SANTA ANA : District to Seek Grants for Clinic

The Santa Ana Unified School District has decided to seek about $185,000 in grants to fund a mobile health clinic, a proposal that generated controversy last year when critics charged that such a facility would be used to promote birth control.

The district Board of Trustees voted 4 to 1 this week to seek the grants, with trustee Rosemarie Avila opposing, according to district spokeswoman Diane Thomas.

The board approved one grant application seeking about $170,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to pay for a program intended to teach children in kindergarten through fifth grade and their parents about nutrition and accident and illness prevention. The board also approved a $15,000 grant application to the Orange County Community Foundation, which is based in Costa Mesa. That money would be used to train parent leaders as health care instructors at local schools.

Avila, who has criticized school-based health-care programs as inefficient and incompatible with schools’ goals to provide education, denounced the grant applications.

“I just think the last thing for the school to do is start a heath care bureaucracy,” she said. “It is time to simplify and get refocused on our mission of providing a good education.”

Trustee Audrey Yamagata-Noji, who along with trustees Robert Balen, Sal Mendoza and Richard C. Hernandez, supported seeking the grants, said that the clinic is crucial.

“Parents are going to be able to recognize signs and symptoms and take precautions and keep the illnesses from getting worse,” Yamagata-Noji said. “Basically, we can’t treat everybody, and we know that. That’s not what were trying to do. But these grants would provide parents training, and that’s what’s so critical.”

Last year, critics of the proposal charged that the health-care program would end up providing information on birth control and abortion referral services to high school students. However, the board’s vote specified that the programs would target pupils only up through fifth grade and that district funds must not be used to offer abortion referrals.