Statewide Chair Mary McLellan Heritage Community Services Regional Chairs Mariscia Cooper (Pee Dee) Charlie Lybrand (Lowcountry) Lenna Neill (Upstate) Rev. Randy Riddle (Grand Strand) Dr. Roger Rollins (CSRA) Charlotte Valentine-Green (Ace Basin)   Advisory Council Eugene Bacote Darlington School District Dr. Vera Bailey Hilton Head Preg. Care Center Pamela Berry Colleton Fire and Rescue Dr. Vonda Calcutt Lowcountry Ctr. Diabetes Sen. Chip Campsen Charleston/Berkeley Rev. Chuck Coward Charleston Outreach Robin Crosby Colleton County Ligure Ellington Ret.Capt. Charleston City Police Dr. Randy Goings Chiropractic Physician Faye Hill Lowcountry Pregnancy Center & SC Association Pregnancy Care Centers WC Hoecke Fatherhood Practioner Leroy Lewis Upward Bound at Cof C Norman L. Moore, Jr. Colonel, USAFR(Ret) Cyndi Mosteller Comm. for Higher Education Alexia Newman Carolina Pregnancy Center Fred Payne Marriage Savers of Upstate Jerry & Barbara Seymour R& R Marriage Min. Ronald Shoupe Colleton County Dr. A. V. Strong A Better Way, Inc. (Gang Out) Dr. Robert Thomas Pulmonary Medicine Pastor Phil Thrailkill St. Luke UMC Hartsville Kelly Walker Upstate Fatherhood Coalition	December 9, 2010 SC Healthy Family Formation Coalition E-News!   Letter to the Editor ‘unfit to print’ This letter to the editor was submitted to Charleston’s Post and Courier following articles  about teen pregnancies in the high schools:    Isn’t it discriminating to provide a successful teen pregnancy prevention program to some students and to censor that same program from other students?  Parents should insist that programs benefiting other students also be made available to their own children.   On November 14th, school-by-school data of the pregnancies in Charleston County schools published in the Post and Courier demonstrated the crisis of teen pregnancies over the past 3 years.  Simple math reveals that the 4 high schools with the most troubling data averaged 28 pregnancies, while 7 high schools with the least troubling data averaged just 3 pregnancies.    Why is there such a difference in the average number of pregnancies between schools when Comprehensive Sex Education is provided district wide?   The high schools averaging only 3 pregnancies each year added the Heritage Keepers® Abstinence Education program to the Comprehensive Sex Education approach.  However, those high schools averaging 28 pregnancies either discontinued the Heritage Keepers® Abstinence Program more than 3 years ago or refuse to schedule the program for all their students.   No one sex education program fits every student, but every student deserves to know all of their options. Why not add the Heritage Keepers® Abstinence Education program at all middle and high schools in the district so that every student has the advantage of learning from role models about the benefits of abstinence?      The Retreat from Marriage Apparently, pumping more money into our educational system is not enough to improve the social, economic, and emotional welfare of families.    Marriage is the only social institution capable of promoting economic, social and emotional welfare for families. It is the presence of married families that apparently divides the haves and the have-nots putting into motion generational cycles of poverty or prosperity.   Kay S. Hymowitz created a national stir in 2006 when she published Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, making the case that marriage creates a caste system in America with married families doing well, and the non-married families suffering in poverty. The annual State of Our Unions 2010 report was released this week entitled When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America. Middle America now consists of those 58% of adults with only a high-school diploma. They are not choosing marriage, look more like high-school dropouts, are heavily in debt, and raising troubled children.    According to State of Our Unions 2010, it is Middle America’s ‘retreat from marriage’, not education, that has made the difference.    “Today's retreat from marriage among the moderately educated middle is placing the American Dream beyond the reach of too many Americans.   It makes the lives of mothers harder and drives fathers further away from families. It increases the odds that children from Middle America will drop out of high school, end up in trouble with the law, become pregnant as teenagers, or otherwise lose their way.   As marriage—an institution to which all could once aspire—increasingly becomes the private playground of those already blessed with abundance, a social and cultural divide is growing.   It [The retreat from marriage] threatens the American experiment  in democracy and should be of concern to every  civic and social leader in our nation.”       Follow the SC-HFF Coalition on Twitter! Join the Heritage Keepers® Facebook Cause
	The South Carolina Healthy Family Formation Coalition (SC HFF Coalition) is organized and staffed by Heritage Community Services. The SC HFF Coalition promotes child and family well-being by providing opportunities for statewide communication about such issues as: adolescent pregnancy, unwed childbearing, fatherlessness, sexual exploitation of our youth, dating violence and domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, gang activity and youth violence.    Coalition members support healthy family formation initiatives that integrate character-based life skills, teen pregnancy prevention with an emphasis on abstinence-centered education, and the importance of fidelity-within-marriage.   Together we can impact our culture so that forming healthy families becomes a norm, rather than the exception, for South Carolina. Please, forward this E-News to interested friends, family and colleagues and ask them to consider joining the Coalition. Join/Subscribe Unsubscribe PRIVACY POLICY: Information you share will never be sold, rented, or given to any third party. Contact Mary McLellan , Statewide Chairman (843)654-7740 ext.122