A private-public partnership to decrease teen pregnancy

The Denver Teen Pregnancy Prevention Partnership (DTPPP), a coalition of six community agencies and the Mayor's Office of Strategic Partnerships, mobilized community based service providers, city officials, the public school district, and the school based health clinics to deliver evidence-based reproductive health programming to middle and high school students. DTPPP's objectives are to reduce teen pregnancies and decrease STIs in selected regions of the city. Pre-post survey data assessed changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Baseline collaborative data indicated that participants in the DTPPP schools reported engaging in sexual activity approximately four months earlier, were more likely to report using no form of birth control during their last sexual encounter, and tended to be more sexually active than Colorado youth. Individual DTPPP partners demonstrated program related increases in youth reproductive health knowledge, with some additionally demonstrating improvement in related values and skills among youth participants. This presentation will discuss evaluation results for the collaborative as a whole from the two evaluation years completed with over 2000 youth participants on the following topics: 1) Major barriers to success and how were they overcome by the DTPPP Partners 2) The degree to which DTPPP has been successful in changing the knowledge and attitudes of youth who received the programming 3) The degree to which DTPPP has been successful in affecting sexual behaviors such as delaying the onset of sexual activity or increasing the use of condoms. Finally, the potential for collaborative school-based interventions to impact sexually related behaviors will be highlighted.