May 25, 2007

Abstinence program goes out with a party

Hayden, ID - Panhandle Health District (PHD) and high school students from Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls will celebrate another successful year of PEAK-Peers Encouraging Abstinent Kids-at a Skate Plaza party May 29.

    The party also will mark the end of the 10-year-old peer-mentoring program that helped to reduce significantly the teen pregnancy rate in the five northern counties. PEAK began in Bonners Ferry in 1996, a year after the state's pregnancy rate for teens 15-17 years old hit 32.9 per 1,000. After the program had operated for eight years, the state's pregnancy rate for teens 15 to 17 years old dropped to 20.9 per 1,000.

    "It's such a great program," said Brittany Baeumel, the PHD health education specialist who coordinates PEAK. "I hope that it somehow continues with school and community support."

    PEAK and the Governor's Council on Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention are among several programs and councils Gov. Butch Otter has decided to cut this year.

    Built on the premise that teens are more comfortable discussing sex with someone their own age, PEAK relies on high school students to deliver its abstinence-based message to middle school students. Older teens learn to help younger teens understand the risks of early sexual involvement. They share with younger students coping strategies to resist peer and social pressure to have sex and teach them how to say no.

    High school students pledge abstinence from sex, drugs and alcohol while they're mentors.

    "Middle school kids get the most out of it when they see their mentors outside of school still modeling the behavior they're promoting," Baeumel said. "But I think high school students get even more out of it than the middle school students they mentor."

    This year, 40 Post Falls High students and 55 Coeur d'Alene High and Lake City High students are PEAK mentors. They visit middle school health classes weekly for six weeks and answer the younger students' questions about high school, social pressures and more. Angie Whalen, a Post Falls High sophomore, is a PEAK mentor this year.

    "When I was in eighth grade, I really enjoyed the mentors," Whalen said. "I wanted to be a mentor when I reached high school and now I am. I really want to do it again and I hope I can."

    PEAK is in 11 northern Idaho high schools and 14 middle schools at no cost to the school districts.

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