The teenagers crammed into a social worker’s small office are role-playing.
Robert Montano pretends that he has been dating a girl for four months. Jeff Rodriguez and Jose Mata try hard to dig into Montano’s love life.
“Are you hitting it?” Rodriguez asks, meaning is Montano having sex with his girlfriend.
“None of your business,” Montano tells him.
“Come on, how long is she going to make you hold out?” Mata asks.
“It’s not like that,” Montano says. Several minutes later, when neither Mata nor Rodriguez can shake Montano from his stance, the exercise ends.
It’s a lesson in real life, and it’s part of what Rodriguez, male outreach coordinator with Ft. Worth’s Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Inc., teaches during the yearlong weekly class called Compass.
He wants the teenagers with the close-cropped haircuts and baggy pants to respect themselves and to respect others. He wants them to have motivation, confidence and the skills to make good decisions as they enter manhood.
He also wants to prevent any of them from becoming fathers before they are men.
“Part of our philosophy is that kids know having sex causes pregnancy, and it’s not a good idea,” says Rodriguez, who teaches the 8th-grade class at Meacham Middle School in Ft. Worth. “But they do it for a lot of different reasons. I want them to choose not to get a girl pregnant, not because I said so but because it is the right thing to do.”
The teens in the class come each week because one of their teachers has decided that they could benefit from what the young social worker has to offer. None is a father. All live in the tough city neighborhoods surrounding the school–places where teens have difficult choices to make.
Programs such as Compass have blossomed across the nation, according to Freya Sonenstein, one of several authors of a recent Urban Institute report: “Involving Males in Preventing Teen Pregnancy.”
The programs have been spurred in part by public-policy changes to hold males more accountable for their children and by a fatherhood movement that advocates males taking more active roles in their children’s lives, says Sonenstein, an analyst at the Urban Institute.
“When we are moving to a child-support policy that holds men responsible, we should at least be trying to give them resources to prevent unwanted pregnancies,” she says. The report cites such programs nationwide, including Ft. Worth’s Compass, which is funded through a Tarrant County AIDS Partnership grant and other sources.
In the past, Sonenstein says, teen pregnancy-prevention programs have been aimed exclusively at females. It’s not that experts didn’t want to involve males, “but it was a matter of limited resources. If there isn’t enough family-planning money to go around, you tend to direct it to those who are the most affected by the problem.”
There is evidence those attitudes are changing. Since the report was published in December, the Urban Institute has printed and sold out of more than 200,000 copies, she says.
“There are a lot of creative, innovative people trying different approaches around the country. One of the clear themes that have surfaced is that you can’t just get up and lecture to a group of guys about how they have to be responsible,” Sonenstein says.
“All of these programs are trying to get the kids to redefine who they are, what it means to be men and to work on relationship skills,” she says.
Back at Meacham, the seven teenagers in Rodriguez’s class are doing just that as they take turns introducing themselves to a visitor. Eric Montes, an 8th grader, goes first, extending a hand, his eyes cast downward, his voice barely audible. Before he has finished offering his name, he is diving for the safety of his seat.
“OK, when you meet someone, especially an adult, you want to make eye contact and you want to give a firm handshake,” Rodriguez says. “It’s a sign of respect.”
After the students finish their introductions, it’s Rodriguez’s turn to talk.
“Hey, check it out. True story,” he says. On a recent weekend, he was driving with a carload of students and drove through a changing traffic light. In his rearview mirror, Rodriguez saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser and pulled over.
“I treated the officer with respect. I showed him my license and my insurance card. I told him I knew I was wrong. I should have stopped. And you know, he said, `All right, all right. No ticket.’
“I didn’t slam him. I didn’t dog him. You know when someone is dogging you out, you want to dog back. But I didn’t. I showed him respect. At least be man enough to admit what you did wrong. And sometimes when you treat someone with respect, just maybe you might get some back,” he says.
