Pali High’s Progressive Approach to Reproductive Health

By MATTHEW MEYER | Reporter

Palisades Charter High School has taken an increasingly popular approach to reproductive health for teens: providing a discrete, on-campus option for its students to receive counseling on healthy relationships, learn about safe sex practices, obtain birth control methods and be screened for sexually transmitted diseases.

Once each month for the past three school years, a mobile unit from Santa Monica-based Westside Family Health Center rolls onto campus complete with examining rooms, a waiting area and three nurses.

“It kind of looks like a big Winnebago,” Assistant Principal Mary Bush told the Palisadian-Post. “It’s a pretty cool set-up.”

Students can sign up in the school’s health office for a consultation at the mobile clinic. Their visit is kept private and the services are available to everyone.

“This gives students a chance to see someone, it’s convenient [and] they’re not having to be embarrassed,” Bush said. And “no student is turned away, whether they have insurance or not.”

It took some time to build familiarity and trust with the program when Pali High first started offering the clinics in 2015, but now Bush cites “a steady stream” of 20 to 30 students each month who use the mobile unit in some capacity.

The assistant principal said data indicates that the most common request is for STD screening and treatment, and the second most common is for birth control counseling—similar results to other local schools.

Bush emphasized that the Westside units “are not promoting sex for teens.”

“The counseling is for abstinence and for healthy relationships,” she told the Post. But “knowing teenagers,” she said that Pali High wanted to be proactive in preventing the kinds of issues that commonly affect students across the country, from abusive relationships to STDs and unplanned pregnancies.

That thinking is in line with a California state law that requires age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education in schools—promoting abstinence alongside safe birth control and STD prevention practices, as well as information about body image, sexual assault, sexual orientation and other related issues.

Californian minors do not need guardian approval to seek reproductive health services.

Pali High is far from the only Los Angeles high school to offer a mobile clinic: Westside Family Health Center also serves University High in West LA and Alexander Hamilton High School in Castle Heights. LA schools provide similar services on campuses from South LA to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

Bush said it’s important to note that the clinics aren’t intended to simply hand out contraception—they’re meant to be a safe place to ask questions and address “those bigger concepts with relationships,” such as “what a [healthy relationship] looks like, with trust and honesty.”

It’s a progressive approach that isn’t embraced everywhere. But in California and on LA’s Westside, proactive reproductive care is increasingly delivered right on campus—complete with four wheels and a driver.