At 8:05 a.m. a scholar bumped into my classroom with tears of their eyes. We talked collectively till the bell rang, after which they headed to their first-period class not eager to go house and definitely extra ready to study.
So it started, my first scholar interplay on my first day of a brand new job, all earlier than faculty began.
For the file:
9:00 a.m. Aug. 26, 2025A earlier model of this text incorrectly said that Deliberate Parenthood Los Angeles had closed clinics. The closed Deliberate Parenthood clinics had been elsewhere in California.
That is why I’m right here, I believed.
In 2024, Deliberate Parenthood Los Angeles employed and educated 16 well being educators to broaden the Wellbeing Middle undertaking, a program designed by the Los Angeles County Division of Public Well being to convey psychological and sexual well being providers to public highschool college students proper on their campuses. I used to be in that new cohort of educators, working with others to employees greater than 20 facilities at L.A. excessive faculties, with plans to broaden to 50 within the coming years.
Our Wellbeing Middle school rooms had an open door 4 days per week, accessible to any scholar who walked in with a go. My job was to be a trusted grownup with sources, info and a nonjudgmental listening ear.
I do know critics of such applications assume college students shouldn’t get to take psychological well being breaks in school as a result of it isn’t what occurs within the “actual” world. They miss the purpose. Wellbeing Facilities are about what the world might be like. They’re locations the place younger individuals have company to ask questions with out concern, the place they discover mentors who don’t grade or self-discipline them, the place they will apply self-regulating their feelings as a substitute of chopping class and storming off campus.
I sat throughout from college students who advised me about being sexually assaulted, and about having suicidal ideas. Others had been cheated on, had been nervous about exams, had been being bullied by their friends or had been grappling with the information they weren’t going to qualify for commencement. One scholar got here to the WBC to name her father for the primary time in her life, and one other got here to speak after studying her father was leaving. College students advised me I used to be their secure particular person, that I used to be who they’d come out to first, that nobody else in class listened just like the employees on the Wellbeing Middle.
WBCs are an pressing response to issues that we have to take critically. The fact is that 90% of my interactions with college students concerned serving to them by completely different phases of psychological well being crises. It was not all the time the simplest job, however I by no means doubted that we had been wanted. Then, due to the Trump administration’s One Large Lovely Invoice Act, I misplaced my job on July 16.
That price range invoice focused Deliberate Parenthood, ending its eligibility for Medicaid reimbursements. In California, Deliberate Parenthood estimates that dropping the reimbursements will cost the statewide system $300 million. It is fighting the cuts in court, however within the meantime, clinics throughout the state are closing totally. For Deliberate Parenthood Los Angeles, the trouble to stabilize itself means sharply downsizing the training division.
Los Angeles is dropping Deliberate Parenthood educators who labored on well being initiatives within the Black and Latino communities and in a wide range of school-based applications, together with the Wellbeing Facilities. We’re speaking about educators who led workshops for fogeys about how one can have sexual well being conversations with their youngsters, who linked foster youth with medical health insurance and who introduced complete sexual training courses in our faculties.
These group employees aren’t being laid off as a result of they aren’t efficient of their jobs. They’ve been laid off as a result of the federal government doesn’t worth Deliberate Parenthood and the psychological and sexual well being training it has supplied.
I can describe the methods the true world intruded on the excessive faculties the place I labored — faculty shootings, the pandemic, the January wildfires, immigration raids — however simply writing these phrases raises the query: Is now actually the time we need to reduce psychological well being applications for teenagers?
After I advised my grandmother I’d been laid off, she stated she didn’t assume President Trump knew his price range would remove roles like mine, jobs that supplied direct assist for college students who wanted it so badly. She stated he wasn’t a pleasant man, only a businessman.
And naturally, he didn’t know who he was shedding, not that my employment standing is what’s vital right here. Sure, the layoffs are dangerous information for me and my colleagues, however they’re dangerous information for everybody. For my college students, for Los Angeles and for the nation.
Telling individuals I misplaced my job is painful, not as a result of I’m embarrassed to be unemployed, however as a result of it implies that there might be fewer trusted adults in WBCs in L.A. faculties. Not each Wellbeing Middle will vanish, however the gaps in entry might be actual. For that, I’m devastated.
Jessica Lipaz is an interdisciplinary educator and author in Los Angeles.
