The Schools: A Different Approach
If it was a challenge for local health departments to build a mechanism for delivering tobacco control programs quickly, the schools faced an even greater problem. Every county had a health department, and those health departments had a tradition and mandate to do prevention-oriented activities directed at specific diseases or risks. Within schools, the situation was different. Health was not a central part of their mandate, and schools varied in their capacity to provide any kind of health education, much less something as specialized as tobacco use prevention. Moreover, teaching health issues of any kind in schools can expose the local elected board of education to controversy, which it may not be willing
From the beginning, the schools viewed the tobacco money as just another categorical program. Educators tend to resent categorical programs because they believe that such programs limit their authority to do what is best for their students and because the programs require excessive paperwork. Thus, while the Proposition 99 dollars were welcome, the mandate that the schools provide tobacco-specific prevention activities was not. In addition to these problems, AB 75's rapid sunset also caused difficulties. No one knew what would happen when AB 75's twenty-one months ran out, and this uncertain future made the schools even less interested in developing a long-term commitment to tobacco education.
When Proposition 99 passed, California schools were under financial siege. Proposition 13, which had limited the ability of local governments to raise local revenues, had hit the schools particularly hard. Bill Honig, who served as superintendent of public instruction when Proposition 99 passed and when AB 75 was being implemented, explained the situation this way:
There are four things that were going on in California that would make anything hard. Number one is this huge growth. Many places are just trying to accommodate new kids. …They're just coming out of the woodwork and we are not building the buildings. …Secondly, there has been this demographic shift of poverty. The explosive growth of poverty conditions makes schooling much tougher. More kids are coming with deep problems. Then the third one was this whole language demographic shift where you've got now, one out of three kids in that early elementary school level doesn't speak English. So we've got that problem. And then you have the funding crisis on top of that, we're trying to do it with less and less and less dollars.[32]
In this difficult climate, Proposition 99's new money was viewed by the schools as a way to solve some of their pressing problems.
At approximately the same time that Proposition 99 was passed, the California school superintendents were working to establish a regional structure to provide the school districts with health expertise. At the state level, CDE had already established a program and an administrative unit called Healthy Kids, Healthy California, which was responsible for carrying out health and drug-related programs. CDE decided to use the Healthy Kids Regional Centers to implement Proposition 99. CDE pooled the Proposition 99 monies with two other funding sources to
According to Kathy Yeates, who was the acting director of the Office of Healthy Kids, Healthy California in 1994, schools were not really committed to doing much about tobacco for a variety of reasons:
There was no commitment to it. It was like one more thing, given reading programs and bilingual and all the pressing problems—the obvious problems. “Yeah, some kids smoke, but who cares. You know, smoking. Big deal. …It's the least of our discipline problems right now. We've got kids fighting with guns; tobacco, that's just a passive problem. It's not as active as fighting or something like that.” A lot of school folks smoke and it was just too controversial with unions and whatever. So schools really didn't want to take it on. In addition to everybody having someone that's an alcoholic, everybody's got somebody in their families that smokes. And people on staff. …So they kind of tiptoed around it and didn't want to take it on. Didn't see it as a problem…as long as they weren't smoking in their classrooms, who cares what they do?…I mean like “Oh yeah, bad drugs,” but you know that's not the biggest problem.[33]
This attitude, coupled with the risk and protective factors model, provided schools with an opportunity to spend their Proposition 99 monies creatively. For schools, a program that addresses the problems that educators consider most pressing was much more appealing than taking on tobacco directly. From this perspective, if school failure is an underlying cause of tobacco use, then tobacco money could be spent on just about anything that would improve the schools.
The method used to distribute funds added to the problem. In contrast to the critical mass of funding created in the health departments, money went to the county offices of education and the school districts based on average daily student attendance. Once the money was spread over 1,003 districts, fifty-eight county offices, and ten regional centers, the amounts could be quite small. Some of the small districts received under $500, hardly enough to create an identifiable presence for tobacco control. By contrast, even the smallest county health department received $150,000. With a lack of commitment to Proposition 99 at the top, inadequate programming, and sometimes small amounts of money, it is not surprising that schools saw themselves as the recipients of a categorical funding stream, driven by entitlements, which they could try to use for
The poor condition of health education generally in California, due to years of Proposition 13-inspired budget cuts, created further problems for implementing meaningful tobacco prevention programs in the schools. (Increasing numbers of districts were cutting back or eliminating their school nurses at that time.) As one TUPE coordinator said, “All of this money has been flowing to schools with the assumption that there was an infrastructure in place for health education.”[34] The infrastructure to absorb this money and use it effectively simply did not exist. There is no high school graduation requirement for health education in California, and there is a very minimal requirement for health education in teacher credentialing. One of the county TUPE coordinators explained how the lack of infrastructure in schools set them up for failure, not just in tobacco programs but other health programs as well:
There wasn't an infrastructure there to accept the money. A lot of us were afraid that all this money was coming down and it was going to be misused because there wasn't anybody in place. This is kind of a Catch-22, it's a chicken-egg thing. We've got the money but nobody in place, so then we put the money in, we say, “Look, it's failing, it isn't working… .” This is the typical thing that's happened in health education in many instances where the person who ends up teaching it at the high school is the person who's on their last leg. “We don't know what to do with Charlie so we'll have him teach health.”[35]
The $36 million that schools were given each year during the two years of AB 75 would have been a substantial increment to an existing backbone for the delivery of health messages in the schools had it existed.
A coherent approach to tobacco education in the schools was further undermined by the absence of training, materials, or expertise in tobacco use prevention. This lack of materials reinforced the tendency of the schools to teach health as “body systems.” There was little in the way of good age-appropriate material that focused on tobacco as a social and political issue.
For early program implementers, CDE's lack of commitment to the program was reflected in the nature of its tobacco-free mandate. Schools were not required to have tobacco-free policies in order to qualify for Proposition 99 funds, and they were given until 1996 to become tobacco free. CDE promulgated a definition of “tobacco free” that was more rigorous than the definition used by other organizations—schools could not allow any smoking in the buildings, on the grounds (including service