Mackenzie Mays

Mackenzie Mays is a reporter for the Fresno Bee. Her series on teen pregnancy and sex education was done as a fellow with the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism....

Half of California’s 10 counties with the highest teenage birth rates are in the Central Valley, despite statewide record lows in teen births. Even so, the Valley lacks programs that help boys understand the responsibilities of sex and parenthood.

Out of 160 Fresno Unified high school students who took a survey conducted by The Fresno Bee, more than half said they had only “learned a little” about sex in school. Sixteen percent said they had learned nothing at all.

The neighborhood a child grows up in may be the biggest contributor to teen pregnancy rates. And one way to reduce the number of teen pregnancies is to provide structure, like after-school activities, to teens in needy neighborhoods.

The San Joaquin Valley is home to some of the California's highest rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. As part of a series on sex education and teen pregnancy, The Fresno Bee found out what some women wished they would have learned about sex when they were younger.

Before the California Healthy Youth Act went into effect last year, Fresno Unified was one of a few school districts that didn’t teach comprehensive sex education and pushback against such lessons remains.

While U.S. teen birth rates have continued to decrease across all races and ethnicities, disparities persist. In 2014, nearly 75 percent of the teen births in Fresno County California were to Hispanic mothers.

Research has shown that sex education results in fewer teen pregnancies, but in California's politically conservative San Joaquin Valley, there is a history of strong push-back against sex ed.

The story is the first in a series about sex education and teen pregnancy in the central San Joaquin Valley, and is produced as a project for the USC Center for Health Journalism’s California Fellowship....