New England Newspapers

PITTSFIELD -- The likelihood of teenage girls in Berkshire County giving birth has increased by 20 percent over the last decade, while it dropped 21 percent in the rest of the state over the same time span.

That is one of the findings included in a fiscal 2010 Community Impact baseline report, which was commissioned by the Berkshire United Way and completed by the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission. The figures are based on the latest state numbers for each issue, some of them dating back to 2007, said Berkshire United Way President and CEO Kristine Hazzard.

The teen pregnancy figures in the report are for girls between the ages of 15 and 19, and were obtained from Berkshire County's teen birth rate statistics between 1998 and 2007.

Teen pregnancy has been an ongoing issue in Berkshire County for several years. The problem in Pittsfield was well documented in "Growing Up Fast," a book and short documentary film by Joanna Lipper that were released in 2003.

Hazzard, a Connecticut native who became the Berkshire United Way's executive director in July 2008, said she was aware of the teen pregnancy problem, but was surprised the numbers were so high.

"We definitely plan on informing the community about it," she said. "We want to begin to mobilize the community and work together to see if we can lower it dramatically."

The Berkshire United Way has compiled reports before, Hazzard said, but they mostly

contained reports from community leaders, and never included accountability factors.

She said this report will help the United Way identify community problems, and prioritize them with the goal of achieving "results-driven accountability," Hazzard said.

"We are going to do this every year," she added.

The Berkshire United Way spent the past two years engaging hundreds of people in the community in this project. The data focuses mostly on education and employment, the priority areas that were identified by the community.

"The report is really designed to be a baseline measure for a lot of issues or things that are going on in Berkshire County," said Marsha Parnell, the Berkshire United Way's coordinator of marketing and communications. "We've been working for the last couple of years on the community impact model, defining issues, what we call priorities, with the community."

"We're focused on these areas," Parnell said. "We're trying to come up with meaningful and measurable results in these areas. And we really want to attack the root causes."

Not all of the findings are bad.

The report found that high school students in Berkshire County perform on par with their peers in the state on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System's English test, and they fair better in science, but fall behind in math.

The county's full-day kindergarten enrollment for the 2008-2009 school year was between 95 and 100 percent, far above the state average of 75 percent. Student attendance in the 2007-2008 academic year was close to the state average of 94.6 percent, while four-year graduation rates held steady with state levels.

However, the report also found that 800 children were waiting for a subsidized care slot for early childhood education, and that 30.4 percent of the county's children under the age of 5 were twice as likely to be living in poverty in 2007, which was double the state average of 15.4 percent for that year.

The work on the findings included in the Community Impact Report have already begun. More than 100 leaders from the business and nonprofit community recently joined community leaders in Pittsfield on Nov. 12 to discuss the findings.

That meeting included reports from three impact teams that have been formed to address early childhood education, kindergarten through 12th grade youth development, and adult learning and careers.