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Maine Middle School To Make Birth Control Available

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By JERRY HARKAVY, The Associated Press

Published: October 19, 2007

PORTLAND, Maine - School officials on Thursday defended a decision to allow children as young as 11 to obtain birth-control pills at a middle school health center, saying the new policy is aimed at a tiny number of sexually active students.

King Middle School will become the first middle school in Maine, and apparently one of only a few in the nation, to make a full range of contraception available, including birth-control pills and patches.

Students would need parental permission to use the city-run health center in the school, but they wouldn't have to tell them they were seeking birth control.

'People I associate with are looking at me like, are you guys crazy? Is this really going to happen in Portland?' said school committee Chairman John Coyne, who opposed the new policy in the 7-2 vote by the Portland School Committee on Wednesday night.

There are no national figures on how many middle schools provide such services. Most middle schoolers range in age from 11 to 13.

'It's very rare that middle schools do this,' said Divya Mohan, a spokeswoman for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care.

This week, the health center asked the committee to make birth-control pills available to high-school-age students who were still in middle school and unable to access the contraception available at the high school, said Portland School Committee member Robert O'Brien.

School officials said five of the school's 510 students would have qualified for the birth control under the program last year.

O'Brien, whose district includes King Middle School, said the notion that young children can now easily get birth-control pills is flat wrong.

'They don't just have a giant punch bowl full of pills,' he said.

The birth control will be given out only after extensive counseling, and no prepubescent children will get it, O'Brien said.

Coyne said a physically mature, savvy 11-year-old could get the birth control once the permission slip to use the center is signed.

'I think she could navigate the system,' he said.

Portland's three middle schools had seven pregnancies in the past five years, said Douglas Gardner, director of Portland's Health and Human Services Department.

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