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Recently: Climbing high with a safety net

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Staff

By Valarie Schwartz

There’s no denying the difficulties connected with being a teenager. The angst of that age involves charting unfamiliar waters and facing adult situations — sometimes with an adult-looking body — but with the experience and insecurities of a child.

For 12 years, Teens Climb High (TCH), a program of the Women’s Center in Chapel Hill, has endeavored, with assistance from the middle schools, to make this passage easier and safer for some girls in our community.

Girls from families with seriously limited resources may have more exposure to potentially damaging situations, but through school referrals such girls are invited to attend afterschool sessions of TCH from sixth through eighth grade. This year, 41 girls,
divided by grade and school into five groups, meet each week. TCH transforms these middle school years from a time filled with questions and lack of confidence into one where their peers begin to turn to them for answers, frequently continuing beyond their teens.

Julia Thornton was a planner on the founding committee for the program that started in 1996. A needs assessment performed by the Resident’s Council in the public housing communities in Chapel Hill indicated the need for a program that addressed teen pregnancies. Now Thornton’s daughter, Allicson Rone, is a peer leader — a position that eighth-graders in the program can apply and interview for to help coordinate program events.

“When she first started TCH, she felt like she didn’t have any friends and she had low self-esteem,” Thornton said. “When the opportunity came, I signed her up. Now she has more friends and she gives a lot of advice, like a little old lady,” Thornton said with a tickle in her voice.

TCH covers far more serious ground than charm school of my day, and Destini Purefoy, a seventh-grader at Smith, had no qualms about telling me what they learn.

“We learn about STDs, how to say no, where to get birth control, stuff like that,” she said at the TCH Winter Celebration last month. She said that she now has more higher-quality friends than when she began the program. “Me and my mom used to not talk much; now we do,” she said.

Even though Fabiola Castillejos speaks very little English, she sought out the program for her middle daughter, Sonia, 14, wanting to avoid the circumstances she endured with her eldest daughter, now 19.

“I like it a lot,” Castillejos said in Spanish. “It has been helpful for Sonia.”

“They teach us a lot of things,” Sonia said. “We play curriculum-based games and learn about self-esteem and our bodies. I feel like I have a better understanding of life in general.”

Kristi Page, 29, has been leading and watching girls climb high for three years as the director of Adolescent Programs at the Women’s Center, and for a year before that as an intern in the master’s of social work program at UNC.

“I think what really motivated me as an intern was the participants. To see them in the academic year and broader, through the three years we’re together, really impresses me. You really get to form a relationship with the girls. To see them mature and grow into young women means the world to me. I love it.”

This age girl looks for role models of what a woman should be, and having at least two interns from UNC each year gives them choices of whom to emulate, as they become young women.

“I definitely want to be in a school working with young ladies,” said intern Carlie Ewen, 24. “I used to be a teacher. I like the idea of doing preventive measures for some of the things I saw my high school students go through. I really enjoy it.”

Mark your calendars to attend the Women’s Center’s month-long 30th anniversary events beginning with an opening night cocktail reception on March 6 at the center at 210 Henderson St. For details, call 968-4610 or see womenspace.org

Contact Valarie Schwartz at 923-3746 or valariekays@mac.com

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