Letter from Stein Member and Executive Director of Metro TeenAIDS Adam Tenner

Dear Fellow DC Youth Advocates:

No matter what issue you work on, I need you to take action to ensure that we preserve the health of DC youth. Whether your issue is asthma, unintentional injuries, teen pregnancy, smoking, nutrition, obesity, drugs and alcohol, LGBT youth, HIV or something else, this impacts us all.

I recently spoke with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Division of Adolescent School Health (DASH) who informed me that the 2009 implementation of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS) was deemed unusable. DC's data will not be part of any CDC publication or analysis.

According to my conversation with Dr. Laura Kann from DASH, DC needed to achieve a response rate of 60% of its targeted sample size in order to meet the CDC requirement for accurate, weighted data. DC only managed to reach 36%. In other words we did not meet their requirement - an embarrassment for the city and a huge setback in our city's attempt to "measure" our successes.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is responsible for implementation of the YRBS and has clearly not taken the task seriously. I am concerned that Dr. Briggs and her staff do not take the health of DC youth seriously and that they are not actually interested in progress measures when it comes to health and nutrition. In fact, Dr. Briggs and Dr. Schliker have been dismissive of our community's offers to support OSSE.

As you may know, the YRBS, conducted every two years by states, cities, and counties, is perhaps the single most important data set we have for monitoring the health behaviors of DC youth. According to the CDC,

"The YRBS assesses six categories of priority health risk behaviors--behaviors that contribute to unintentional injuries and violence; tobacco use; alcohol and other drug use; sexual behaviors that contribute to unintended pregnancy and STDs, including HIV infection; unhealthy dietary behaviors; and physical inactivity--plus overweight and asthma."

Many of use the YRBS data for our programs and for our grants. From a city-wide perspective, many of us were excited to use YRBS data to objectively measure the city's efforts to improve the health of its youth and to highlight the challenges that remain.

Amazingly, in these tough economic times, the city will have no usable 2009 youth health data to make the case for additional federal funding!

The next implementation will be in 2011 and those results will not be available until 2012. But planning of that effort must begin now.

Please help us with the following:

1. Please come and testify at the OSSE oversight hearings this Friday (10:00 AM at the Wilson Building, Room 412.) We must tell the Dr. Briggs that this negligence is not acceptable. To testify at the hearing, please contact Aretha Latta at 724-8196 or alatta@dccouncil.us.

2. If you cannot testify in person, please submit written testimony.

3. If you don't want to testify, come out Friday and support those of us who do.

We have three demands:

1. That OSSE present a written plan on how they will ensure that the 2011 YRBS will be properly implemented with adequate student and school participation;

2. That the City Council ensure that ALL DC students (DCPS and charter schools) receive high-quality age appropriate Health and Physical Education; and

3. That the City Council clarify OSSE's responsibility for measuring schools' and students' progress in meeting the Health Learning Standards.

Please pass this on to other allied youth health advocates.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or Josh Rovner, Policy and Advocacy Manager (jrovner@metroteenaids.org).