Next L.A. / A look at issues, people and ideas helping to shape the emerging metropolis. : More Than Just ABCs : For many poor children, school is the only place where they might get medical, social and psychological help.

Students and parents at Murchison Street School in Boyle Heights look to the school for more than the usual fare of classroom lessons, cafeteria food and kickball on the playground.

For these 625 families, most of whom live down the street at the Ramona Gardens housing project, the school is where they go to get medicine prescribed for an ear infection, help dealing with a loss of welfare or food stamp benefits, psychological counseling in the case of a family trauma and adult English language classes.

“If our job is to improve the learning of these students, we can’t just do it by doing reading, writing and arithmetic,” said Principal Robert Bilovsky, “because the family is not in a position to support their children at home as much as they need to . . . and we need to help those families.”

American schools historically have done more than just teach the students who come through their doors. In times of great social need, such as the turn of the century when immigrants from Eastern Europe flooded into East Coast cities, schools have become community centers with a broadly defined social mission.

School and social service officials see a parallel in Los Angeles today. Social needs--poverty, shattered families, high unemployment, hunger--are a burden that more schools are facing.

While critics argue that schools should stick to teaching children, many academics, social workers and educators say that improvements in instruction, textbooks and other traditional elements of school are predestined to fall short unless troubling aspects of children’s lives are attended to.

Since children are at school most days, it makes sense to address their needs there, rather than make them travel to a central office somewhere, the concept goes.

The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health has found that only half of the families scheduled for counseling at a central office show up for their appointment; the rate is above 90% for counseling sessions at the Murchison campus.

School attendance also has improved, to over 95%, because minor health problems, such as allergic reactions, sore throats and ear infections, are treated quickly before becoming more serious.

It works, Bilovsky says, because instead of tackling a family’s problems one by one, the agencies work together.

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Beneranda Villatodo arrives at Murchison every morning with her first-grader, second-grader and 2 1/2-year-old toddler. While the older children report to class, the toddler goes to the school’s day care center and Villatodo attends either an English language class or a citizenship class.

“These are opportunities that I’m going to take advantage of, because I’ve never had them before,” she said.

Carmen Mora said she appreciated the call she got from the school when her 6-year-old daughter began falling behind in class. The school asked if there were problems at home and, later, provided counseling to help ease tensions between Mora and her husband.

As elegantly common-sensical as the idea might seem, putting it into practice in Los Angeles has been nightmarishly complex. Conflicting eligibility rules, inter-agency rivalries or differences of opinion, stop-and-start commitments from top agency officials and, in some cases, plain and simple inertia, have slowed progress.

“It hasn’t failed, it just takes longer,” said Susan Lordi, an administrator with the county Office of Education who has pioneered such arrangements. “We learned as we went along that our original idea was too simple.”

Out of 1,650 schools in the county, only 31 in communities as varied as Pasadena, Pomoma, Long Beach, Culver City and the Antelope Valley are operating such full-service social programs.

Now, however, Los Angeles County’s financial problems, as well as uncertainty about the federally funded social programs that the schools draw on, are casting such efforts into turmoil.

Doctors with the county health department, for example, back up nurse practitioners who diagnose minor problems such as ear infections by confirming the diagnoses over the phone and giving permission to prescribe medication, which the family can obtain for free at a county facility.

In the looming cutbacks, some of the physicians may lose their jobs, nurse practitioners will visit schools less often and the free prescription program may be cut altogether.

Proponents say, however, that in times of financial difficulty public agencies should be more interested than ever in taking part. “Agencies may need to rethink the service delivery system and ask how can we get services to kids and families that need them the most,” said Sid Gardner, who directs the Center for the Collaboration of Children at Cal State Fullerton.

Rather than having social workers gather at a central office, one might be stationed at the school itself, and assigned to all the cases that arise in the neighborhood. That not only makes the social worker a fixture in the area, adding to his or her credibility, it could could help the agency save on rent.

Gardner said schools also should rethink how they serve educational needs. Instead of having a dozen programs to help reduce student gang involvement, drug use and other problems, the schools should be allowed to simply pool the money in different accounts and tackle school-wide problems, he said.

At Murchison, a committee that includes a caseworker, school administrator, dropout prevention specialist, social workers and others sits around a table every Monday morning and discusses cases. Some are children who are falling behind academically, behaving badly or having chronic health problems.

Four children at the school have suffered recent deaths in their families. The committee members agreed to try counseling for the students and their siblings who attend a nearby middle school. That holistic approach to families would not have been possible before.

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In another case, a third-grader who had become uncontrollable in class was referred for counseling to a psychological social worker. When the social worker learned the boy was being beaten at home, the caseworker assigned to Murchison by the county Department of Children and Family Services became involved.

After meeting with the family, the two workers put together a plan for helping the parents deal with the father’s alcoholism and issues of spousal abuse, unemployment and isolation. They obtained a court order requiring the parents to attend parenting classes and counseling for substance abuse.

The boy’s family also was helped to get welfare and food stamps and his 4-year-old sister was immunized by the school nurse and enrolled in a preschool program, freeing up the children’s mother to attend English as a Second Language classes and a parent discussion group.

“The reality is that children are sitting in our classrooms with all sorts of problems preventing them from learning,” said Andrea Zetlin, a professor of education at Cal State Los Angeles who helped set up the Murchison program. “It seems like we are putting blinders on if we just ignore that.”