At 8:05 a.m. a pupil 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 desirous to go dwelling and positively extra ready to be taught.
So it started, my first pupil interplay on my first day of a brand new job, all earlier than faculty began.
For the report:
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 have been elsewhere in California.
Because of this I’m right here, I assumed.
In 2024, Deliberate Parenthood Los Angeles employed and skilled 16 well being educators to broaden the Wellbeing Heart venture, a program designed by the Los Angeles County Division of Public Well being to convey psychological and sexual well being companies 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 colleges, with plans to broaden to 50 within the coming years.
Our Wellbeing Heart school rooms had an open door 4 days every week, accessible to any pupil who walked in with a go. My job was to be a trusted grownup with sources, data and a nonjudgmental listening ear.
I do know critics of such applications suppose college students shouldn’t get to take psychological well being breaks at college as a result of it isn’t what occurs within the “actual” world. They miss the purpose. Wellbeing Facilities are about what the world may be like. They’re locations the place younger folks have company to ask questions with out concern, the place they discover mentors who don’t grade or self-discipline them, the place they’ll observe self-regulating their feelings as a substitute of reducing 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, have been nervous about exams, have been being bullied by their friends or have been grappling with the information they weren’t going to qualify for commencement. One pupil 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 individual, 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 Heart.
WBCs are an pressing response to issues that we have to take severely. The truth is that 90% of my interactions with college students concerned serving to them by means of totally different levels of psychological well being crises. It was not all the time the best job, however I by no means doubted that we have been wanted. Then, due to the Trump administration’s One Large Lovely Invoice Act, I misplaced my job on July 16.
That funds invoice focused Deliberate Parenthood, ending its eligibility for Medicaid reimbursements. In California, Deliberate Parenthood estimates that dropping the reimbursements will value the statewide system $300 million. It is combating the cuts in courtroom, however within the meantime, clinics throughout the state are closing fully. For Deliberate Parenthood Los Angeles, the trouble to stabilize itself means sharply downsizing the schooling 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 folks about methods to have sexual well being conversations with their kids, who linked foster youth with medical health insurance and who offered complete sexual schooling lessons in our colleges.
These neighborhood staff 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 schooling it has supplied.
I can describe the methods the actual world intruded on the excessive colleges 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 wish to lower psychological well being applications for teenagers?
After I advised my grandmother I’d been laid off, she mentioned she didn’t suppose President Trump knew his funds would eradicate roles like mine, jobs that supplied direct assist for college kids who wanted it so badly. She mentioned 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 essential 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 folks 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 will likely be fewer trusted adults in WBCs in L.A. colleges. Not each Wellbeing Heart will vanish, however the gaps in entry will likely be actual. For that, I’m devastated.
Jessica Lipaz is an interdisciplinary educator and author in Los Angeles.
