142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

302116
Offering Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs through Agency/School Partnerships: Challenges in Access, Coordination and Evaluation

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Monday, November 17, 2014

Ashley Philliber, MS , Philliber Research Associates, Accord, NY
Susan Philliber, PhD , Philliber Research Associates, Accord, NY
Sally Brown, PhD , Philliber Research Associates, Winters, CA
Carole Miller, M.Ed , Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest, Seattle, WA
Willa Marth, MAT , Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest, Seattle, WA
One of the leading causes of school dropout in America today is early pregnancy. One-third of school dropouts cite this reason for leaving school.  Schools have recognized that preventing early pregnancy is not only a worthy goal for the well-being of their students but important for the school as well.  Community agencies often try to partner with schools to offer pregnancy prevention programs, sending their staff into the school to offer an after-school or in-school program or by training school personnel to incorporate the program into a suitable class (like health).  This would seem like a “win-win” partnership providing the community agency access to young people while giving the school an evidence-based program to prevent teen pregnancy.  But often the differing structures, politics, schedules, and goals of schools and community groups make the process frustrating.  This paper discusses the experiences of the authors as evaluators of more than 100 such partnerships, detailing how they struggled with and solved issues of 1) access (school agreements, school board cooperation, reaching the most at risk students); 2) politics (community views, program approvals, handling findings); 3) coordination (parental and student consent, scheduling, mobility, teacher and agency staff pairings), and 4) evaluation (randomization, collecting data, tracking students).   The goal is to share lessons learned about how to handle these everyday issues in such partnerships.

Learning Areas:

Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Public health or related research
Social and behavioral sciences

Learning Objectives:
Explain lessons learned about how to have effective agency/school partnerships.

Keyword(s): Community-Based Partnership & Collaboration, Youth

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: Ashley Philliber, an Evaluation Coordinator with Philliber Research Associates, has some 15 years experience in evaluation and research. Her current work focuses on the evaluation of nonprofit programs, particularly those in teen pregnancy prevention. She has taught courses on evaluation internationally and has worked on several national projects in youth development, teen pregnancy, school achievement, journalism programs, community development, and other areas of human service delivery.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.