Santa Monica-Malibu Schools OK Condom Policy : Health: The district approves a program to provide high school students easy access. But a distribution plan has yet to be devised.

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 this week. “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 children from participating in the program. This would have meant that every student requesting a condom would have to identify himself 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.

About two dozen students attended the last 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 against 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?”

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.