When Dorotha Hogue started teaching at the Florence Crittenton School in 1982, only five brave students were enrolled. The home for unwed mothers of the same name had just closed, and its endowment was made available to provide educational support for teen mothers.
With Title IX mandating that girls – even pregnant ones – be guaranteed equal educational opportunities, Denver Public Schools made room for the new program at Baker Middle School.
But Baker didn’t exactly welcome it. “We had a classroom and a closet, way in the back,” Hogue recalled. The teachers didn’t want the girls to eat lunch with the other kids. “I guess they thought pregnancy was contagious.”
More and more students entered the program, however, and as it grew, they moved from one facility to another until they settled in a beautiful new building at 96 S. Zuni St. four years ago.
Through the upheaval, Hogue was the one constant. But after graduation May 18, the science teacher and nurse will gather her books and 23 years of baby pictures and say goodbye.
As she tells her students, everyone must be prepared to give birth to new possibilities in life. At 64, it’s her turn.
Reared on a farm in a religious community in rural Kansas, Hogue was an unlikely candidate for a career as an advocate for teen mothers. But after college, she worked at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, where she saw desperate women who had been sexually exploited and abandoned. “It was a turning point for me,” she said. So when Denver needed someone to develop the groundbreaking school, she knew just what to do.
“The first goal was to help our students be all they could be,” she said.
But a supportive approach was not always popular. “There was a lot of resistance in the community,” she said. “People would say, ‘Why are we spending money on girls who screwed up?”‘
She was not surprised. Few understand the dynamics of teen pregnancy.
Hogue said that many of her girls are poor and have had little or no parental involvement in their lives. Most came from families that don’t value education, so they dropped out of school, believing they had no opportunities for fulfillment outside of motherhood.
There’s no point in judging them or their families, she said. “Our challenge is to meet them where they are and help them learn how to make good choices.”
That means the first thing she must teach them is how to be self-defined rather than expecting relationships to give their lives meaning. And she works hard to disabuse the girls of their unrealistic, romantic and downright dangerous misconceptions about relationships.
“It’s a very vulnerable age,” she said.
Beyond that, Hogue and her colleagues work to develop a supportive community at Flo-Crit, a nurturing environment where both young parents and their babies can learn and thrive.
Sure, it would be great if the priority was CSAP scores, but it’s not. Their other work is so much more critical.
For those who don’t understand, Hogue offered this story:
A student got pregnant at 13 and was despondent and alone. “When she came to us, she was so shut down, so depressed.”
The first teacher she had that day was Hogue. “I was like her imprinted mother. She followed me everywhere, and she was completely nonverbal.”
Hogue said they “lost her for a while.” Nobody heard from her. But eventually she returned to school. She came up to Hogue’s desk with a small framed photo of Judy Garland as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” She looked at Hogue, the woman who was the closest thing to a mother she had, and uttered her first complete sentence: “I got this for you.”
The picture hangs on the wall in Hogue’s classroom.
“People talk about the cost of running this program,” she said, her eyes glistening as she looked at the picture, “and I think of her and say: ‘Yes, it’s true. It’s expensive to run a program like this.
“‘But just imagine the cost if you don’t.”‘
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
