A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Clinic Gets Its Message Out to Girls and Guys

For two years, the 17-year-old North Hollywood girl has had a place where she could talk frankly about sex, something she could never do with her parents.

“They think I’m a virgin,” said the girl, visiting the Valley Community Clinic with a friend this week. “I don’t know how to tell them.”

But it is because of the truths about sex that she learned here--the diseases, death, unwanted pregnancy--that she took firmer control of her sex life. “It’s not worth risking my life for,” she said.

The Valley Community Clinic teen program has had nearly 1,300 visits this year from teenagers getting exams, birth control help, information and advice. Connie Kruzan, the clinic’s director of youth services, has seen a lot of progress since the program began four years ago.

“We’re seeing more and more kids coming in as couples,” Kruzan said. Others have decided to put off having sex. And a small minority are even coming in with their parents. While both trends are encouraging to Kruzan, she notes more importantly that the percentage of pregnant teens at the clinic has dropped from over 30% to only 6% in four years.

But the target of the clinic has not been just teenage girls. It’s the boys too.

“They really have been left out of the loop as far as reproductive education goes,” she said. But through the educational-outreach programs at the schools, Kruzan has seen how much teenage boys want to be responsible.

“I think people always assumed they didn’t really care,” Kruzan said. “But they really are thirsty for the knowledge.”

The clinic’s teen pregnancy prevention program--which includes a male outreach project--was a winner of a Community Partnership Award from the Los Angeles Times Valley Edition. The program’s strength, Kruzan said, has been that the message comes not from grown-ups but from teens and young adults who work as health educators and clinic staff.

“We never talk at them,” said Demetrious Navarro, a health educator in his 20s from Pacoima. With his friend, Robert Coppel, Navarro instead talks with teens at high schools, group homes, shelters and juvenile halls about the realities of sex.

With light jokes, casual talk and some graphic photos of venereal disease, they work to destroy a lot of myths about sex among teens.

“We’re far from the textbook,” said Coppel, who lives near Pasadena. “We try to answer the things they don’t understand. Sometimes they get a little rude, but that’s their way of asking questions. Teachers don’t understand this.”

Teens helped design the program and drew up a job description for Kruzan before she was hired four years ago. It was their enthusiasm for the program that persuaded private foundations to come forward to support it after state funding was lost last year, Kruzan said.

Marsha Malinovitz, 20, a USC student from North Hollywood, was stuffing envelopes this week for a fund-raiser with Jane Fonda in October. In five years at the clinic, Malinovitz has worked in each of its departments.

“I was here when it first started,” Malinovitz said. Although stuffing envelopes is not the most satisfying job, it did serve as a reminder about how much the program has improved. “It makes me feel proud to know I had a part in it.”

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