Students Health

Children who eat school lunches, take nutritional education classes and have limited access to soft drink and candy machines are less likely to be unhealthy, according to a study released Tuesday.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius visited a health clinic in downtown Los Angeles on Monday and announced more than $9 million in funding to help medical students repay school loans if they agree to work in underserved areas. Sebelius said the program will encourage more students to pursue careers in family medicine and will help relieve a shortage of primary care doctors. "Most Americans who live in underserved areas don't have access to basic care," she said during the visit to Eisner Pediatric and Family Medical Center.

Noxious fumes emanating from a nearby bus yard sickened 38 students at Sun Valley Middle School on Friday, sending 20 of them to area hospitals for treatment, authorities said. All 20 were all expected to be treated and released. The fumes, which officials believe emanated from an area where school buses are steam-cleaned, were harmless, Los Angeles Fire Department Assistant Chief Michael Fulmis said. "It was just a bad, stinky odor."

The 17-year-old boy who came into Cathy Owens' nursing office at Murrieta Valley High School in Riverside County was gasping for breath. He had no history of health problems. After quickly examining him, Owens' 35 years of experience kicked in. "He was not able to breathe, and there was no heart rate going," she recalls. "All I could think of was he was suffering from anaphylaxis. " Often the result of a severe food allergy, anaphylaxis can be lethal if not treated within minutes.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer and teachers' union President Day Higuchi endorsed legislation by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) that would establish a student health insurance program, giving low-income public school students free health insurance. Students in the free school lunch program would be eligible for the insurance plan, for those whose families live at or below 130% of the federal poverty level, about $22,945 a year for a family of four. From Times Staff Reports

In response to an upsurge in tuberculosis cases in Orange County, health officials have ordered expanded testing of students this fall. * The new policy requires TB testing of students from outside Orange County who transfer into any public or private school in the county. State law already requires TB testing of all students entering the first grade. The county's new policy expands the testing to cover grades one through 12, if the student is moving into Orange County.

More than 200 Orange County high school and community college students and their teachers will be tested for tuberculosis beginning today because they were in classes with two students diagnosed with the infectious disease. About 107 students and teachers at Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove will be tested on campus today.

Parents lining up at the medical clinic at Columbus Middle School in Canoga Park want to volunteer as classroom aides, but must first pass a tuberculosis skin test. At Manual Arts High School in South-Central Los Angeles, a student who recently delivered a baby waits to speak to a doctor about contraceptives. And at San Fernando High School, teenagers stream into a cramped medical clinic for everything from headaches to acne to depression. Many are indigent and without health insurance.

With most Orange County schools set to open in less than two weeks, the fall back-to-school rituals are well under way. There are shopping trips for new lunch boxes and pencils and the less-pleasant outings to receive immunizations required for entering school. The mandatory inoculations are DTP (diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis), MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) and oral vaccine for polio. Each series requires two or more doses over varying periods of time.

Believing that a good education begins with healthy students, seven northeast Valley schools have joined together to apply for a $250,000 grant from the state Department of Education, hoping to turn their campuses into miniature community service centers.

The recent arrest of a UCLA student in the brutal stabbing of a classmate in a campus chemistry lab has again focused attention on an issue that gripped the nation after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech: the mental health of troubled college students. The Virginia Tech shootings, which left 32 victims and the gunman dead, raised difficult questions about how a disturbed student could have been allowed to remain at the school despite danger signs. Since then, campuses in California and around the country say they watch their students ever more closely for signs of possible mental illness or other problems.

Say "squishy-squashy" and students immediately know what to do in the model physical education program at Van Nuys Middle School. It means "move in close enough to touch somebody, but don't," one administrator explained. The command is an attention-getting time-saver -- before or after a physical activity -- when teachers need to be heard. But metaphorically, the invented word could apply to P.E. in the Los Angeles Unified School District as a whole. Squishy-squashy could stand for oversized P.

When Janis Lake heard the Los Angeles County supervisors cast their votes a year ago, her heart immediately sank. The county-funded student health clinic at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills would be shut for good due to budget cuts. With the 2002-2003 school year about to start, Lake knew that something had to be done to save the clinic, where an average of 15 students, nearly all of them uninsured, would come each day to receive free medical care.

Against the backdrop of the Ventura school district's first farm-fresh salad bar, community leaders joined Tuesday to urge legislators and other policymakers to take a tougher stand against a rising tide of children showing up to school overweight and out of shape. That message was bolstered by the release of a new study that chronicled a surge in childhood obesity and other health problems in three coastal California counties.

When my mother's generation went to college, parents sent their sons and daughters off knowing that strict dress codes, curfews and rules of conduct were the order of the day. Universities operated under the mandate of in loco parentis, "in place of a parent, with a parent's duties and responsibilities." My generation, the baby boomers, triggered a radical change in the relationship between students and university administrators.

Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer and teachers' union President Day Higuchi endorsed legislation by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) that would establish a student health insurance program, giving low-income public school students free health insurance. Students in the free school lunch program would be eligible for the insurance plan, for those whose families live at or below 130% of the federal poverty level, about $22,945 a year for a family of four. From Times Staff Reports

Teacher John Cort has tended the same playing field at a local junior high since Nixon was president. Early on, he hardly noticed when pesticide crews sprayed lemon orchards once or twice a year. But now, with tractor rigs or crop-duster copters strafing nearby strawberry fields every couple of weeks, Cort and his physical education students sometimes flee indoors to escape the possible drift of noxious fumigants, toxic fungicides and poisonous insecticides.

A 13-year-old student with asthma died at school Monday afternoon, authorities said. Uzma Noori was rushed to Pomona Valley Medical center after collapsing in the girl's locker room of South Point Middle school in Diamond Bar. She was pronounced dead at 12:50 p.m. Although the autopsy has yet to be completed, Los Angeles County Sheriff's investigators say they suspect Noori's asthma caused her death.

Los Angeles Unified Supt. Roy Romer and teachers union President Day Higuchi endorsed legislation by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) that would establish a Student Health Insurance Program, giving low-income public school students free health insurance. All those entitled to free school lunches would be eligible for the program, going to students whose families live at or below 130% of the federal poverty level, which is $22,945 a year for a family of four.

Children who eat school lunches, take nutritional education classes and have limited access to soft drink and candy machines are less likely to be unhealthy, according to a study released Tuesday.