It’s been one year since the Tulsa Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy launched, and Tulsa's teen pregnancy rate is way down.
Tulsa’s teen pregnancy rate fell 20 percent in that time. Campaign Director Kim Schutz said they’ve set a new goal.
"We'll be gauging our success from 2013 to 2020," Schutz said. "So it will be a seven-year goal of a 25 percent reduction."
In the last two decades, Tulsa’s teen pregnancy rate has dropped 30 percent in all. From 2012 to 2013, it dropped 20 percent. Schutz said to give credit where it's due.
"The teenagers and the young people in town, they're really the ones who deserve the credit, because they're the ones who are making the decisions," Schutz said.
There’s still work to do, as Tulsa’s teen birth rate is still higher than the national average. Part of that was promoting evidence-based sex education, which Tulsa Public Schools has adopted.
The campaign is also broadening its mission.
"We're now collaborating with the Kirkpatrick Family Foundation and the Central Oklahoma Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition there so that we can take this statewide," Schutz said. "It can be a statewide effort because our goal is to bring the whole state down, starting with Tulsa."
Nationwide, teen birth rates are the lowest they’ve been since the 1930s, when they started being tracked. Tulsa and Oklahoma’s rates, however, are still higher than the national rate.
