and STD testing. But if they want condoms or birth control pills, officials refer them to an off-campus community health center, said Dr. Steve Federico, who oversees the school clinics for Denver Health. (The agency also runs a hospital and other community health centers.)

The problem for a lot of students is getting there, said Janine Solano, a physician assistant at North High School in northwest Denver.

"They'll say, 'I couldn't find a ride. I couldn't find a friend to take me. My parents are really strict and I couldn't get away,' " Solano said.

A 43-member task force charged with defining the future of the clinics cited those factors when it recommended that the clinics begin offering contraceptives.

Solano said she would continue to counsel students that abstinence is the only foolproof birth control method. But, she said, "for children who choose not to do that, we need to take care of those kids."