O.C. School District Makes Student Therapy a Priority : Services: Huntington Beach Union’s use of volunteer counselors ensures teens’ psychological needs are met.

At Edison High School, troubled students know that once a week they can join a support group of their peers to talk confidentially about their struggles with drugs, family members or whatever else bothers them. At Marina High, parents meet in the evenings to learn how to improve their relationships with their kids.

These support groups, and others like them elsewhere in Huntington Beach Union High School District, are notable not just for the service they provide to students and their families, but also for the fact that in an era of financial austerity, they cost the district nothing. The sessions are led by volunteer therapists.

Huntington Beach Union has been a leader in the use of volunteer therapists to beef up psychological services to students. Other districts use volunteers, but not as many as Huntington Beach, where two or three trained, unpaid therapists conduct regular help sessions of some kind at each of the district’s six high schools.

“The district has been innovative, flexible and progressive, because it’s brought these people in and given them a lot of rope,” said Ellen Shiro, a staff psychologist at Marina and Westminster high schools. “The students really benefit.”

In successive years of budget-cutting, many school districts have reduced the ranks of counselors and psychologists along with teachers, custodians, secretaries, administrators and chunks of their curricula. Ironically, these reductions in on-campus psychological services occur as students are facing more problems than ever before: gangs, alcohol and drugs, child abuse, AIDS, pregnancy, crumbling families and an ominously stark job market.

Until the latest round of budget cuts, Huntington Beach Union had two psychologists for each of its high schools, but now it has the equivalent of 1 1/2. Even that gives the district a higher ratio than many districts in California, where it is not unusual to find one psychologist shuttling among two, three or even four schools.

Joseph A. Platow, executive director of the California Assn. of School Psychologists, said he sees a worrisome trend in districts in the state: They are reducing their staffs of counselors and psychologists, leaving those remaining responsible not only for the regular student population, but also for state- or federal-required testing and counseling of mentally or physically disabled students.

“It concerns us very much,” he said. “The psychologists are finding they have to spend almost all their time with special education students. Regular education students are being neglected more and more . . . (and this neglect) in many of these youngsters’ cases is severely affecting their education.”

In Huntington Beach Union, the psychologists used to specialize in three areas: There were those who counseled special education students, those responsible for testing and evaluating those students, and those who counseled the regular education students on a broad range of personal issues. But now, as a result of staffing cutbacks, all those functions have been merged into one job.

Some of the school psychologists say that their evaluation and care of the physically or mentally disabled students, with all the accompanying paperwork, takes so much time that they have little left over for other students.

Gayle Olson, a full-time psychologist at Edison High, said she or one of her staff colleagues will always be available to deal with “an absolute crisis, like a razor blade to the wrist.” But she said students with less acute problems need someplace to go too.

Olson recalled a 17-year-old girl who stopped by to see her recently. The teen-ager was depressed, getting bad grades and beginning to develop a drinking problem. But Olson, faced with a crowded schedule, could see her for only 20 minutes.

In some districts, the girl might have had nowhere else to turn. But at Edison, she could attend a weekly support group led by a volunteer. Olson said that without such support group services, many students’ problems would just simmer and worsen, carrying a higher price tag down the line.

“You pay now, or you pay later,” Olson said. “If you don’t take care of these problems now, if you don’t teach these kids coping skills now, you’ll see them on welfare, in gangs, on drugs.”

Todd Huston, 31, who is working toward his license as a marriage and family counselor, runs weekly support groups at three of the district’s schools. As he listens to the students in his groups, he says he hears the kinds of stress they experience, and sees how important it is for them to talk about what is going on in their lives.

“These kids are lacking vision and hope,” he said. “They are not getting it from their families, and they usually don’t get it at school. The economy is in trouble and the tension in their families is up. Their emotional needs are not being met.”

When so many teens and parents have difficulty communicating, young people can find it useful to talk to another adult, knowing their conversations will be held in confidence, said Diane E. Kusek, who leads support groups at Marina and Huntington Beach high schools.

“It’s a good way to have non-threatening contact with an adult, someone who’s going to be non-judgmental, who’s not going to bring it up over dinner the next night,” said Kusek, 45, who has three grown children and is working toward her counseling license.

But Kusek does not consider support groups a permanent substitute for talks between students and their parents. In both her support group for students and another evening session for parents, Kusek spends a lot of time teaching them how to talk and listen to each other respectfully.

The volunteer services available in Huntington Beach Union high schools include one-on-one sessions with a practicing clinical psychologist who donates time once a week, in addition to the support groups, most led by people studying for their counseling licenses. There are sessions that cover a wide range of student troubles, as well as groups specially designed for parents, for teens with eating disorders, those with poor study skills, low self-esteem or behavior problems.

Among the student group members are a boy who missed weeks of school because he was abusing crystal methamphetamine, a girl who is depressed and promiscuous, and another girl whose boyfriend beat her up.

To school psychologists, those kinds of problems and many more demonstrate the need to provide students with as many counseling services as possible.

Platow, of the state school psychologists’ organization, said it is “commendable” that Huntington Beach Union uses so many volunteers to beef up the available services. But he cautioned that volunteers must be properly accountable to staff psychologists, and that they could lack the commitment of professional staffers.

“You need a consistent, professional approach, someone who is going to be there Monday and a week from Monday and the Monday after that,” he said.

The district’s psychologists spend time networking in the community, spreading the word that they welcome qualified, trained volunteers. Dorothy Crutcher, who oversees testing and guidance in the district, said that for years they have found a sympathetic community that has delivered those volunteers.

“It would be wonderful if we could have enough to help all the people with problems,” she said. “But you’re in a human business. No one ever runs out of problems.”