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Alternative high school to add daycare for students
Roughly a year after it opened its doors for at-risk students in the Mountain Home area, a local alternative school is expected to provide new services for some of those teens.
Addressing the needs of teenage parents enrolled in its classes, the school will add a daycare facility there early this year.
Fundraisers by the students and donations from private individuals and businesses have covered all the costs of the facility. No school district funds were used in its construction. Local social sororities and dairies have helped fix the facility up and provided supplies.
Located in the basement of the current school building on East Jackson Street, the daycare will feature an infant playroom with the a second, adjacent room set up as a designated sleeping area.
The facility was already in demand when the school opened last January, according to Mary Kaye Johnson, who serves as the school's counselor.
"When the doors opened here... there were already teen moms coming to the school," Johnson said.
In fact, the school currently has 10 teenage parents with three more expected to start classes at Bennett Mountain this month. In many cases, she said, those teen parents had dropped out of school because they missed too many days of class since they couldn't find reliable daycare.
Juana Gonzales is among these students. A mother of two children that was also working to make ends meet, she struggled to finish just one year of high school. Despite maintaining top grades in school, the demands at home prompted her to stop going to school three years ago.
Gonzales, like other teen moms, come from families where their parents work. Many times, they don't have grandparents or other family members that could care for their children.
According to Johnson, those enrolled at Bennett Mountain were given a great opportunity and a second chance to finish their education. The learning environment there also gives them a little flexibility to deal with family issues associated with being a parent.
However, the school faculty knew these teens would end up "back at square one" unless they had a dedicated daycare they could afford, Johnson said.
"How great would it be for moms to come to school knowing their children are right there being taken care of on a day-to-day basis? They can focus on their studies and their goals, and we can take one of the stresses out of their lives," Johnson said.
As part of their agreement with the school, the students will be required to visit with their children at lunch, which has its advantages, according to Johnson.
"They get to see their child during the day and don't have to wait for six to eight hours to pass before they get to see them," Johnson said. "They really like that."
"I want our own facility," Gonzales said. "I can go downstairs and make sure they're OK, see if they're fussy. We can get some time together."
In addition, the daycare program will offer the school an opportunity to provide a parenting program for the students. "They can actually earn credits for that," said Bennett Mountain's lead instructor, Stehvn Tesar, who noted that nearly a quarter of the students at the alternative school have children.
"This isn't something where they drop their kids off at one end of the building and go be a teenager the rest of the day. They have to take care of them, feed them, it's a family environment," said school board chairman Jim Alexander.
Efforts to open the facility at Bennett Mountain started earlier this year when the teachers and staff visited Canyon Springs High School in Caldwell. The alternative school has a daycare for the students enrolled there.
"When we took a look at it, we were taken back," Johnson said. "It was just like any other daycare setting... in the community."
It prompted the Bennett Mountain staff to move forward with a similar plan. Last May, Tesar briefed the school board here on that alternative school's progress to date. He included a recommendation to build the on-site daycare facility.
Originally hoping to open the daycare in January, school officials currently expect to open its doors by March.
It's something teens at the school were already discussing when the new school year began, according to Johnson.
"When the moms found out about this daycare program possibly being made available at Bennett Mountain, you could just see the relief on their faces," she said.
These parents know their children will be at the school every day, which takes away a portion of the stress associated with being a teen parent, Johnson added.
The school has relied on fundraisers and public donations to renovate a basement area into a licensed daycare facility. Meanwhile, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare will cover a bulk of the day-to-day operating costs.
Moms using the daycare will sign up for a child care co-payment service through the Department of Health and Welfare. That qualifies those teens to pay for the infant care on a sliding scale system based on their income. It's the same one low-income families throughout Idaho can use to have the state subsidize a portion of regular daycare costs. On that scale, since the students usually earn less than $1,629 a month outside of classes, they'll pay $40 per child with the state covering the remaining $550 that represents the market rate for private daycares in the region.
The program hasn't been universally praised. Some local daycare operators, including some within two blocks of Bennett High School (the old Hacker annex building), have complained that the district is taking away some of their business by running its own daycare for the Bennett students. The district argues that its ability to offer parenting programs for the students with its "in house" daycare is a benefit that can't be matched.
"Part of our job," Alexander said, "is to produce productive citizens. This helps get kids back into school and it gives them life skills. Otherwise, they'd probably wind up just sitting at home living off welfare. Without these kinds of programs, you can't beat that welfare cycle. Schools like this, with programs like this, can prevent that cycle from continuing.
"They graduate, go out and get good jobs and become productive members of society," he said.
Gonzales is one example of what the school can do, and agrees with Alexander.
"Before, I didn't even think it was possible to graduate from high school," she said. "Now, I plan on going to college and getting a major in education and a minor in business and criminal justice. They've shown me the benefits of a college degree. Hard work pays off. Around here we say, 'after the storm comes the rainbow'. Never give up."
Officials at the school recently opened an account at Idaho Independent Bank specifically to cover the renovations costs for the new daycare. Donations to the Bennett Mountain High School effort are tax deductible.
For more information, call the school at 587-3837.