Garden City ? Some teens were too shy to share their private pledges of abstinence, but others read their commitments aloud.

“We have to respect our bodies until we are prepared physically and mentally,” one girl said. “Including that, I want to wait until I’m married, and I also want to be prepared and educated.”

The teenagers planned to share their pledges in a graduation ceremony at the culmination of a local abstinence-education program, coordinated by local officials from the Finney County Health Department and Fort Hays State University.

Eight boys and girls ages 11 through 15 participated in the program, which encompasses a curriculum that aims to re-evaluate the rituals of the coming-of-age celebration — called the quinceanera — for 15-year-old girls of Hispanic or Latino communities.

The program was adopted as a local health and education initiative from a private, nonprofit organization by the name of Friends First, based in Littleton, Colo. The program’s facilitators wanted to educate teens about sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy. Adolescent pregnancy rates are much higher in Finney County than the rest of the state, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Stacy Gonzalez, one of the program’s facilitators and a disease intervention specialist with the county health department, encouraged the teens to talk to their parents or turn to her or Martha Perkins, the area Fort Hays center director, for advice.

The parents — many of whom did not speak English and communicated through Perkins — discussed the need to continue the dialogue about sex with their teenagers long after the class is over.

“I would like my daughter to keep her virginity until her marriage, but it has to be up to her,” said Luisa Frayre, who has a 15-year-old daughter.

Despite a slight increase in the number and rate of teenage pregnancies in 2005 and 2006, pregnancy rates have dropped 15 percent overall over the last 20 years in Kansas, reflecting the downward trend of teen pregnancies.

Of the 19 million new sexually transmitted infections each year, almost half are among those age 15 to 24, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC. Among the mandatory-reported sexually transmitted diseases — chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis — racial and ethnic minorities continue to be disproportionately affected, as well, according to the CDC.