Adolescent and School Health

I have been working with the ASH unit since 2007. Here is a summary of the projects this research group has worked on.

Project Connect (2005-2010)

Project Connect was a teenage pregnancy and STD prevention study conducted in LAUSD schools. Twelve high schools in areas with STD and pregnancy rates exceeding the Healthy People 2010 [14] goals were matched into six pairs based on criteria including chlamydia and birth rates, school demographics, and number of students, and were invited to participate. To minimize contamination between conditions, the schools in each pair were purposively assigned to either the intervention or control condition so that no intervention school attendance area shared a geographic boundary with any control school. Schools were matched using publicly available data before any staff contact with school personnel.

Keeping It Real LAC (2010 -2015)

Funded through the Office of Adolescent Health, Keeping It Real LAC (KIR) trained 7th and 8th grade teachers in 24 CUSD and LAUSD middle schools in the evidence-based, abstinence-plus curriculum It’s Your Game…Keep It Real! (IYG). KIR demonstrated that, with appropriate training and support, middle school teachers are capable of delivering evidence-based sexual health education that impacts student risk behaviors. The success of KIR and the growing demand for the IYG curriculum provided powerful evidence of its fit in Los Angeles, and paved the way for KIR-T.

Keeping It Real Together (2015-2020)

Keeping It Real Together (KIR-T) is a multi-agency collaborative that works to to reduce and prevent teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among Los Angeles County youth. Our goal is to change the landscape of sexual health in Los Angeles County through school-based sexual health education, parent workshops, improved access to health services, and community mobilization and partnership

For more details on program outcomes and success stories see https://keepingitrealtogether.org/

Related Publications & Presentations

• Effectiveness Evaluation of It’s Your Game; Keep It Real, a Middle School HIV/Sexually Transmitted Infection/Pregnancy Prevention Program (2018)
• Structural Intervention With School Nurses Increases Receipt of Sexual Health Care Among Male High School Students (2017)
• Patterns of Sexual Experience Among Urban Latino and African American Ninth Grade Students (2016)
• Improving the Implementation of a Condom Availability Program in Urban High Schools (2012)
• The Project Connect Health Systems Intervention: Linking Sexually Experienced Youth to Sexual and Reproductive Health Care (2014)