High School Program Under Fire in Assembly : Counselor to Keep Working With Homosexuals

A Fairfax High School counselor says she will continue to provide services to homosexual students throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, despite last week’s condemnation of the program by Republicans in the Assembly.

“I’m just going to continue doing what I’m doing,” said Virginia Uribe, of South Pasadena, a teacher at Fairfax for almost 30 years and founder of Project 10, a counseling and support program for homosexual students and students confused about their sexual identity. Started at Fairfax in 1984, the program was extended to other schools in the district at the beginning of this school year.

Although the program has been largely non-controversial in the past, it drew fire from Assembly Republicans last week when Assemblywoman Marian La Follette (R-Northridge) led the GOP caucus in voting unanimously to withhold new funds for L. A. Unified until it stops supporting Project 10.

‘Unfit for Students’

La Follette, who described the program as “unfit for students,” said she had received complaints from parents after Uribe spoke at San Fernando High School.

It was not clear what effect, if any, the Assembly action might have on school district funding. Project 10 receives no money from the district other than Uribe’s salary. Uribe, who teaches science at Fairfax, works half time on the program, running an in-school center for homosexual students and advising schools throughout the district on the needs and concerns of homosexual teen-agers.

Earlier this week, Uribe’s principal, Warren L. Steinberg, said: “I’ve got darn near overwhelming response in support of the program.” Uribe said that she, too, has received mostly supportive letters and calls. “I’m starting to get some nasty letters--one in 50,” she said.

Uribe said she has spoken with district officials, who told her the district is committed to counseling “all its children.” She called the district “visionary and compassionate” in its concern for homosexual students.

School board member Jackie Goldberg, an early supporter of the project, said that she intends “to honor the program . . . and the woman who started it” at Monday’s meeting of the Board of Education.

Uribe’s project is believed to be the only such school program in the country. She started it after a homosexual student dropped out of Fairfax because of sexual taunts. In an interview before the Republican action, Uribe said the program began as a lunchtime rap session for any students who wanted to attend. At one of those sessions she revealed that she, too, was gay.

Uribe said homosexual teen-agers often feel terribly isolated among the heterosexual majority. Too often the schools fail these students, just as their peers, families and churches so often do, she said.

“We extend all our services to all our children, except lesbian and gay kids. We act as if they’re not around.”

Uribe said she counsels more than 200 students a year, including students from other schools who have heard about the program. She said that homosexual students are believed to be at greater risk than their peers for drug and alcohol abuse, attempted suicide and dropping out.

Named for the 10% of the population believed by many researchers to be homosexual, Project 10 is housed in a Fairfax classroom. Its library includes information about acquired immune deficiency syndrome as well as novels with homosexual protagonists. Students are welcome to drop in throughout the day. They may take away any books that interest them. “They don’t have to check the books out,” said Uribe, aware that many would be embarrassed to do so.

Uribe said the program has been the most exciting project in her long school career. It has also been the occasion of her own “coming out” as a lesbian.

“For most of my life, I’ve been ‘in,’ and I know how strangling that can be,” said Uribe, a 54-year-old grandmother.

Uribe said that as a teen-ager she never put a name to the puzzling crushes she had on the nuns who taught at her parochial school. Since involvement with Project 10, she has told both her parents and her two children (from an early marriage) of her sexual orientation. All have been supportive.

“I agonized over whether to tell my kids,” she said. “And when I told them, they said, ‘Don’t you think we knew that?’ ”

Adults’ Responsibility

Uribe believes responsible adults must break the silence that continues to surround teen-age homosexuality. She said that sometimes students seek her out “because they want to see who this adult in the school system is who talks about this.”

Many of Uribe’s students seem to want nothing more than to have their self-worth affirmed. Self-esteem is often hard won by homosexual teens, she said. “You have the whole world stigmatizing you, implying that you are morally inferior because you are gay,” she said.

Most of the students who turn to Uribe are male. The majority, she said, “are scared of AIDS, of sex, of sexuality.” (She always counsels sexually active students to practice safe sex, she said).

The girls who come to her are often trying to cope with passionate feelings for oblivious girlfriends. Many of the girls say they are confused about their sexual identities. Almost all the students are experiencing some sort of family disruption, Uribe said.

Uribe pointed out that, quite apart from any problems the students have as a result of being homosexual in a predominantly heterosexual world, they are also young, with all the concerns and uncertainties that trouble other adolescents.

Freedom From Harassment

Uribe said she has been in touch with about one-third of the district’s 122 junior and senior high schools since the program went districtwide.

One of her goals is to see all schools become places where homosexual students are free from harassment and physical danger. A 17-year-old Fairfax student, who asked not to be identified, said harassment is a given for openly homosexual students.

“I’ve had books thrown at me, I’ve had food thrown at me, I hear the word faggot 55,000 times a day,” he said.

Uribe would like to see the district institute an anti-slur policy that would include sexual taunts.

During this first year of the districtwide program, she said, she is trying to make as many people in the schools as possible aware that homosexual teen-agers exist, often with special needs and that “we as a school can do something about this that will benefit everyone.”

So far she has spoken mostly to teachers, counselors, school nurses and other support staff. She hopes Project 10 eventually will be able to add staff, including bilingual counselors.

It is never too early to start teaching people that “you have a commitment to human rights and, understand, that commitment extends to everyone,” Uribe said. “We should start in elementary school talking about tolerance and diversity. We have to put a stop in elementary school to overt discrimination. We have to put a stop to games like ‘smear the queer.’ ”