Dropping Drug-Counseling Program a Bold, Stupid Move

You notice her beauty first, pin-up movie star beauty, thick dark hair, huge brown eyes and skin pale and smooth. Then you take in her shape.

In six days, Tina Mull’s first child is due to be born. And Tina, unmarried and living with her parents, is 17 years old.

I’ve come to see Tina this evening in spotlessly middle-class Portola Hills because administrators and school board members of the Saddleback Valley Unified School District say they are “concerned” about girls like Tina.

Oh, not about Tina herself perhaps, but other girls and boys who they feel might be led astray by government employees proffering free abortions and family planning advice behind the backs of parents. A-hem!

(Hint to parents: According to state law, any child over the age of 12 can walk into any county welfare office, alone, and ask for a Medi-Cal card entitling them to family planning services).

So the Saddleback district has made a bold and incredibly stupid move, the only school district in the state of California to do so.

It has engineered an end to a government-funded drug counseling program in the district that Tina and other kids- and their parents -credit with keeping them in school, bringing up their grades and saving their lives.

All because, in theory, if kids enrolled in the Medi-Cal Minor Consent Program request it, they may be eligible for confidential family planning services or treatment for sexual assault victims, venereal disease and mental health care. The program, funded by state and county funds, serves about 1,000 kids countywide.

And, incidentally, Saddleback officials say that as far as they know, during the five years that the program has been used in the district, no student has ever sought an abortion.

But you never know. . .

So now Tina and some 150 other district high school students are on their own, which is why they sought the substance-abuse counseling in the first place. They weren’t making it on their own.

They were doing drugs, drinking themselves sick, hanging out anywhere but in their classes, sleeping around, priming themselves for early death.

Which the district does not dispute. Officials say they think the drug counseling is great, a Godsend really, especially considering that it’s free to them during a time of severe budget cuts and layoffs.

Or rather, it was.

Superintendent Peter Hartman tells me in the wake of the stink about shutting down the program, and since the state still refuses to change its rules for Saddleback Valley--that is, if a kid asks for additional help, she or he can get it--he has worked out a last-minute plan to save the drug counseling.

For six more weeks. At a cost of $15,300 to the district. With no idea about what the plan is for the next school year.

And any and all parents who were concerned that their children might also avail themselves of family planning services thanks to the minors Medi-Cal program--the district calls these parents “anonymous”--can now rest assured. There will be no talking dirty in school!

Even though there never was.

*

But, hey, just a thought here, maybe Tina could have used some family-planning advice. Except Tina, who was in the program for two years, didn’t ask. Like the vast majority of kids in the program, she did not request a Medi-Cal card.

And she says sex was not what they talked about in “group,” that she thinks it’s a topic too personal and delicate to share.

“My family is real strict,” says Tina as her mother sits in the next room listening to her words. “It’s always been the no-premarital-sex kind of thing. We don’t talk about sex. It’s not the type of thing my family talks about. . . . And my dad, to this day, it’s kind of hard for him to even say the word pregnant.”

Tina, who has had problems in her life that could have easily felled anyone twice her age, went first to her drug counselor when she found out she was pregnant. She hadn’t told her parents, and wouldn’t, because she was too scared.

“(My counselor) asked me, ‘Have you thought about what you want to do? It’s your decision,’ ” Tina says. Tina and her boyfriend, whom she has no plans to marry, decided to have the baby.

“And my parents are very against abortion,” Tina says.

But, over and over again, the kids I talked with credit their drug counselor with giving them hope, and goals, in life. Not one says they sought abortions or sexual advice from their counselor at school. Instead, they worked on staying in class and walking straight.

Then, rewards were reaped. Failing grades turned into A’s, and college is in the plans of many--even Tina, determined to finish high school with the class of ’94. (This year, Tina worked as a reporter on the school newspaper at Trabuco Hills High and wrote a personal story about her decision to bear a child).

And, here’s the catch. All the kids’ parents know about the counseling program and wholeheartedly approve.

Says Linda Mull, Tina’s mom: “We tried everything with her. I think Kate (Tina’s counselor) is great. The kids are only going to open up to who they want to.”

Oh, and at the district’s El Toro High School, for instance, parent permission slips were required before children could be enrolled in the drug-counseling program.

But when I ask Hartman why he doesn’t just send home notes to Saddleback parents telling them that their child is enrolled in a program that could also give them access to family planning, and to take out their child if they object, he says that he cannot. He says that it is against the law.

Even though other districts are planning to do so, and even though state and county officials tell me that it is clearly OK.

So let me just cut to the chase. The politics of abortion has torpedoed a worthwhile program because of a “what if.” Ideology rules and the kids, and district taxpayers, lose. And the Saddleback board of education member who has been leading the charge doesn’t return my calls.