LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - A bill that would require schools to provide accommodations for pregnant and parenting students advanced Tuesday in the Nebraska Legislature over protests from rural senators who say schools don’t need a mandate.
The bill would require schools to provide spaces for breastfeeding students to express and store milk and task school boards with adopting written policies for how they will accommodate pregnant and parenting students. Senators gave the measure first-round approval with a 29-3 vote.
But rural senators said they’ll work on amendments to strip the bill of what Sen. Mike Groene of North Platte called “feel-good mandates to force more regulation.” They said schools already accommodate pregnant and parenting students because it’s the right thing to do.
“In rural Nebraska, we take care of our own,” Groene said. “We take care of our young mothers. We don’t need regulation from up high.”
Sen. Tony Vargas of Omaha introduced the bill in response to a December study from the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska, which found only 17 percent of schools had set policies for student parents.
Schools cannot discriminate against pregnant students because pregnancy is included in Title IX, the federal gender equity in education law, but across-the-board policies for absences and completing coursework prevent many girls who become pregnant in high school from graduating, he said. The ACLU study found 70 percent of mothers who have children in high school drop out of school.
Sen. Roy Baker of Lincoln, a former school superintendent, said he’s seen a lot of changes in how schools treat pregnancy. Girls were forced to leave school if they became pregnant when he was a child in the 1950s, and his school district created an alternative school in the 1990s that primarily served young mothers and smokers, he said.
“If I were still superintendent, I would craft a rather broad policy,” he said. “Lot of things can be done with technology now. But if young moms want to keep attending their school, we can find accommodations.”
Nebraska’s constitution requires the state to provide free K-12 instruction, not provide special accommodations for some groups of students, said Sen. Steve Erdman of Bayard.
“I don’t know where it’s a constitutional obligation to keep pregnant and parenting students in schools,” Erdman said. “Some of it’s up to the students.”
Criticism of Vargas’s bill was ironic coming from senators who voted Monday to pass a bill creating anti-abortion license plates, said Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks of Lincoln.
“I heard people say ’we’re a pro-life state,’” Pansing Brooks said. “That just means until birth. After that, all bets are off.”
Teen pregnancies have declined nationally for the past 25 years, but Nebraska’s rate of 31.1 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 is still well above the national rate of 24.2. The state needs to recognize that unplanned pregnancies happen and help young mothers become contributing adults, said Sen. Lydia Brasch of Bancroft.
Brasch said requiring schools to provide space for teen mothers to breastfeed is a simple step lawmakers can take but they still need to do more. She said she has heard women pumping breastmilk in bathroom stalls at the state Capitol because they don’t have better places to do it, and providing a safe, sanitary, private space for women to feed their babies is a simple necessity.
“We’re not asking for a room that students can have sex in,” she said. “We’re not condoning or promoting motherhood before marriage.”
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