Middle school to offer birth control

PORTLAND, Maine – School officials on Thursday defended a decision to allow children as young as 11 to obtain birth-control pills at a middle-school health center, saying the new policy is aimed at a tiny number of sexually active students.

King Middle School will become the first middle school in Maine, and apparently one of only a few in the nation, to make a full range of contraception available.

Students would need parental permission to use the city-run health center in the school, but they wouldn’t have to tell them they were seeking birth control.

“People I associate with are looking at me like, ‘Are you guys crazy? Is this really going to happen in Portland?’ ” said school committee Chairman John Coyne, who opposed the new policy in the 7-2 vote by the Portland School Committee on Wednesday night.

There are no national figures on how many middle schools provide such services.

“It’s very rare that middle schools do this,” said Divya Mohan, a spokeswoman for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care.

This week, the health center asked the committee to make birth-control pills available to high school-age students who were still in middle school and unable to access the contraception available at the high school, said Portland School Committee member Robert O’Brien.

School officials said five of the school’s 510 students would have qualified for the birth control under the program last year.

The birth control will be given out only after extensive counseling, and no prepubescent children will get it, O’Brien said.

Portland’s three middle schools had seven pregnancies in the last five years, said Douglas Gardner, director of Portland’s Health and Human Services Department.