The school, North Heights, is an “alternative campus” composed of students who, because of pregnancy or some other reason, are finishing their schoolwork independently. Today, she was speaking to a group who had recently been suspended from their regular schools for misbehaving. Most were busted for weed; some had been fighting. One kid insulted his teacher’s mother.

Their punishment, exile in this pre-fab hut behind the main North Heights building, actually awarded them an unusual privilege. Most students in Amarillo don’t get to hear from Vazquez about these long-acting, reversible contraceptives.

For sex education, public schools in this conservative town rely on an abstinence-oriented program called “Worth the Wait.” Vazquez says most high-school principals will not allow her and other workers from her clinic, Haven Health, to come present to the kids about family planning. Her only path into schools, Vazquez said, is through “personal connections” with the teachers or administration, like the kind she has here at North Heights.

Vazquez herself is a former North Heights student. After she gave birth to her son at 16, she came here for two years to catch up on coursework. With the help of scholarships and jobs cleaning houses, she went on to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work. She’s been directing Haven’s educational programs since 2013.

“How much do you think daycare costs for two kids?” she asked the sleepy teens. “My kids are 8 and 6 now. My most affordable option is $647 a month.”

In an ideal world, she tells them, she’d only now be thinking about having children.

Vazquez’s teenage struggle is one that awaits many kids in Amarillo. The surrounding county has a teen birth rate nearly four times the national average. Out of 1,000 Amarillo teenagers, 90 will give birth before the age of 19.

Those numbers inspired Carolena Cogdill, the CEO of Haven Health, to try to offer long-lasting, reversible contraceptives to more of the area’s teenagers. These so-called LARCs, which include IUDs and implants, are by far the most effective forms of contraception, and they’ve been partly credited with bringing down teen pregnancy rates nationwide.

LARCs are set-it-and-forget-it baby-proofing machines. They don't depend on teens using their underdeveloped prefrontal cortices to remember to take a pill each day. They’ve been around since the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 2011 that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended them as the “first line” birth control option for adult women. The following year ACOG said teen girls should get them, too.

Cogdill heard about a project in St. Louis that offered free LARCs to teen girls and cut pregnancy and abortion rates to a quarter the rate typically seen among sexually active teens. Though the devices should be fully covered by most insurance plans, they can cost more than $1,000 for uninsured women or teens who don’t want to use their parents’ insurance plans. Last year, Cogdill secured $130,000 from local foundations to buy LARCs and offer them to Amarillo teenagers for free.