Wilson Urges Linking Social Services With School System : Politics: Senator’s first major policy statement of the gubernatorial campaign breaks with traditional GOP views. He pledges attack on home-life stress.

In the first major policy statement of his 1990 gubernatorial campaign, U.S. Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) called for a systematic integration of social welfare services and the California public school system, a move that would address the home-life stress Wilson believes is causing many student problems.

Wilson promised that, as governor, he would appoint “a cabinet-level secretary of child development and services.”

The integration of social services and public schools is not an idea widely embraced by Republicans. For months, Wilson’s advisers have promised that he would make a dramatic break with traditional Republican attitudes about social services.

But Wilson, whose speech to members of the California School Boards Assn. was interrupted several times by applause, stuck to Republican concepts in other areas. He endorsed merit pay for outstanding teachers and promised support of experiments with parental choice of schools, such as a model gaining attention in the Richmond Unified School District east of San Francisco.

The main focus--and big surprise--of Wilson’s speech was his desire to coordinate medical and mental health services with public schools.

He cited a recent case in Orange County in which a high school honors student was arrested after the baby she delivered in a restroom was found drowned in a toilet.

“Suddenly every child and social service agency in her city and county were there to help,” said Wilson. “But it was after the fact.”

He promised that as governor he would “establish in every county a council chaired by the chairman of the Board of Supervisors . . . to achieve this integration” of medical and mental health services with schools.

In an interview after the speech, Wilson said: “What we’re talking about is a provision of services that is clearly not happening now.”

He said that drugs and other crime problems now disrupting public schools “require that we make mental health counseling available to little children from the point of entry into the school system and consistently thereafter.”

Wilson acknowledged that this would cost money, and indicated there would be more on that later in his campaign.

But in the interview, Wilson sounded like a liberal Democrat, saying: “It costs us infinitely more as taxpayers if we do not engage in the kind of preventive, proactive measures that make for healthy, motivated children.”

Despite a projected $1,200-per-mother cost that some estimate is needed to guarantee prenatal health care for each child born in the state, Wilson said, “it is the best investment . . . if we are to determine if there are problems . . . and I am convinced that would eliminate many of the learning disorders.”

In his speech, Wilson also said he would try to organize a “mentor program” for school children whose parents are not sufficiently interested in their education to monitor their progress. This idea, also pushed by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dianne Feinstein, would recruit successful people to oversee the educational progress of specific students.

Such efforts have worked on a small scale in Los Angeles County and other areas. But Wilson did not address a major complaint about the programs--that the huge size of California’s public school system limits the possible use of “mentor programs.”

As for allowing parents more choice in picking public schools for their children, Wilson was more cautious than advisers of President Bush, who contend that open enrollment would vastly improve the public schools by making them more competitive.

Wilson said he likes the experimental program now used in Richmond, where the racial balance makes it less likely that the freedom of choice of schools will segregate poor, minority students in a few inadequate schools.

The concept is trickier in the Los Angles Unified School District, however, where 80% of the students are non-Anglo. Wilson’s advisers said he was aware of that and added that he was not advocating open enrollment in Los Angeles without more experimentation.

On the concept of merit pay, a controversial idea among teachers who are concerned about who will do the evaluating, Wilson was less equivocal. It fits his Republican views of the marketplace, he said, adding that he supports merit pay for outstanding teachers as long as poor school districts are not unfairly compared to rich ones.

After the speech, Maureen DiMarco, a Garden Grove Democrat who is the new president of the California School Boards Assn., said Wilson’s platform, “as expressed in his speech today, seems to be a dramatic proposal for addressing the needs of children not only in schools but in all the health care delivery systems of the state.”

Times Education Writer Jean Merl contributed to this report.