Peer Counseling Comes of Age in L.A. Schools

About 15 teen-agers sat on blue and orange plastic chairs in a cleaned up basement storage room at North Hollywood High School.

They looked at one another nervously. Then a 17-year-old scratched her arm absent-mindedly and began: “My dad’s been hassling me. Saturday I got a ticket, and I still haven’t told him.”

Others at a meeting of the Communicators, a peer counseling group, offered sympathy and tales of a lack parental trust and understanding.

“They say, ‘When you’re ready to have sex, I’ll get you birth control,’ ” complained one boy. “But when we’re ready, they say, ‘You’re not ready yet.’ ”

During sessions reminiscent of group therapy, the students shared irritation at parents who seem intrusive, worried about getting pregnant or getting AIDS and discussed the frustration of schoolwork. Similar gatherings of peer counseling groups occur weekly at nearly every high school in the San Fernando Valley.

Although the first student peer counseling program was designed about 20 years ago by psychologist Barbara Varenhorst at Stanford University, only in recent years have such programs gained broad acceptance. When the state Department of Education took a survey in 1985, five high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District had peer counseling programs. Now, the district offers more than 100 such programs.

Allan Kakassy, a peer counseling teacher at Granada Hills High School, believes he started one of the first such programs locally when he was teaching at Washington High School in Los Angeles during the late ‘70s. Students told him they were so frustrated with the problems surrounding them that they wanted a chance to do something for themselves.

“It wasn’t that the counselors weren’t doing their job, but the students felt they could do greater outreach and enhance the effectiveness of the counselors’ work,” he said.

Earlier this month, about 550 people attended the First Annual Peer Counseling Conference, which Kakassy held at Cal State Northridge. “The conference was a very tangible indication of the degree of enthusiasm and interest in peer counseling in L.A. city schools,” he said.

Rich Mills, a Reseda-based school psychologist and peer counseling consultant for the student guidance services division of the Los Angeles Unified School District, speculated that the suicides of four teen-agers in New Jersey in March, 1987, prompted educators to view peer counseling as a possible way to prevent such tragedies.

But Mills and his colleagues are quick to acknowledge the limitations of peer counseling.

“If a major problem is identified in an adolescent, I would be most concerned about using another adolescent as a counselor,” said Marilyn Ruman, an Encino clinical psychologist who has helped set up peer counseling programs.

Student on Student

However, she said, there is no one better than another adolescent for helping a peer “break through that state of self-delusion and self-deception to the point where they can identify that they’ve got a problem.”

Joe Pope, a 16-year-old Granada Hills High School junior and peer counselor, said: “A lot of people at school do think we think we’re junior psychologists, which is not true. We don’t give advice. We just let them know that people are here. Instead of giving advice, I’ll say, ‘I’ve been in situations like that.’

“I counseled one guy who really felt alienated. He said that nobody liked him. Several times he said he thought about killing himself. I reported it. I talked to him and told him he overlooked his friends that he really had. Now I talk to him a lot as a counselor and a friend. He’s a real happy guy. He changed within about two weeks. He just needed to know that there were people there.”

At North Hollywood High School, Communicators is one of the most popular groups on campus. It receives about 300 applications each semester for 25 openings. The group is balanced by race, sex, age, and achievement level, and members must have completed or be enrolled in an evening Leadership Training class.

Not all high school peer counseling programs follow the same model, but they have common aspects. They all start with a class, known as leadership training or peer counseling training, which students sometimes take after school for no credit.

There are lectures, guest speakers, exercises, role playing and discussion of what is going on in the students’ lives. Confidentiality is emphasized. The only situations that must be reported to school authorities are potential suicide, physical abuse, or threat of harm to another person.

Dolva Watson, a mental health nurse with the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health, is an adviser to Communicators. “The angle we work from is that you can’t change anyone else, you can only change yourself,” she said. “So we talk about ‘how are you going to change the way you communicate with your mother?’ We try to get them to come up with their own answers.”

At Grant High School in Van Nuys, student counselors may be assigned to talk with students referred by teachers, counselors, or who have requested counseling themselves. The two students then meet on their own time during lunch, after school, on weekends, and by phone.

Mills said he prefers to use peer counselors as assistants to school staffers, to welcome newcomers, perform clerical work, set up and lead educational programs for other students and as peer tutors for those students in academic difficulty.

Using students to counsel other students about personal problems, he suggested, could be dangerous.

“Kids get inflated very easily, especially in the adolescent years,” he said. “And when you tell them ‘you’re a peer counselor, you’re going to work with this student because he’s a potential dropout, see if you can help him,’ sometimes they get the idea that they’re psychologists.”

Irene Goldenberg, a child psychologist at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, said that when peer counseling programs are well run, ‘they’re amazing, in terms of the kids’ ability to really be helpful and to really get close to other kids.

“I think it’s just distressing to professionals to think that some kid could do what you’re doing,” she said.

Psychologist Ruman emphasized the need for peer counselors to be well supervised and for teen-agers to turn over any major difficulty to a supervising psychologist or guidance counselor.

Supervision of peer counselors is handled differently in each program. At North Hollywood High, for example, 30 peer counselors meet together monthly with an adviser.

At Oak Park High School in Agoura, 70 peer counselors meet in an ongoing training class where they discuss situations, without mentioning names, that have come up while counseling other students. The school guidance counselor is available to talk with peer counselors individually or in small groups.

At Oakwood, a private school in North Hollywood, students attend a 2-hour-a-week class where they discuss current cases. They also write a formal report to the program’s adviser after each meeting, and he discusses cases with each peer counselor.

Recognizing the popularity of peer counseling at high school campuses, Los Angeles school officials have acted recently to establish a uniform policy governing such programs.

“Within the last year, we felt that enough schools were working with it that maybe we should give the strategy more structure,” said Charles Espalin, director of counseling and guidance services for the school district. “So we developed a district bulletin which outlines district procedures.”

Peer counseling advisers say the best counselors are teen-agers who have grappled first with their own problems. Janine Medina, 16, a student at Granada Hills High School, was hospitalized for three months with an eating disorder. A year ago, she weighed 69 pounds.

“In the hospital I met a lot of people, and I thought, ‘When I get out of there, I want to help people,’ ” Janine said.

She became a part of the Peer Assistance Center at her high school and discovered a number of other students with eating disorders.

“It’s real common,” she said. “I was just counseling my friends at first, then other kids who just wanted to talk. There are a lot of people who don’t know what to do.

“Now I’m on the heavy side,” she said. “But I’d rather be heavy than be dying.”

In addition to sharing a certain wisdom with their peers, these youths have also created a community perhaps lacking in other areas of their lives.

“It helps to know other people have the same problems,” said peer counselor Lorna Keene, 16, who attends North Hollywood High. “It helps just knowing the group is there for you. It’s like a family.”