School-Based Health Center Plans Advance

A special multi-agency task force decided Friday to move ahead on the possibility of a controversial school-based health center in San Diego as part of its broader plans to improve health and counseling services to students.

The New Beginnings project will canvass the Mid-City community anchored by Hoover High School by means of a survey or public meetings, or both over the next three months to determine whether the community favors some sort of health center, Tom Payzant, superintendent of San Diego city schools and one of 28 members of the project, said Friday.

Should the results show community support, Payzant would then ask the five-member Board of Education to give its blessing for detailed plans and a search for money to operate such a health center, he said.

Although both Payzant and county social services director Richard Jacobsen, who chairs the task force, stressed the comprehensive care envisioned with a school-based center, they conceded Friday that the issue of providing birth-control information and/or contraceptives could complicate any approval process.

‘Not Ducking the Issue’

The task force Friday left the specifics of what would be asked in a survey up to the subcommittee assigned the task, and Payzant said that eventually the functions of a school-based clinic would depend on what the community wants.

“We’re not ducking the issue (of family planning), but that’s not the focal point,” Payzant said, pointing out that problems related to teen-age pregnancy represent only a small percentage of visits by students to school-based clinics in Los Angeles and other cities across the country. “The school community has to decide what services it wants . . . rather than the school district saying whether this school or that school wants it.”

A proposal initiated by Payzant three years ago for school-based clinics as a districtwide policy was turned down 3 to 2 by school trustees, after a bitter battle that anti-abortion opponents turned into a debate over the morality of providing family-planning counseling for teen-agers.

A poll taken for the district last fall showed strong support for such clinics, from 66% to 76% of those surveyed, depending on whether funding was public or private. Payzant and Jacobsen said options for a clinic could range from closer cooperation with the existing county-funded health clinic in the area to a new clinic situated at the school.

Wide Ethnic Diversity

The New Beginnings project--composed of administrators from the school district, city, county and community colleges--selected the Hoover area for study because the neighborhood has wide ethnic diversity and many low- to lower-middle-income students who need basic medical care as well as drug, family, mental-health and employment counseling. Its work coincided with a separate examination of social services by a school-community committee at Hoover concerned about the lack of coordination among social agencies serving the East San Diego area.

The findings of both New Beginnings and the Hoover group were merged on Friday and included issues beyond the emotion-tinged question of clinics.

Among other recommendations the project made Friday:

- Go ahead with a coordinated data base on families with students in public schools in the Hoover area. That would allow the county to share social service information so, for example, the district could identify more students who could qualify for federal or state educational assistance.

- Look into setting up a “one-stop” office setting at Hoover, where counselors from the school district, the county, the probation department and the police would be available on a regular and coordinated basis so that students could get help more quickly.

“Any time you have better information, you deliver better service,” Jacobsen said. “The data (from Hoover health surveys) show that kids don’t know where to go. . . . If we can better educate them on how to access services, there will be a better product.”

- Set up quarterly meetings between the county’s public health nurse, the school district’s chief nurse and other health and social-service agencies to try to improve services for teen-agers either pregnant or already with children. Another recommendation to expand school classes on sexuality was deferred at the request of Payzant, because such expansion would require elimination of some other part of an already crowded curriculum.