Contributor: Washington passes a bill and L.A. students lose mental health help they need

At 8:05 a.m., a student ran in my class with tears in the eyes. We talked together until the probe bell, after which they went to their first period course which did not want to go home and certainly more ready to learn.

So it started, my first student interaction during my first day of a new job, while starting the school.

That’s why I’m hereI thought.

In 2024, Planned Parenthood, Los Angeles, hired and trained 16 health educators to extend the Wellbeing Center project, a program designed by the Los Angeles County Public Health Department to provide mental and sexual health services to public high school students on their campuses. I was in this new cohort of educators, working with others for staff of more than 20 secondary school centers in Los Angeles, with plans to extend to 50 in the years to come.

Our classrooms in the wellness center had a door open four days a week, accessible to any student who entered with a pass. My job was to be a trusted adult with resources, information and a listening ear without judgment.

I know that criticism of these programs believe that students should not be able to take mental health breaks at school, because this is not what is happening in the “real” world. They lack the point. Well-being centers concern what the world could to be like. These are places where young people have agencies to ask questions without fear, where they find mentors who do not classify them or discipline them, where they can practice the self -regulation of their emotions instead of cutting the class and assaulting the campus.

I sat in front of students who told me about sexual assault and have suicidal thoughts. Others had been deceived, were nervous with regard to the exams, were intimidated by their peers or were struggling with the news that they were not going to qualify to obtain the diploma. A student came to WBC to call her father for the first time in her life, and another came to speak after learning that her father left. The students told me that I was their safe person, that I was to whom they came first, that no one at school listened as the staff of the Wellbeing Center.

WBCs are an urgent response to the problems we have to take seriously. The reality is that 90% of my interactions with students involved help them at different stages of crisis in mental health. It was not always the simplest work, but I never doubted that we were necessary. Then, due to the great law on Trump administration, I lost my job on July 16.

This budget bill has targeted Planned Parenthood, ending its eligibility for Medicaid reimbursements. In California, Planned Parenthood estimates that the loss of reimbursements will cost $ 300 million to the state -scale system. He fight the cuts before the courtBut in the meantime, state clinics close completely. For Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, the effort to stabilize means not only the loss of clinics, but also strongly the reduction in the workforce of education.

Los Angeles loses Planned Parenthood educators who have worked on health initiatives in black and Latin American communities and in a variety of school programs, including wellness centers. We are talking about educators who have directed workshops for parents about how to have conversations in sexual health with their children, who connected young people with foster family to health insurance and who have presented complete sex education lessons in our schools.

These community workers are not dismissed because they are not effective in their work. They were dismissed because the government does not appreciate Planned Parenthood and mental and sexual health education it has provided.

I can describe the ways in which the real world has sheltered from secondary schools where I worked – school shots, pandemic, January forest fires, immigration raids – but simply writing these words raises the question: is this really the moment when we want to cut mental health programs for children?

When I told my grandmother that I had been dismissed, she said that she did not think that President Trump knew that his budget would eliminate roles like mine, jobs that provided direct aid to students who needed it so much. She said he was not a nice man, just a businessman.

And of course, he did not know who he was dismissed, not that my job status was what is important here. Yes, layoffs are bad news for me and my colleagues, but this is bad news for everyone. For my students, for Los Angeles and for the country.

To say to the people I lost my job is painful, not because I am embarrassed to be unemployed, but because it means that there will be fewer WBC in the schools of Los Angeles, with fewer confidence adults. Not all wellness centers will disappear, but the gaps in access will be real. For that, I am devastated.

Jessica Lipaz is an interdisciplinary educator and writer in Los Angeles.