Gay Teen Counseling Proposal Shelved : Education: Heavy opposition, including church groups and principals, leads school officials to take the issue off the agenda.

A proposed high school counseling program for homosexual teen-agers was quietly dropped this week in the wake of heavy community opposition.

Proponents of the program asked school officials to remove the proposal from the agenda for the school board meeting next Monday.

Most school board members said they would have voted against the proposal, partly because of the growing opposition. In the last two months, parents, high school principals, some church leaders and others had deluged the board with hundreds of letters and phone calls opposing the plan, school officials said.

“I was supportive of the idea of counseling for the students, and I was expecting some opposition--but not this much,” said board member Mary Stanton, who planned to vote against a program that she once said she would support.

Gay activist David Newell, who led the effort for the counseling program, said he was disappointed but not surprised by the growing opposition. “We knew we would have a lot of problems,” he said. “Any time you get a proposal of any kind that tries to help gay and lesbian people, there’s opposition from fundamentalists and other groups that exist out there.”

Newell’s group, Committee for Project 10 Long Beach, had drawn up a plan to establish a program at each of the Long Beach district’s high schools, which includes Lakewood, that would offer gay and lesbian students an opportunity to receive gay-oriented literature, counseling and support. The committee had met with district officials and individual school board members to solicit support and planned to make its formal presentation next Monday at the board meeting.

The program would have emphasized dropout, suicide and substance-abuse prevention and would have provided “an understanding, non-judgmental place for students to discuss sexual orientation,” according to the proposal. The program would have cost an estimated $27,000 for a part-time coordinator. The Project 10 program, which takes its name from estimates that 10% of the population is homosexual, would have been staffed by volunteer teachers.

The proposal was criticized on several grounds, but its controversial subject matter appeared to be the main reason.

“The idea of counseling children with the thought of ‘I am’ or ‘I’m not’ (homosexual)--sowing the idea into them--is very distasteful to us,” said Associate Pastor Bill Venske of Christian Life Church, which has about 500 members.

Millikan High School Principal Wendol Murray questioned whether the program would only serve to confuse teen-agers about their sexuality. “It could unduly influence them,” he said in an interview.

Board members said they heard from various religious organizations, including the First Church of the Nazarene in Long Beach, Cottonwood Christian Center in Los Alamitos and the Traditional Values Coalition, an Anaheim-based lobbying group headed by the Rev. Louis Sheldon.

When activists from the Long Beach Lambda Democratic Club, a prominent gay-oriented political group, first announced the proposal in 1989, there was little controversy.

The Project 10 Committee, formed to develop the program, included a number of religious leaders and a representative from the Teachers Assn. of Long Beach.

Since then, proponents have been working behind the scenes to draft the proposal and garner support. They had planned to present the proposal to the school board last month but postponed the presentation because of uncertainty over the board’s response.

Project 10, which was patterned after a similar program at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, was endorsed by the teachers union and religious leaders on the committee, including Rabbi Howard Laibson of Temple Israel and the Rev. Norman Copeland Sr., a pastor with the Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Long Beach Area Citizens Involved activist group and the League of United Latin American Citizens also added their support.

“The teachers feel that there is a need for more counseling in the schools, and this was one avenue to at least give one group more help,” said Felice Strauss, president of the teachers union.

The first sign of public opposition surfaced last summer when Jerry Shultz, a school board member at the time, described the plan as a “project of depravity and filth.” He described his objections in a newsletter to North Long Beach residents.

Most of the opposition developed in the last two months, school officials said.

“I have a shopping bag of letters against,” board member Jenny Oropeza said. “Never underestimate the power of a good letter-writing campaign.” She said she remains a strong supporter of the plan and hopes the issue will resurface in the future.

Board President Karin Polacheck said she opposed the program because it sets up a separate counseling program for one particular group of students. “As a school district, we need to meet the needs of all our students. I don’t think we need to separate our students,” she said.

Board member Harriet Williams, who was once supportive of the concept, said she would have voted against the plan because it was not supported by the high school principals.

“With our restructuring, we have done a lot of new things. We’re tossing a lot at our principals, and I really didn’t want to vote for something they didn’t want--at a time when we told them they could do more site-based decision-making,” Williams said.

Supt. Tom Giugni, pointing out that district officials are attempting to decentralize and give more power to the schools, said he opposed the plan because it was not generated in-house.

“This proposal was developed with the district outside of the loop,” Giugni said. “It goes against what we’re trying to do.” Giugni also said that school counselors already are meeting the needs of gay and lesbian teen-agers, making Project 10 unnecessary.

School principals agreed, adding that more counseling needs to be provided to all students.

At Wilson High School, Principal Lawrence Burnight said that a drop-in referral center featuring peer counseling and a drug-abuse prevention team is in the works for his campus. A counselor there would be available to all students, including gay and lesbian teens, he said.

“We don’t feel the need for Project 10 here,” he said.

At a recent meeting of the Long Beach Council of PTAs, a committee was set up to study the proposal after several parents expressed opposition to the program, according to Sheila Spivey. The organization represents about 20,000 PTA members.

In the meantime, Newell and others said they will propose an anti-slur policy to discourage students from making derogatory remarks to homosexual teens.

“Over time, the need will become more understandable,” Oropeza said. “(But) my hope is that we don’t experience a tragedy in the meantime. We’re talking about kids with a time bomb ticking inside.” Gay and lesbian activists say that teen-agers confused or depressed about their sexuality are more prone to suicide and substance abuse.

BACKGROUND The proposed counseling program for gay and lesbian teen-agers in the Long Beach Unified School District was patterned after Project 10 at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. At Fairfax, a classroom was set aside about seven years ago for students who want to talk with someone about their feelings, their sexuality, acquired immune deficiency syndrome and how to deal with taunts from classmates. Since then, posters listing a phone number that students can call for counseling have been posted in high schools throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District.