At 8:05 a.m. a student ran into my classroom with tears in their eyes. We talked together until the bell rang, after which they headed to their first-period class no longer wanting to go home and certainly more prepared to learn.
So it began, my first student interaction on my first day of a new job, all before school started.
This is why I am here, I thought.
In 2024, Planned Parenthood Los Angeles hired and trained 16 health educators to expand the Wellbeing Center project, a program designed by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to bring mental and sexual health services to public high school students right on their campuses. I was in that new cohort of educators, working with others to staff more than 20 centers at L.A. high schools, with plans to expand to 50 in the coming years.
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Our Wellbeing Center classrooms had an open door four days a week, accessible to any student who walked in with a pass. My job was to be a trusted adult with resources, information and a nonjudgmental listening ear.
I know critics of such programs think students shouldn't get to take mental health breaks at school because it isn’t what happens in the “real” world. They miss the point. Wellbeing Centers are about what the world could be like. They are places where young people have agency to ask questions without fear, where they find mentors who don’t grade or discipline them, where they can practice self-regulating their emotions instead of cutting class and storming off campus.
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I sat across from students who told me about being sexually assaulted, and about having suicidal thoughts. Others had been cheated on, were nervous about exams, were being bullied by their peers or were grappling with the news they weren’t going to qualify for graduation. One student came to the WBC to call her father for the first time in her life, and another came to talk after learning her father was leaving. Students told me I was their safe person, that I was who they’d come out to first, that no one else in school listened like the staff at the Wellbeing Center.
WBCs are an urgent response to problems that we need to take seriously. The reality is that 90% of my interactions with students involved helping them through different stages of mental health crises. It was not always the easiest job, but I never doubted that we were needed. Then, because of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, I lost my job on July 16.
That budget bill targeted Planned Parenthood, ending its eligibility for Medicaid reimbursements. In California, Planned Parenthood estimates that losing the reimbursements will cost the statewide system $300 million. It is fighting the cuts in court, but in the meantime, clinics across the state are closing entirely. For Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, the effort to stabilize itself not only means the loss of clinics, but also sharply downsizing the education department.
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Los Angeles is losing Planned Parenthood educators who worked on health initiatives in the Black and Latino communities and in a variety of school-based programs, including the Wellbeing Centers. We’re talking about educators who led workshops for parents about how to have sexual health conversations with their children, who connected foster youth with health insurance and who presented comprehensive sexual education classes in our schools.
These community workers aren't being laid off because they aren't effective in their jobs. They've been laid off because the government doesn’t value Planned Parenthood and the mental and sexual health education it has provided.
I can describe the ways the real world intruded on the high schools where I worked — school shootings, the pandemic, the January wildfires, immigration raids — but just writing those words raises the question: Is now really the time we want to cut mental health programs for kids?
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When I told my grandmother I’d been laid off, she said she didn’t think President Trump knew his budget would eliminate roles like mine, jobs that provided direct help for students who needed it so badly. She said he wasn’t a nice man, just a businessman.
And of course, he didn’t know who he was laying off, not that my employment status is what is important here. Yes, the layoffs are bad news for me and my colleagues, but they are bad news for everyone. For my students, for Los Angeles and for the country.
Telling people I lost my job is painful, not because I’m embarrassed to be unemployed, but because it means that there will be fewer WBCs in L.A. schools, staffed with fewer trusted adults. Not every Wellbeing Center will vanish, but the gaps in access will be real. For that, I’m devastated.
Jessica Lipaz is an interdisciplinary educator and writer in Los Angeles.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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