Payzant Presses On Despite Resistance to School Changes

When Tom Payzant took over as superintendent of the San Diego city schools on Nov. 1, 1982, educational reform was the order of the day. The public was clamoring for back-to-basics curricula, tougher graduation requirements and improved test scores, and Payzant had to meet the demand.

But with the first reforms completed, Payzant has turned to a more controversial facet of education--the link between the world outside the schoolhouse door and the learning that goes on inside.

During the 1985-86 school year alone, Payzant asked the Board of Education to:

- Condemn South African apartheid.

- Lift the nine-month ban on student AIDS victims, letting them into schools on a case-by-case basis.

- Allow girls to play on high school football and wrestling teams.

- Approve a “nuclear age education” curriculum.

- Establish a campus-based health clinic that would dispense contraceptives.

- Institute voluntary drug tests for students.

To his critics, that list of proposals proves that the city schools are run by a man bent on pursuing his own liberal social agenda, often to the detriment of students.

To his allies, the same measures show that Payzant recognizes the reality of supervising America’s ninth-largest urban school district, with all the health and social welfare concerns that inevitably arise in a big-city school system today.

Either way, Payzant’s relish for tackling social issues has embroiled the Board of Education in delicate questions of contraception, family values, privacy, equal rights and international politics--and inevitable discussions of how far the school system should go in educating its 113,000 students.

“It would be wonderful to focus just on instruction, and leave all other responsibilities to other institutions,” Payzant told more than 150 people who showed up at the school board meeting for the vote on the health clinic earlier this month.

“Children who are hungry, tired, abused, depressed, physically ill, or under the influence of drugs are not ready to learn,” he added. “The school has no choice but to deal with many of the burdens children carry to school if we are to teach them and help them learn.”

But to some of Payzant’s critics, and the hundreds of people who wrote to protest the school-based health clinic, Payzant is stepping on parents’ toes and neglecting the reading, writing and arithmetic instruction that they feel is his primary responsibility.

“Tom is promoting a social agenda,” said Larry Lester, the most conservative of the five school trustees and the most frequent critic of Payzant’s social policies. “He is clearly giving direction to the staff to support his ideas of what is appropriate social policy.

“It’s not the business of the school system to be promoting social change,” Lester added. “That’s beyond its legitimate function.”

“Payzant keeps saying that San Diego is the seventh-largest city (in the U.S.) and it’s got to quit behaving like a small town,” said Joan Patton, one of the leaders of a lobbying effort against the health clinic proposal. “Well, maybe there’s a lot of us who like small town values.”

Payzant has won more often than he has lost, indicating that a majority of the trustees believes his policies have a clear link to education. The trustees passed the resolution on apartheid in September, voted in November to allow girls to try out for boys’ wrestling and football teams, approved courses on the ramifications of nuclear technology in June, and agreed to a voluntary drug testing program this month.

An outright ban on school attendance by students with AIDS was approved last October over Payzant’s objections, but the trustees appear ready to reverse that policy when it comes before them again in September. Trustees Kay Davis, Susan Davis and Dorothy Smith have indicated they will vote to evaluate each child individually.

But the health clinic proposal was defeated this month, and virtually everyone involved agrees it was because the availability of contraception was seen as threatening parental authority and encouraging promiscuity.

In the face of vehement opposition that included Catholic Bishop Leo T. Maher, only Board of Education President Susan Davis said she was willing to vote for a clinic that would provide birth control devices.

“When you get into health clinics, a lot of parents--fairly or unfairly--feel you’re overstepping your bounds,” said Kay Davis, who cast the deciding vote in the 3-2 rejection of the clinic and on several other social issues tackled by the school board this year.

“If it was only medical, and the public could have separated that out, I could have supported (the clinic),” she said. “But what the public couldn’t separate out . . . was birth control.”

Why such questions are so controversial here is a matter of speculation. San Diego is the only U.S. city where a health clinic has been defeated by a vote of school trustees, according to Sharon Lovick, director of the Support Center for School-Based Clinics in Houston. To date, 64 clinics have been opened in 16 states. Thirteen clinics provide contraceptives.

The school district is also among a small minority of big-city school systems that chose to reject the advice of the federal Centers for Disease Control, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Education Association by turning down the case-by-case approach to students with AIDS. (The San Diego schools’ policy has yet to be applied; to date there have been no reports of district students with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.)

“I think that when you see a good deal of public outcry about a proposal to start a school-based clinic, it’s my experience that it’s usually fueled by misinformation about what these clinics do,” Lovick said. “It is usually coupled with the erroneous assumption that these clinics are run by Planned Parenthood and organized to provide abortion as part of the school day.”

Others say that turmoil inevitably results when a school district attempts to cope with the kind of demographic change that characterizes San Diego’s recent years.

“I think it is difficult for people to move from seeing San Diego as a small town, (that is) pretty provincial and pretty homogeneous, to a more heterogeneous, urban community,” said Susan Davis.

The school district that Payzant heads continues to evolve into a typical big-city school system. As late as the 1982-83 school year, more than half the students were white. Today, minorities make up 53.7% of the students, a proportion that will almost certainly continue to grow.

In 1975, 12.9% of the district’s students were from welfare families. Today, the figure is 18.3%.

Student mobility--the number of times children switch schools during the school year--is up sharply. And in the past five years, the number of students whose primary language is not English has risen to 14,680 from 9,837. Parents are addressed in seven different languages at Hoover High School graduation ceremonies each year.

Added to that, school health officials said, are more general societal changes. In 1955, 60% of all U.S. families consisted of a working father, a housewife mother and two or more school-aged children. By 1980, that was down to 11% and in 1985 it was 7%.

“When I went to school, my friends and our mothers were home with chocolate chip cookies,” said Susan Davis. “It’s very different now. I’m not home. I started working several years ago.”

School nurses told the task force investigating health clinics that many of the city’s students are not receiving routine medical care. “We see a lot of untreated problems stemming from kids who do not have access to medical care,” said Judy Beck, the district’s school nurse supervisor.

But Payzant’s critics say his responses to such dilemmas are sometimes out of step with what San Diegans can accept--or simply inappropriate.

“There are social issues that directly impact our children--like drugs--and there are others that don’t,” said Patton, who founded the Coalition for Family Values to lobby against the health clinic proposal.

Patton said she is concerned about a plan to provide AIDS education to students beginning in the sixth grade. She said she believes that the curriculum might condone homosexuality.

Bishop Maher, who was the most influential opponent of the health clinic, said he agrees with Payzant that children with AIDS should not be banned from school, but is opposed to voluntary drug testing, which he believes is a matter for the police.

And Lester adds that no school board should be passing resolutions on foreign policy, as the trustees did when they condemned apartheid in September.

“We don’t legitimately have a school district policy on southern Africa, any more than we have a school district policy on Afghanistan or on Beirut,” he said. “You can’t defend that. It’s indefensible.”

Kay Davis, a moderate trustee, believes it is time for a respite from social policy and renewed attention to the district’s upcoming budget problems. “I’m tired of handling controversial social issues,” she said. “I hope we have a break.”

But Payzant said more of those questions will be put before the trustees.

“I don’t know what the next one’s going to be,” he said. “I’m sure there will be more, just because that’s the nature of things in a major urban society. Everything that’s out there is going to ultimately make its way to the school.”