Group studies teens

Thirty-nine percent of eighth-grade girls and 77 percent of eighth-grade boys at two area middle schools report having had sexual intercourse. Ann O'Sullivan, interim director of the Primary Care Program and associate professor of Pediatric Care in the School of Nursing, discovered these staggering statistics while studying these schools as samples. On Friday, O'Sullivan and David Hamburg, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, addressed a small group of physicians at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia about this national problem by putting the issues in local terms. In O'Sullivan's middle school sample, 16 percent of eighth graders have tried marijuana. Fifty-five percent have tried cigarette smoking. Sixteen percent of those who had tried marijuana continued to use it. Between 1992 and 1995 the number of eighth-grade cigarette smokers increased by 55 percent. Twenty-three percent of the students she studied scored high on measures of clinical depression. Sixty percent of these were girls. According to O'Sullivan's study, not only has violent behavior among eighth graders increased, but so has the rate of attempted suicides. Despite these statistics, O'Sullivan said she hopes local programs involving parents, schools and the community will take a step toward addressing these concerns. "I know one middle school, which is a community school, had over 300 parents come out on a Wednesday evening for an extravaganza that featured their children performing in areas from cooking to aerobics," she said. She stressed the importance of parental involvement in school, further urging principals and teachers to be active contributors, attentive to individual student needs. "More principals and teachers are redesigning large 800-student middle schools into small learning communities," she said, adding that the effects of individualized attention drastically improve reading and math scores. O'Sullivan noted the urgency and serious nature of the problem, but said she is full of optimism. "Without hope, none of us would get up each day," she said. "Let's talk as much about the problem of depression as we do about dental care and dermatitis. "Let's talk as much about failing grades as we do about fungal infection and flea bites," she added.