This past week Gillian and I hosted a voter registration drive at a high school in Dallas. The school is a member of the beleaguered Dallas Independent School District (DISD), where Superintendent Michael Hinojosa is fighting for his job as he faces a $64 million budget shortfall, the pending layoff of over 700 teachers this month, unchecked staff who allegedly purchased millions of dollars of personal goods on school credit cards, and a dropout rate of 55.6%.

The school is predominantly made up of Hispanic and African-American students. We were situated in the computer lab, which also serves double duty as a ninth grade English classroom. While we waited for the drive to begin, we browsed around the classroom. We were appalled at the surroundings - grade school sized chairs and tables (more suitable for kindergarteners) with many broken legs being propped up by mountains of text books, cast-off computers (i.e., hand-me-downers) circa 1980's, well-worn text books that appeared to be more than twenty years old, and bulletin boards that displayed dated materials from the 1990's.

And then there were the English teacher's classroom rules for behavior. The rules were typed on a single sheet and contained many grammar and punctuation errors. But perhaps the most shocking visual was yet to come, as Seniors' Night began. The halls and classrooms were filled with teenagers with their children in tow - high school senior after high school senior, proudly carrying their little ones from classroom to classroom. Dads carrying car seats under one arm and their baby in the other arm. Moms pushing strollers.

Oh, they were proud of their offspring. At one point I noted to Gillian, "It's as if they are carrying their trophies or showing their badge of honor."

The scene made me pause and think as I asked myself, "How are these kids going to succeed? The parents and their children - what do their futures hold as they leave school in June?"

And then I was reading today's Sunday paper - the Parade Magazine - and found out the shocking news. The U.S. teen-pregnancy rate is about 7.5%. One in three teenaged girls in the U.S. will get pregnant. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the U.S. teen-pregnancy rate is almost twice as high as Britain and four times higher than Sweden and France.

Why these startling statistics? Because U.S. teenagers are less likely to use contraception than their European counterparts. And the Alan Guttmacher Institute's study found no strong evidence that abstinence programs work.

Well just maybe we need to rethink our programs and adopt European programs that do work!

Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive