GEORGIA is in the midst of a highly publicized budget shortfall and yet it persists in throwing money away.
No, we’re not referring to it just having spent $600,000 on a hangar lease at Charlie Brown field in the metro to house its fleet of seven state airplanes, though that’s certainly amazing given what is being taken away from ordinary citizens in all the budget cutting. Say, Sonny (Gov. Perdue has a pilot’s license), that couldn’t have anything to do with your being passed up for vice president, could it? Didn’t Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP nominee, get rid of her state’s aircraft?
Rather, the reference is to Dr. Wade Sellers, the district health director, in announcing a new round of state-forced budget cuts that are definitely not his idea or choice, admitting the obvious: The Teen Plus Center basically no longer exists.
Sellers’ reference was to the possibility of the Floyd County Health Department now losing $150,000 in federal money “for family planning activities designed to keep people off the welfare rolls.” That’s what Teen Plus did, including a lot more such as prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, primarily among teen-agers. Did it so well, in fact, that Floyd County became a sort of a statistical island of comparative health in what amounts to sea of STDs and teen pregnancy that comes near matching third-world numbers.
TEEN PLUS, which now continues in name only and won’t be able to provide the sort of numbers needed for outside funding grants, was pretty much erased when its 11-year director and nurse practitioner, Marilyn Ringstaff, was terminated. Nobody’s talking about that but apparently she annoyed state-level officials by advocating for her clients.
Besides the federal money, the Teen Plus Center was a big source of revenue for the Floyd County Health Department as it was paying rent — double what it paid when located in the downtown — when made to relocate to the new health department building. That was made possible because Teen Plus received Medicaid compensation for much of what it did. Indeed, it was operationally largely self-supporting. It also got gobs of donated pharmaceuticals for which otherwise the health department would have had to pay.
Obviously, this compounds the health department’s budget problems. Not only is it losing even more state funding, it is also losing grants and rent revenues.
Certain portions of the religious right have long been seeking Teen Plus’ demise. Indeed, they managed to knock off pretty much all of the state’s once-existing teen development centers, some of which had medical components, and really hated places like Teen Plus that (horrors!) provided birth-control to the sexually active.
Just informatively, even now at the federal level some Republicans are trying to eliminate birth-control funding, equating it with abortion (preventing conception is apparently equal to terminating a pregnancy in their eyes).
AMUSINGLY, Ms. Ringstaff was about the biggest professional-tier advocate of abstinence to be found, once having said: “Abstinence is all we talk about around here. But some of our teens are not abstinent. They have to make that decision themselves. We can’t make that decision for them. People don’t want to believe the risks these teens are taking.”
Having seen, and treated, those consequences for so long Ms. Ringstaff has the properly rational view of such matters. It’s a shame so many still can’t see that abstinence and birth control are two sides of the same coin. There’s only one coin, and keeping it from being wasted is the only objective.
By the way, only this past March, in a detailed presentation of the County Board of Health before she was terminated (without that board’s knowledge), Ms. Ringstaff provided this information among a lot more:
“The Teen Plus pregnancy statistics for the last two years were discussed showing that in 2006 some 101 total pregnancies were reported in Floyd County 15-17-year-old girls. Of these, only 11 pregnancies occurred in teens enrolled at Teen Plus. No repeat pregnancies were reported in enrolled Teen Plus patients vs. 11 in non-Teen Plus patients. The same phenomenon was noted in 2007 and in previous years. The majority of pregnancies occurring in Floyd County teen-agers continue to occur in teens who have never had access to the Teen Plus Center.”
ONE SUPPOSES local taxpayers can now prepare to support a whole lot more babies on welfare. At the same time, abstinence supporters will shortly be gaining a new argument: Don’t have sex; almost everybody out there is likely to be carrying an untreated sexual disease.
The local County Commission, although long dominated by Republicans, has laudably supported the Teen Plus operation as it places the good of the community over the stridency of certain party members.
One notes with mild bemusement that Dr. Sellers, in noting the possible $150,000 federal funding loss, asked the commissioners to add $200,000 to their support for the health department’s work. The commission, of course, has money problems of its own.
Perhaps it should cut a deal with Dr. Sellers: Find a way to bring Teen Plus (and Ms. Ringstaff) back fulltime, get the federal $150,000 back, and additional county support might indeed do some good. If not ... well, isn’t the county just being asked for funds that bad, politically motivated policy decisions at the state level have thrown out the window?
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