Birth Control Issue Leads to Rejection of School Health Clinic

San Diego school trustees, ending months of bitter controversy over whether schools should dispense contraceptives to students, Tuesday killed a proposal to establish a health clinic in a city school.

By a 3-2 vote, the board decided not to continue research on the clinic proposal, rejecting the recommendation of a task force that trustees created four months ago by the same divided vote.

The clinic died when trustee Kay Davis--who in March joined board President Susan Davis and trustee Dorothy Smith in creating the task force to study the need for a clinic--sided with trustees Larry Lester and John Witt to defeat the proposal.

“Sadly, we, the public school system, cannot take on and solve all of society’s ills,” Kay Davis said in a prepared statement. “We must keep a narrower focus and keep in our vision the type of educational program we want to offer our children. Within budget constraints, keeping this focus is already a full-time job.”

Contraception would have been just one facet of the proposed clinic, but it became the overriding issue for opponents, who said the availability of birth control devices and pregnancy counseling would promote promiscuity and undermine parental authority. Those opponents included Roman Catholic Bishop Leo T. Maher, who endorsed a one-day boycott of the schools in May and rallied parishioners against the proposal.

Clinic proponents, including schools Supt. Thomas Payzant, said discussion of most other issues was lost in the battle over contraception.

The defeat was a bitter one for school officials, who almost a year ago began devising plans for a comprehensive health facility where students could obtain mental health care, physical examinations, immunizations and nutritional advice.

“I’m not surprised. I thought it would go this way,” said Edward Fletcher, health services director for the district, which had received hundreds of letters in opposition to the idea and just a few supporting it. But Fletcher said he was disturbed that opponents’ remarks during more than two hours of public hearings Tuesday “ranged from naivete to outright distortion.”

The clinic’s critics celebrated the vote. “I think the community has won,” said Father Douglas Regin, who led the opposition members of the task force.

“We’re very thrilled,” said Joan Patton, founder of the fledgling Coalition for Family Values, which fought the clinic. “They really couldn’t ignore a very, very well done minority report (of task force members opposed to the clinic). And the majority report said nothing.”

Patton suggested that proponents of a clinic would try to bring the idea before the board again--perhaps after school board elections in November--but Payzant declared the idea dead.

“There’s not going to be any effort on my part in the foreseeable future to bring this back,” Payzant said, adding that the vote was a “strong statement” by the board against a clinic.

Susan Davis proved to be the strongest supporter of the proposal, telling board members that “we can’t really turn the clock back. I know we’d like to . . . We don’t want to really deal with a problem that will take us away from our other problems.”

Smith also voted for the clinic proposal, but only after a strongly-worded declaration that she could not support dispensing contraceptives at the facility. To do so, she said, “would simply heighten the conflict and not serve the best interest of the majority of students.”

But Kay Davis, the only incumbent board member who faces election in November, said the clinic would open the school system to numerous lawsuits and detract attention from major educational issues such as class size, teacher salaries, property management, morale and maintenance.