Student Loans are SO last season.

Nowadays, There are lots of ways for middle school and high school age girls to save up money to pay for their college dreams.
Working a part time job.
Participating in programs or competitions that give scholarships and grants.
Student Loans.
And now, for some North Carolina girls, using birth control!

Teen girls living near the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, can now enroll in a program called College Bound Sisters, which pays them to not get pregnant.

The program is geared towards helping young women with dreams of college actually reach those goals.
Hows it work?
The program is split up into two separate age groups, girls ages 12-14 and girls ages 15-18. Each group meets for an hour and 30 minutes once a week, where the girls get guest speakers, food, field trips, demonstrations, and an "assortment of media coverage".
There is also a quarterly meeting held for the parents of these girls, to teach them about issues adolescent females face today.
And here's the icing on top of the celibacy cake:
make $1.00 everyday you're not pregnant!
That's right!
The girls will be paid $365.00 a year to not have babies. Every week, $7.00 goes into an account and cannot be accessed until she is enrolled in college.

Granted, there are eligibility requirements:
-You must be a female, between the ages or 12-16 in order to enroll
-you must want to attend college
-you must be willing to attend the weekly meetings
-you must not have never been pregnant
-you must have a sister who has had a baby before the age of 18

Plus, there are incentives!
girls receive $5.00 at meetings to cover travel expenses, as well as other incentives being offered periodically to get them to stay in school, etc etc.


Check it out here

So, this program is very...interesting, and I'm sure controversial.
Pros would be that it provides the opportunity for many young girls to making money, being educated, form relationships, and it keeps them out of trouble once a week.
Cons being.....a lot of things.
Why should we pay a young woman to not get pregnant?
What kind of world are we living in where people want to pay kids to go to school, to not have kids, whatever it is.
They are kids, there are plenty of adults who cant afford to have kids and still have goals that they want to achieve, and theyre not getting paid.

The program is run by 3 R.Ns. Only two are pictured, and they both appear to be white, female, and old (and im sure by the standards of the girls who would be attending the program, grandmotherly)
Now, maybe this is racist, maybe this isnt, but the picture posted on the website of girls in the program feature all african american girls. I dont know about being african american, but the picture make it appear as though those females are having children more or at least enrolling in the program more. Im not saying that these three women are not qualified. What I am saying is when I was 13 year old if I walked into a program and the instructors were old enough to be my grandma, I probably wouldve hated it, at least until I got to know the instructors. Also, if they did have someone who was maybe, say....a success story from the program, a young, college attending woman for the girls to look up to, maybe that would be beneficial. Someone who is a role model, who knows the movies, music, celebrities, and issues that these girls see in their day to day lives?

On one hand, I do understand that by these girls having siblings who had children at a young age, they might think that it is "acceptable"behaviour. However these girls are also seeing a lot of the hardships their sisters are going through too.
I understand that they cant afford to pay everyone, but I feel like a lot of the girls who really should be in this class, wouldn't be because they don't have a sibling who had kids at a young age or because their parents wouldn't let them.

While I am a very firm supporter of sex education in schools, I don't think students should be paid for anything other than at a job. For 100s of years there have not been incentives for students making the right decisions. I didn't get pregnant in high school and you know what I got? The same things that everyone else who didn't get pregnant in high school got; a chance to continue my life without having a kid.
Why should I get paid for that?
The fact that I dont have the added expense, stress, and responsibility of having a child is payment enough.

And why is it fair that boys cant be in the program?
It takes two to tango.
Girls arent just going out and making babies without a guy around.
If a young man and a young woman had a baby, and the man did not help in raising the baby, he would be the bad guy, right?
So shouldn't he receive the same opportunities as his female counterpart?
I think thats only fair.

Whether you agree or disagree, the program exists, and Im interested to see in later years if teen pregnancy rates have been affected by this program.

Really?
Yeah, that just happened.