The following story was written by Camille Giglio of the California Right to Life Committee.

Did you know that it was the responsibility of schools to control birth rates in local communities?

The Los Angeles Unified School District thinks it is.  On June 5th, 2012, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Planned Parenthood clinic has been operating on the campus of Roosevelt High School in the mainly Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles.

This is not just the school nurse sitting in the school wellness clinic checking temperatures and issuing aspirin. No. This is a full service walk-in reproductive services extension of one of Planned Parenthood’s local abortion clinics.

Here is a quote from the L.A. Times of June 5, 2012: “Despite the decline [of teen pregnancies, ages 15-19], there are still certain areas within the county with disproportionately higher numbers of young mothers, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. The heavily Latino and low-income neighborhood around Roosevelt High School is one of them. Several other neighborhoods in East and South Los Angeles also had higher percentages of teenage births than the rest of the county.

“The services, which are free and confidential, are offered through a unique collaboration between Planned Parenthood and the Los Angeles Unified School District designed to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies among teenagers at the Boyle Heights high school.

After the L.A. Times story appeared, the school district was contacted for an interview.  After several weeks of stalling by school officials, we filed a public records act demand with the school district, requesting all contracts, minutes of meetings, exact location of the clinic on campus, all funding sources and goals and objectives of this partnership.

After five months of filing requests we finally received one outdated document, the Clinic Contract Agreement.

There are nine clinics in the Boyle Heights and surrounding area dispensing birth control, STD treatment, morning-after pills, Plan B, and abortions. What’s the real reason the school district feels that it needs to plant a clinic right on the campus?

According to several of the reports published on June 5th both in print and in on-line media, it was one Roosevelt High School nurse practitioner, Sherry Medrano, already dispensing contraceptives to students, who by herself invited Planned Parenthood to open an office on campus. In the Times article, Medrano claimed that she had become alarmed at the failure of the birth rate to drop for the Latina young women of the Boyle Heights area.

Susan Dunlap, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood-LA, is quoted in the same LA Times article, in response to a question, as to what Planned Parenthood is doing while on the campus:

“So what we do at Roosevelt is we make sure that they have the support and resources that they need to cut down their teen pregnancy rate, whether that means access to condoms, access to information, access to our medical director,” Dunlap says.

According to the contract between Los Angeles Unified School District and Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles, negotiations to form this partnership were begun in 2008, to be re-negotiated in June of 2010. It appears to now be further extended to 2013, but the school district claims that it has no other newer contract.

The school district’s attorney states that this one contract is all the data that they have. The contract lists 48 points of agreement many of which could be normal legal language for any contract between two parties.  However, the school district and Planned Parenthood have failed to honor the part of the contract to make public the main points of the contract in the area of delivery of service, results of services to students, and minutes of meetings of advisory groups required for the school to convene.

The contract states that by law Planned Parenthood is not required to inform parents of the services delivered to teens.

The contract further stipulates that the school will furnish office space, office equipment, advertising and brochures, security for medical data while Planned Parenthood retains all rights exclusively to the human data and services provided including prescribing medications and referrals made.

Planned Parenthood further stipulates that it will be providing physical exams and prescribing medications, all without parental involvement and with strict instructions that the school is not to interfere.

The contract states that Planned Parenthood will train students to be peer birth control counselors for their fellow students and representatives of Planned Parenthood to the community.

Planned Parenthood will partner with community groups to bring education to the neighborhoods and provide “outreach to difficult to reach populations.” The groups named are  Promotoras Communitarias and Circolo de Salud

Theodore Roosevelt high school was founded in 1922. Roosevelt, according to its website, is situated in a 93.3 percent Latino and immigrant neighborhood of Boyle Heights in East L.A. and has a student body consisting of 98.9 percent Hispanics.