School District Approves Condom Distribution Plan : Health: The policy provides easy access for high school students starting next month. There will be a small fee, and parents will not have to grant their consent.

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District officials approved a policy this week that will provide high school students with easy access to condoms beginning April 20.

The policy’s greatest restriction is that a small fee will be charged for the condoms.

School officials originally envisioned a program in which students would obtain condoms from a counselor and parents would be able to bar their children from having access to the condoms. At recent school board meetings, however, Santa Monica High School students persuaded board members to strike these “barriers” out of the final policy.

“Your comments are very persuasive to me,” said board member Brenda Gottfried after listening to passionate testimony from about 15 students Monday night. “This policy will directly affect you. . . . I was prepared to have the condoms passed out in the nurse’s office. After hearing the comments tonight, I have been persuaded that we need an alternate distribution site.”

Details of where and how the condoms will be distributed will be worked out in the next month.

As originally proposed in February, the policy called for condoms to be distributed by a specially trained counselor so that students would have an opportunity to ask questions about sexually transmitted diseases, discuss their sexuality and have abstinence stressed to them as a smart choice, and the only 100% safe one.

The proposal also would have provided a form that parents could sign and send back to the district to keep their child from participating in the program. This would have meant that every student requesting a condom would have to identify himself or herself so the name could be checked against a list of students barred from the program.

Students attending board meetings argued that having to identify oneself, or even to have to speak to an adult at all, would scare away all but the most confident.

“All your friends are around,” said Nathalie Torrens, associated student body vice president. “Are you going to slink into the nurse’s office and ask for a condom? I’m speaking for the shy ones: ‘Yeah, I want a condom. Yeah, I want to have sex,’ because they can’t say that.”

Students urged that the condoms be available via vending machines in the bathrooms, but board members said the overhead of a vending machine would make the condoms expensive. A team consisting of school district staff members, students, parents and health care professionals will decide in the coming weeks how to collect a fee while guaranteeing privacy.

A help-yourself fishbowl full of condoms--an early suggestion by board member Michael Hill--remains a possibility, but a twist has been added.

“A can with a suggested donation of a quarter is acceptable to me,” said Hill. Although his colleagues initially offered little support for his fishbowl proposal, by Monday several thought it was a good idea.

One board member, Patricia Hoffman, said she would still prefer that the school nurse be in charge of handing out condoms. Hoffman said her main concern with a collection can was that it could easily be stolen.

About two dozen students attended the past two board meetings and painted a sobering picture of sexually active teens at the high school who practice unprotected sex. They spoke of unwanted pregnancies, of friends who would use a condom if available and friends who contracted sexually transmitted diseases.

For the first time Monday, opponents to a condom policy spoke. Some said condoms are not guaranteed to protect from the AIDS virus.

“I feel that we are playing Russian roulette with my children,” said Lincoln Middle School PTA President Sharon Randlis.

Other parents expressed concern that not enough was being done to teach abstinence, and that condom availability would encourage students to have sex.

“There’s one thing that hasn’t been addressed,” said James Huckabay, who has two daughters attending the high school. “That is the enormous psychological damage that occurs by young people (having sex), especially girls that are used and abused . . . used just like a condom and tossed away.”

Students countered some of the charges.

“How about the psychological effects of finding out you are HIV-positive?” asked Nazanin Samar. “And that the rest of your life’s plans are laid to waste because of this disease?”

Another parent warned of the district’s possible liability for condom failure.

“We risk exposure to liability with every decision we make with this board,” Hoffman responded a few minutes later. “We can’t use that as an excuse to make bad decisions. We have to make good decisions and assume they are defendable.”

Under the policy adopted unanimously Monday night, condoms will be packaged with information that includes instructions on use and how to get more information about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases, a statement that abstinence is the only sure way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, and a statement that many teen-agers choose abstinence.

The board also approved spending $1,652 for purchasing condoms, packaging and printing, and for preparing and mailing a letter explaining the policy to parents.

“We’re trying to save some lives here,” said board member Mary Kay Kamath. “(Abstinence) is unrealistic for a number of our young people. And for those people, we have to do everything we can, including passing this policy.”

The school district joins at least six districts in the nation with a condom distribution plan, including San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, which adopted its policy in January, is working on how to implement it, said Beverly Martin, administrative consultant in the office of Deputy Supt. Sid Thompson. An oversight committee made up of district staff met recently with students, and condom distribution may begin in early April, he said.