Oceanside School Board Upholds Medical Policy

In a split vote late Tuesday night, the Oceanside Unified school board decided to continue a policy that allows the release of students for confidential medical appointments without parental notification.

Despite intense pressure from parents and students, the board majority stuck to its guns, going against dozens of speakers, mostly parents, who opposed the policy.

“You have the inalienable right to control your children, nobody can take that away,” board member Bibs Orr told the crowd of more than 250. “What you do not have the right to do is take away rights from your neighbor. You cannot make up your mind and dictate to other parents what they may or may not do.”

Opponents of the policy argued that parents hold responsibility for the welfare of their children and that the board’s policy gives the schools an active role in allowing students to deceive their parents.

“Revoking this policy is not going to stop confidential medical appointments. All it is going to mean is that when you say our kids are in school, our kids are in school,” said Gus Morrow, a parent.

Board member Dean Szabo, who dissented from the vote, pulled a Bible from his jacket pocket and said, “There are the laws of the state of California, and there are also the laws that are written in this book.”

Supporters of the policy have long framed the debate as one of Christian fundamentalists trying to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of the community, and Szabo’s remarks reaffirmed that belief.

“I am appalled and offended that a member of our school board, at a public meeting with high school students present, would pull out of his pocket a Bible and announce that this book is the higher law that he is going to follow and not the laws of the state of California,” said Janet Bledsoe Lacy, a parent.

“This is an extremely dangerous position that this school board and other school boards are going to find themselves in if we don’t carefully screen our candidates on a position of separation of church and state,” she said.

School activists across the county predict a bitter election fight this year over the role of religion in the classroom, particularly with the backdrop of the 1990 campaign that elected novice politicos such as Szabo who have strongly held religious beliefs and seek to make those beliefs law.

Lacy and others argued that the policy of excusing students from school for confidential medical appointments protects the privacy of children and aids students from troubled or abusive families in obtaining medical services.

“Just because parents are financially responsible for their children doesn’t mean they can exert absolute control of their children,” said Jackie Oxley, a student board member from El Camino High School.

Both Poway and Vista unified school districts have banned the practice within the past year.