Local governments, facing a loss of state funding, are jockeying for new federal health grants in the hopes of re-establishing their financial hold on teen pregnancy prevention programs.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced a series of grants intended to bolster local teen pregnancy prevention initiatives. Alexandria and Fairfax County hope to snare a chunk of the fresh federal funding.
“Despite the fact that it’s been coming down over the last 10 years, we still have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the state,” Alexandria Councilman Rob Krupicka said.
Roughly 43 out of every 1,000 female teens in Alexandria become pregnant according to the most recent figures — the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in Virginia behind Petersburg and Manassas. The rate among the city’s black and Latino teens is much higher.
In Fairfax the rate is lower, just 11 out of every 1,000 teenage women. But Fairfax has a significantly larger population than Alexandria — on the order of 10 times more girls aged 10 to 19 — so the county’s prevention programs reach far more youths.
“Preventing teenage pregnancy is critical, and to do that we need to provide as much information as possible to young people to help them avoid making bad choices,” Fairfax Board Chairman Sharon Bulova said.
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors recently voted to allow county staff to apply for hundreds of thousands in federal grants, a step Alexandria’s city council took the same day.
“These funds hopefully will provide us with new programs and strategies that will drive that [teen pregnancy] rate down,” said Kerry Donley, Alexandria’s vice mayor and father to five daughters.
The city is scrambling after the state cut program funding from roughly $200,000 to just $65,000, according to Lisa Baker, director of the Alexandria’s office on women.
The city has slashed teen pregnancy rates by roughly a third since the mid-1990s, but local officials worry those gains could be lost unless new funding is secured.
The Department of Health and Human Services will award the grants later this summer.
