GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - Zane Ball is just a few weeks old, but already he's been kicked out of school -- barred from the campus of his mom's high school.
Mom is 16, a sophomore at Bloomingdale High School in Van Buren County.
The dispute in this tiny town is raising questions about how schools across West Michigan handle student moms -- as teen pregnancies start to rise after years of decline.
It was on a recent visit to school to pick up homework that Kera was told by her principal, Rick Reo, that she and her then-week-old son, Zane, had to leave, that they were glamorizing teen pregnancy.
"When I came here as principal three years ago, one of the first issues brought up to me from teachers at a staff meeting was students bringing their babies to school during the school day," Reo later wrote her in an e-mail. "The teachers felt that it was disruptive to have a student arrive at their door with a new baby while they were trying to conduct class.
"Furthermore, since babies are so darn cute, teachers felt like teen motherhood was being glamorized because what students saw was the new teen mother and her baby being showered with all kinds of attention, oohs & ahhs, etc. The staff felt pretty strongly that we should not be sending this type of message to the student body. We decided at that point that we would not allow students to bring in their babies to show off to other students during the school day."
She could come back, he told her, but not with Zane.
Her mom -- Zane's grandmother -- hopes their fight with school administrators leads to change -- maybe even programs for teen moms.
"I think they would kind of like the teen moms, especially, to maybe just go away," the grandmother, Teresa Pountain, said.
But, this issue goes beyond Bloomingdale:
With teen pregnancy on the rise again in Michigan and the U.S. -- after 14 straight years of declines -- some cash-strapped schools struggle to deal with babies giving birth. …...more
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