Jordan High Wins Grant for Comprehensive Health Clinic

Jordan High School in Watts received a $600,000 grant Tuesday to establish the first comprehensive campus health clinic in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Announcement of the six-year award was made by the New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest underwriter of school-based clinics. In July, the foundation’s trustees will consider funding clinics at two other high schools in the district, San Fernando and Los Angeles.

The Jordan clinic, which is to open in September, will be operated by the Watts Health Foundation and will offer a wide range of medical care to students who have written parental permission. Services will range from immunization, physicals, screening for high blood pressure and diabetes to treatment of minor medical emergencies. The clinic will also provide counseling for drug abuse, prevention of suicides and family planning.

The most controversial service of the clinic is that it will dispense birth control devices and information.

In its application for funding, Jordan High school was described as being in “the poorest section of Los Angeles County.” School officials said that the teen-age birthrate in Jordan’s attendance area is among the highest in the county, along with two other South-Central high schools, Fremont and Locke.

In a recent district-sponsored survey, 45% of Jordan students said they were sexually active. About 16% of the female respondents said they had been pregnant at least once and 13% of the male respondents said they had either fathered a child or thought they had. Of the sexually active respondents, 65% said they never used any kind of birth control.

Also, 58% of Jordan students said they saw a doctor less than once a year. A majority of these students said that cost or lack of transportation kept them from seeing a doctor.

Board member Roberta Weintraub, co-author two years ago of the original clinic proposal, said the grant was a “vindication” of the board’s support of the clinics.

Opponents of the clinics, however, interpreted the delay in a final funding decision for the other two school clinics as a partial victory for their side.

‘With only one out of three clinics funded, my initial response is that this is quite an exciting victory for us,” said Eadie Geib, a spokeswoman for a San Fernando Valley group that has organized several anti-clinic marches.

Led by the local Catholic Church and other anti-abortion groups, the opponents have claimed that the campus medical centers are designed to be “sex clinics”; that by dispensing contraceptives they will contribute to increased teen-age promiscuity, and that they will refer pregnant teen-agers to abortion clinics.

District policy, however, explicitly forbids the clinics from providing abortion counseling or making abortion referrals.

Johnson Foundation officials stressed Tuesday that the decision to review applications from the other two district schools chosen for pilot clinics--San Fernando in the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles in the Mid-Wilshire area--did not mean these schools are less likely to be funded. Applications from the three schools were separated so foundation trustees could thoroughly review the proposals, according to Julia Graham Lear, co-director of the foundation’s adolescent health care program.

The foundation, established by a member of the family that founded the pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson, concentrates on providing seed money for improving health services in the United States, and in recent years has been active in setting up school health clinics.

“We have not been rejected, which hopefully means we will get funding for the other two sites,” said Maria Reza, director of the school district’s clinic program.

School officials are seeking additional money from the state and private sources for the clinics, with the goal of eventually having clinics at all 49 district high schools.