Staff at Hurricane's Mission West Virginia are grappling with recent cuts by President Donald Trump's administration to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention grant, the biggest funding source for the nonprofit's Teaching Health Instead of Nagging Kids program. The cuts will halt funding for the program in 2018, two years earlier than the promised five-year span.
With 30 full-time educators serving 19 of West Virginia's most rural counties, the T.H.I.N.K. program provides evidence-based health education to more than 15,000 middle school and high school students, as well as community members and parents every year, according to Jill Gwilt, the program's director.
"We don't just teach about teen pregnancy and [sexually transmitted infections]. We teach about healthy relationships, communication skills, things that can really help these students grow. To take this away is to hurt the youth as a whole," Gwilt said.
With the unexpected cuts, the program will lose more than $3 million in funding - $1.7 million a year - which would have gone toward paying educators' salaries and other overhead expenses associated with operating in more than 100 different sites across 19 different counties, said David Rogers, executive director of Mission West Virginia.
The nonprofit applied for the teen pregnancy grant two years ago, and its application and proposal received the highest score of all 419 national applicants, Rogers said.
Today, the group is one of 81 grant recipients nationwide. Each will see its funding stunted in or before June 2018 under direction of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to a report from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Five of these programs were subject to an immediate halt in funding.
"We just don't know why this is being cut, and we haven't really been provided with any reasonings or rationale," Rogers said. "I'm sure they have their reasons, but for us it's unclear."
Since the cuts didn't come through a regular budgeting process - where members of Congress vote on which federal programs to fund and which to cut - the situation is unusual. Earlier this week, 37 U.S. senators and 149 U.S. representatives signed letters addressed to DHHS Secretary Tom Price questioning the cuts, asking for clarification on how the cuts will be implemented and criticizing the DHHS' priorities.
None of West Virginia's congressional delegation signed the letters, but Rogers said he's been in contact with both Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and Sen. Joe Manchin's offices, as well as Rep. Evan Jenkins' office. None have responded.
"This wasn't their decision. I can't blame them," Rogers said. "If it was their decision, at least I'd have someone to talk to, someone I know I could reach out to. Right now, we just don't know who we should be trying to reach."
Rogers has worked at Mission West Virginia since its founding by Gov. Cecil Underwood in 1997. In his 20 years at the organization, the only comparable scenario he could recall was under the Bush administration in the early 2000s, when Congress voted to end a community-based abstinence education program to implement an alternative abstinence education, contraception and safe sex program.
This time, though, there have not been any proposed alternatives.
"The federal funding, this money, it's investing in these kids, but it's also investing in this state," Rogers said. "The tools being taught through programs like T.H.I.N.K. provide them with skills to make sure they can be healthy, contributing members of our society."
West Virginia has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates, ranking eighth in the nation with about 32 births to teen mothers per 1,000 residents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Even though both the national and the Mountain State's teen birth rate have decreased in the last decade, Gwilt said she believes there is still much work to be done to educate teenagers. With the looming cuts, she said she isn't sure where that education could come from in the future.
For Cara Nelson, a T.H.I.N.K. educator for schools in Boone County, the program's mission is one close to her heart.
"I was them - I was that kid," Nelson said. "When I was their age, though, there was nothing set in place that I could have gone to. Nowhere to help me learn about my next move or what I could do."
At 16 and in high school, Nelson gave birth to her daughter and eventually dropped out. Today, she works to help the students she sees in similar positions, working with them on plans to finish high school, stay attentive and enter healthy relationships.
"Sometimes I kind of feel like I went through that, so I'm able to better help them," Nelson said.
She said only a small percentage of T.H.I.N.K.'s curriculum pertains to sex topics, like contraception, abstinence and sexually transmitted diseases - "maybe 10 percent of what we teach," she said.
Most of the program focuses on big-picture issues, like communication skills that can help the students form healthy relationships and make healthy choices on a number of issues, including sex, drinking and drugs.
Based on those communication lessons, the students learn about peer pressure, signs of abusive and controlling relationships, consent, and family communication.
"If [the DHHS] came out here, if they talked to our students and saw what I see when I teach them, I'm sure they'd change their minds," Nelson said. "This is the future - they are the future of West Virginia. We're counting on them for the state's future, and cutting a program like this does them no good."