GLOUCESTER, Mass. (AP) – School counselors, teachers and families of students the principal said made a pact to get pregnant and have babies together have no information to back the claim, the mayor of Gloucester said Sunday.

Mayor Carolyn Kirk plans to meet Monday with school, health and other local officials after Gloucester High School Principal Joseph Sullivan was quoted by Time magazine saying girls made pregnancy pacts.

The meeting will discuss alarming rates of teen pregnancy. Seventeen girls in the high school – four times the usual number- became pregnant this year.

The girls are all 16 or under, nearly all of them sophomores.

Kirk says that Sullivan has told officials in this hard-luck New England fishing town he can’t remember his source of information. “The High School principal is the one who initially said it, and no one else has said it,” Kirk said. “None of the counselors at the school, none of the teachers who know these children and none of the families have spoken about it.”

“So, my position is that it has not been confirmed,” Kirk said.

The Associated Press could not immediately locate a phone number to get Sullivan’s reaction. A message was left Sunday at the principal’s office.

City and school officials in this town of about 30,000 people 30 miles north of Boston have been struggling for months to explain and deal with the pregnancies, where on average only four girls a year at the 1,200-student high school become pregnant.

Just last month, two officials at the high school health center resigned to protest the local hospital’s refusal to support a proposal to distribute contraceptives to youngsters at the school without parental consent. The hospital controls the clinic’s funding.

The heavily Roman Catholic town, with a large Italian and Portuguese population, has long been supportive of teen mothers. The high school has a day care center for students and employees.

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