Trump’s trims put Colorado program at risk
Colorado Youth Matter is informed its grants will be eliminated early.
A program working to prevent unwanted teen pregnancy in Colorado and that receives 75 percent of its funding from federal grants is in jeopardy of closing after the Trump administration decided to end those grants early.
Colorado Youth Matter is one of 84 programs across the country to learn in recent weeks that its funding will be pulled next summer — two years earlier than expected. The federal grant provides the organization with about $750,000 per year.
“For us, as an organization, it’s critical,” Andrea Miller, the group’s executive director, said of the federal funds.
Colorado Youth Matter works with schools in Denver and Aurora, as well as with a program at Children’s Hospital Colorado, to teach what it calls “comprehensive” sex education. That includes providing information about both abstinence and birth control, while also teaching teens about sexually transmitted infections, healthy relationships, consent and the services available at school-based clinics.
Last fiscal year, the organization trained more than 350 teachers and school health staffers and its curriculum reached about 1,300 students. Miller said the program hoped to expand this year and into the future.
“What we provide,” she said, “is the ability to have these healthy choices.”
Over the past decade, Colorado has been a national model for how to reduce the teen pregnancy rate. Between 2009, when the state launched the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, and 2014, the teen pregnancy rate and teen abortion rate both dropped by roughly 50 percent. A report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, looking at declines in teen birth rates between 2007 and 2015, found that Colorado ranked fifth nationally for the reduction in urban counties and second nationally for the reduction in rural counties.
Dr. Larry Wolk, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said the grant cuts won’t impact the state government-based programs, such as the family-planning initiative. Instead, the cuts affect so-called communitybased programs such as Colorado Youth Matter that receive money through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. The program distributes about $100 million annually and had expected to reach about 1.2 million teens during the current round of grants, which began in 2015.
Wolk said state health officials asked federal counterparts why the grants were being discontinued but didn’t receive an immediate answer.
“We’re in the dark as to why this change is occurring,” he said.
In a statement, HHS said officials decided to pull grants from the current recipients after recipients in a previous round of grants didn’t show sufficient success. The department said studies concluded that 73 percent of the initial projects had either no or negative impact on teen sexual behavior.
“States and communities implemented curricula on the TPP program’s approved list in good faith, having been told that the endorsed programs could be expected to produce positive results consistently,” the HHS statement reads. “However, the very weak evidence of positive impact of these programs stands in stark contrast to the promised results, jeopardizing the youth who were served, while also proving to be a poor use of more than $800 million in taxpayer dollars.”
But Ron Haskins, the codirector of the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families, called the HHS statement misleading.
His own analysis of the studies on the first round of grant recipients found that about 40 percent had at least one positive impact. In addition, the current round of grant recipients will have looked at the previous results and tried to improve their programs based on that information, he said. Studies on the effectiveness of the current programs are ongoing.
“We don’t really know how those programs are doing,” Haskins, who was a senior adviser to President George W. Bush on welfare policy, said. “For the administration to say those programs don’t work is not true.”
More significantly, Haskins said pulling the grants dismantles the centerpiece of a federal effort to craft better social policies. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program was established in 2010 under the Obama administration as one of the first national “evidence-based” policy projects. All of the curricula funded by the program have been proven previously to work somewhere. All of the grant recipients are trying to replicate that success by implementing the curricula in new locations.
“We’ve never had anything like this before, that’s so systematic and is gaining evidence,” he said. “Part of the issue here, I think, is that these are Obama’s initiatives.”
In its statement, HHS did not say whether it planned to fund new teen pregnancy prevention efforts.
“Decisions by the Department regarding the TPP program will be guided by science and a firm commitment to giving all youth the information and skills they need to improve their prospects for optimal health outcomes,” the statement reads.
Miller, meanwhile, said she has been talking with private organizations to see if they can make up for the funds Colorado Youth Matter is about to lose. She said she hopes that the program can continue — and that the research being done on it will show it is successful.
“This is working,” Miller said. “We know comprehensive sex education works.”