Schools Urged to Let Parents Limit Student Clinic Use

Three local committees in the Los Angeles school district have urged that parents be allowed to veto their children’s use of certain medical services, such as birth control, at campus clinics like the one planned for San Fernando High School.

The plan to start a clinic on the San Fernando campus this year has stirred wide community opposition, led by Catholic churches, because the clinic would dispense birth-control devices. Under a plan approved by the Board of Education, parents could prevent their children from using the clinic at all, but a student with parental permission to use the clinic could use it for anything.

The alternative proposal for a limited parental consent form was made Monday night at a meeting of the San Fernando High School Clinic Community Advisory Board meeting. The board was appointed by school and clinic officials to reflect community views in setting policy for the clinics. It includes parents, community activists and business people.

Other Panels Back Veto

According to the panel’s co-chairman, Richard Kruglov, similar advisory boards from Los Angeles and Jordan high schools, the other campuses where the district intends to establish clinics, also back the idea of offering parents the chance to give limited permission.

“The public that we represent did not want a unilateral consent form,” Kruglov said after the meeting.

The gathering turned into a sometimes emotional first-time encounter between opponents and proponents of the campus medical center. After a two-hour question-and-answer session, most of which was conducted in Spanish and translated into English, the announcement of the proposal for limited consent had not changed the opponents’ position.

“I believe the community is very suspicious . . . “ said Eadie Gieb, spokesman for Parents and Students United of the San Fernando Valley, an umbrella group of clinic opponents.

“What is to prevent them from revising the consent form again and going back to a blanket form?” Gieb asked.

The proposal will go to the Districtwide Clinic Advisory Committee and, if approved there, to the school board.

School board member Jackie Goldberg said her first reaction was against it.

‘Untenable Situation’

“I think it would create an untenable situation for the medical personnel and the youngsters,” said Goldberg, who co-authored the original clinic proposal.

“A youngster may come in for treatment of one thing and begin talking about another problem. Is the doctor going to stop the student from talking because their consent form doesn’t allow him to treat the youngster for that problem? I can’t support something that would create a situation like that.”

Some district clinic advocates interviewed Tuesday said they dislike the limited consent concept because parents might use it to prevent their teen-agers from having access to contraceptives. One of the goals of the clinic movement is to reduce the teen-age pregnancy rate.

However, in the San Jose Unified School District, where limited consent forms have been in use at a clinic that opened in September, most parents have given permission for their children to have unlimited access to medical services.

According to Georgiana Coray, clinic administrator for the San Jose district, 600 students at a public high school with an enrollment of 850, of whom 85% are Catholic, have signed up for the clinic. The clinic prescribes contraceptives but does not dispense them on campus.

Only 10 parents did not give blanket permission for their child to use clinic services, Coray said. Of the 10 who gave limited permission, only four said they did not want their children to have access to family planning services. The others requested that their children not receive immunizations, blood transfusions or intraveneous drugs, she said.