High school junior Iryanna Rodriguez, 18, plays with her 9-month-old daughter, Ariyanna Juliett Fuentes, at Lincoln Park High School in Brownsville. The school enrolls teens who are pregnant or parenting and offers a host of resources, including child care., our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
While teenage birth rates have declined significantly across the country in recent decades, Texas remains above the national average,. Out of all births in Texas, around 6% were teen births in 2019 and 2020. Principal Cynthia Cardenas, center, jokes with students about consuming hot sauce as they cover their faces in laughter during lunch at Lincoln Park High School.Other schools in the Brownsville Independent School District have softball teams or drama productions. Lincoln Park has a day care and flexible scheduling. Her students are smart and ambitious, Cardenas said, and they want to be in school — but they’re juggling demands most other high school students couldn’t imagine.
Rodriguez is on track to graduate and wants to become a nurse. She and her boyfriend are planning to have a big family. She said she plans to talk to her children early and often about topics like safe sex, healthy relationships and birth control.A lot of what 18-year-old Jannely Villegas learned about sex came from the TV show “16 and Pregnant.”
She ignored her fluctuating weight and swollen ankles until, one day, she couldn’t anymore. In the middle of the night, she went into the bathroom in her mother’s house, hunched over in pain.“I didn’t feel the pain until after because I guess I was so traumatized,” she said. “When I called my mom in, she almost passed out.”