NIAGARA FALLS — Every few weeks Kathleen Pratt goes into Niagara Falls schools and talks to the students about living with HIV.

The Amherst resident says that when she tells them she’s a 20-year HIV survivor, they listen intently. “You can hear a pin drop,” she says.

The trim, blonde blue-eyed private detective likes to shock them. “I tell them I live in East Amherst, I have a nice house, I drive a Cadillac, I wear diamonds and furs, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing,” she says with a slight laugh.

Pratt, who contracted HIV from a boyfriend at age 17, figures if she can save just one kid than its worth the years of speaking out.

“That's all I need is to stop one kid from ending up like me and all misery I’m going through, and it is worth it,” she said.

During a telephone interview, Pratt said she had just come from teaching students in St. Catharine’s, Ont., and described with delight how 20 or so young teens surrounded her when the talk was over.

“I tell them, ‘You know what? I know it sounds old fashioned, but it’s OK to be a virgin,’ ” she said. “This way you don't have to worry about missing a period, or whether you have a bump or a lump. Why add stress to your lives?

“I tell them they’re all important and they deserve the best in life and not to make decisions to make other people happy.”

Pratt said she was skimming through some of the comment cards and read one aloud from a seventh grade boy named Andrew: “Sensational, passionate, inspiring, amazing, really cares, will change my life.”

While the mother of two speaks throughout Niagara County and the region, she is most impressed by the Niagara County’s abstinence program run by the youth bureau, where she volunteers her speaking time.

“Their program is amazing,” Pratt said. “I'm very grateful to be a part of it ... What they do really benefits the kids.”

While she is in remission now and her current husband remains disease free, her body suffers from nerve damage and she has to preserve her energy some days. But the effort of speaking out is worth it to her.

“I have thousands of letters from teenagers saying thank you,” she said. “They’re saying ‘it’s exactly what I needed to hear.’”

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“Buy shoes instead of diapers!” That slogan is on a poster that decorates Rodney Alaimo’s Niagara County office. Another poster shouts “Virginity Rocks!”

Alaimo is the one-man department created by the youth bureau to promote abstinence among teens in Niagara County. To him, the task seems more than a job, it seems a mission.

His message to teens? Abstinence is empowerment. “If you can say no to sex you can say no to anything,” said the former martial arts instructor.

Despite his declining budget, threatened when President Barack Obama eliminated funding for some abstinence programs based on their questionable success rates, Alaimo carries on with grants and other assistance. Because his program is government supported, he is not allowed to promote a spiritual viewpoint. As such, he promotes abstinence from a medical point of view.

He visits classrooms in the Niagara County school districts and fortifies his efforts with speakers including Pratt, the Amherst woman living with HIV, and two unmarried teenage moms who tell their stories to students.

Alaimo knows that his efforts have to cut through so many sexual messages teens receive from televisions, movies and music.

“They’re bombarded with sexual messages,” he says of the teens. “From the movies they watch to the music they listen to,” he said in an interview from his office. “We’re out there (in the schools) a few hours a year, they’re bombarded every day.”

“The message has got to stay alive,” he added fervently. “The best way to prevent teen pregnancies is abstinence until marriage.”

Despite the research which convinced Obama that federally funded abstinence programs weren’t working, Alaimo believes the teen pregnancy rates speak for themselves.

“There used to be over a million each year in the country,” he said of teen pregnancies. “They’re saying we’ve seen a 25 percent drop in pregnancy in the last 10 years.

Alaimo pulls research from his desktop. He cites a study from “Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine” that shows abstinence-centered education is the most effective approach in reducing teen sex and that “abstinence education has a long-term positive impact on teens sexual behavior.”

According to a Guttmacher Institute report, “shortly after taking office last year President Obama called for an end to ineffective sex education efforts focused solely on abstinence before marriage in favor of “evidence-based, medically accurate and age appropriate programs.”

 Currently all funding is in flux as the president and Congress battle for budget funds. Congress has passed a “continuing resolution,” which stops all funding to Title X family planning programs, including all funding to teen pregnancy initiatives.

No one really know where the funding will eventually be directed but all programs remain in flux until the combative dust clears and a budget is set.

“Leadership for the house is trying to get to a hundred billion in cuts,” explained Adam Sonfield of the Guttmacher Institute. “It’s one of the reasons your hearing talks about a government shutdown. Even if they could agree on the level of cuts they couldn’t agree on the specific programs.”

Meanwhile, teen pregnancies remain an issue in Niagara County and specifically in a single zip code in Niagara Falls where teen pregnancy rates are nearly triple the rates of New York state.