SEQUIM — Angela O’Neil says she knows nearly a dozen girls who became pregnant before graduating from high school.
One friend gave birth to a baby boy six weeks ago. The teenage mother won’t graduate on time, O’Neil said, since “she’s dedicating her life to her son.”
O’Neil did her senior project on teen pregnancy, in Sequim and beyond, and presented it to the Sequim School District Board of Directors on Tuesday night.
She showed a photo of her friend’s infant, who was born weighing just 4 pounds 5 ounces.
O’Neil, 17, was calm and eloquent as she narrated her PowerPoint slides and cited statistics and case histories gathered on the World Wide Web.
She began with a list of reasons to postpone pregnancy, which concluded with: “You’ll have time to be a teen.”
Internet research indicated, too, that fewer than a third of teenage mothers receive their high school diplomas, and some school districts elsewhere in the nation don’t allow pregnant girls to continue coming to school.
“Our district is working very well, I’ve found, with teens who’ve become pregnant,” O’Neil added.