Helping area teens in a time of need
Notice: Undefined variable: article_ad_placement3 in /usr/web/cs-washington.ogdennews.com/wp-content/themes/News_Core_2023_WashCluster/single.php on line 128
Anyone who says you are in “the best years of your life” when you are a teenager has, more than likely, not been a teenager for quite a long time and has forgotten how awkward, confusing and uncertain those years can be.
Washington County teens trying to traverse that bewildering passage have, fortunately, been able to turn to the Washington Health System Teen Outreach. The program has reached an estimated 230,000 students in the county’s 14 school districts and celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2013. Led by the tireless Mary Jo Podgurski, a counselor and columnist for the Observer-Reporter, the program has been providing a valuable lifeline for teens who become pregnant and has helped prevent others from finding themselves in the same condition.
The importance and impact of Teen Outreach was outlined in a front-page story in this newspaper Monday. In the quarter-century since its founding, the pregnancy rate among 15- to-17-year-olds in Washington County tumbled from 36 per 1,000 to 12 per 1,000. Somewhere between 70 to 120 teenage parents receive mentoring and guidance each year from Podgurski and her staff, and between 88 to 96 percent of teenage mothers who participate in Teen Outreach graduate from high school. That stands in stark contrast to the national average, where less than 40 percent of teenage mothers receive their high school diplomas.
“Even with the lower teenage pregnancy rate, we will always have some teen pregnancy,” Podgurski said.
That being the case, we hope that Teen Outreach will always be there.