Initial Steps Taken in Planning for Hoover High Health Clinic

Hoover High School administrators hope to tap a local health foundation for planning money as they begin the months-long process of designing a detailed plan for the school-based health and social service center that was approved in concept by the Board of Education on Tuesday.

A Hoover committee of teachers, parents and community health leaders decided Thursday to ask the San Diego Community Health Care Alliance for financial assistance in setting up neighborhood planning committees, drawing up a menu of medical services, finding a private operator and obtaining operational funds from national foundations.

The executive director of the private, nonprofit foundation, Ruth Reidel, earlier this year offered assistance to the group if school trustees backed the clinic idea, Hoover Principal Doris Alvarez said Thursday. The health-care alliance is a consortium of private business, hospital and labor officials that both supports area health-care agencies and helps locate other money for hard-to-meet medical needs. It has distributed $841,000 during the past two years, including $318,000 to UC San Diego Medical Center for prenatal care and $168,000 for epilepsy treatment.

In approving the concept Tuesday, trustees directed that a broadly representative and multi-ethnic committee of parents and community leaders, including clergy and business people, in the Mid-City area around Hoover be established to oversee the planning.

In response, the Hoover committee decided Thursday to sponsor a informational neighborhood meetings about the clinic to attract as many parents as possible from Hoover, Wilson Middle School and the seven elementary schools that would be eligible for services from a school-based health center. More than half the 9,000 students in the area have no access to regular health care, primarily for economic reasons.

The steering committee would grow out of the informational meetings and would then examine school clinics in Los Angeles and elsewhere and talk with public health planners at San Diego State University in deciding what specific services it would want to offer.

Trustees also strongly suggested that Hoover try to structure its clinic more creatively than others around the country, and in particular try to integrate parents into school health education. Some Hoover parents suggested at Thursday’s meeting that parent health courses be offered through Hoover’s monthly Saturday enrichment program in advance of the clinic opening during the 1990-91 school year.

The broad-based committee would also decide on how extensive reproductive and family-planning services should be at a clinic. Opponents of school-based clinics focused on those services in speaking against the concept before the board.