The Brief

In four years as a peer educator for the group Sexperts at UCLA, Sriha Srinivasan talked to a lot of student groups about sex education.

Some were more difficult than others. Fraternities and sororities were the toughest.

Because of the Greek system’s reputation for ignoring consent in sexual relations, “they expected us to come in and basically scrutinize them or scold them,” said Srinivasan, who is now an abortion doula with the Los Angeles Abortion Support Collective and enrolled in medical school.

She remembers the work it took to loosen students up and help them let their guards down.

“I would start off and say, ‘Hi, my name is Sriha and I'm a part of Greek life too, I'm in ADPi,’ you would see [them react], ‘OK, she's part of this, she's not going to judge us for being a part of this and she understands where we're coming from.’”

That, in a nutshell, is peer health education: training students as ambassadors to convey sometimes controversial health topics. They create spaces where students feel open to listening, dialogue, and discussion.

A state law that took effect in 2023 also offers a new opportunity to universities’ student health ambassadors: informing their peers across public university campuses that students are now entitled to medication abortion services.

Who knows what about medication abortion?

An LAist investigation published in January found that in the year since the abortion pill requirement went into effect, a patchwork approach of outreach and promotion has developed among UC and CSU campuses. Some campuses put a lot of information online about medication abortion while other campuses put out none. Some students — it’s unclear how many — don’t know their campuses now provide abortion pills.

In the absence of consistent messaging over the past year, students have said they feel a need to step in to inform other students about their rights.

Staff on some of these campuses see an opportunity to create awareness campaigns for abortion pills, using the peer education model.

“Students have had to sort of go out of their way to access an abortion that they could have access to right here on campus,” said Shira Brown, director of Cal State Northridge’s Women’s Research and Resource Center. “For me that feels like a major gap in knowledge-sharing.”

After reading the LAist report, Brown said she did her own research, which confirmed a knowledge-sharing gap on her campus. She also talked to leaders of the university student health center. All that led her to decide to organize an awareness campaign this year focused on medication abortion.

Here’s what she plans to do:

• Publish information about medication abortion in the center’s twice a month newsletter. (Done!)
• Have students create a social media campaign on the center’s Instagram page.
• Organize an event around medication abortion information.
• Submit an article to the student newspaper, or pitch a reporter to write one.

The awareness campaign for medication abortion needs to stand on its own, she said, because couching it with other reproductive health topics and context may dilute the message, which she hopes to keep simple.

“This is a service that’s available and it’s legal and you should know about it,” she said.

Sriha Srinivasan poses for a portrait on campus at UCLA.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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Eight students, most of them unpaid, help run CSUN’s Women’s Research and Resource Center. Three of them will work on this campaign, she said, because as peers they know best all that students are juggling these days while earning a degree.

Altogether, 33 public university campuses in California are affected by the medication abortion requirement, and each campus is left to its own devices about how to implement it.

However, some system leaders think there’s room for more involvement.

“We are looking at template language for campuses to include on [individual school websites],” said Ray Murillo, the Cal State University system’s assistant vice chancellor of student affairs.

In-person outreach efforts will likely still be developed by the individual campuses.

Will students react to peer education model?

Cal Poly Pomona’s student health center organized for the first time this month a female reproductive health topic workshop called “Taboo Topics: Womxn’s Health Workshop.”

“It was awesome,” said Kenya Luse, senior coordinator for health promotion and wellness services at the student health center at Cal Poly Pomona. The workshop took place in a conference room in the university student center. About a dozen people attended.

“Students were able to share their feelings around menstruation, their feelings around birth control, how culturally those things have been for them,” Luse said.

Kenya Luse, senior coordinator of health promotion & wellness services at Cal Poly Pomona, in her office on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024.

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Julie Leopo

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LAist

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The success, she said, was due in part to the work of a handful of peer health educators during the workshop, students trained by the center who communicated the topics and facilitated discussion using their own student experiences to do that.

“As a student and also a student worker, I’m like a middle channel to bridge the gap between the student and the professional,” said Minh Tam Vo, a Cal Poly Pomona senior majoring in chemical engineering who was one of the student educators in the workshop.

“They feel more comfortable talking to me and asking me questions,” Vo said.

Did the peer educators make a difference?

“I felt more connected,” said Celina Robles as she walked out of the workshop. She’s a Cal Poly Pomona urban planning and design major. She knows one of the peer educators and came to support her. She also learned a few things about the menstruation cycle. It was a safe space for learning, she said.

Ala Elkambaei, social justice leader, at the Womxn's Resource Center at Cal Poly Pomona.

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Julie Leopo

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LAist

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“When you see people similar [to your] age and other women as well, it just feels like a more tight-knit community,” she said.

It’s not a secret to campus administrators that peer health educators are a powerful tool.

“They can reach their peers so much better than I ever could,” said Susan Flaming Yeats, director of the student health center at CSU Dominguez Hills. "They are the best people to speak to their friends and their classmates about these sensitive topics, better than anybody on staff and faculty ever could.”

Campus administrators say it’s urgent to include information about medication abortion as one more resource to help students graduate.

“It's about reproductive justice and reproductive rights,” CSU Northridge’s Shira Brown said, “but it's also just about making sure our students graduate, which is ultimately what every single center, organization, department on this campus, what our end goal is, right?”

A slow leak from a chemical tank smeared an orange cloud across the sky of a Southern California neighborhood on Tuesday, but authorities said they quickly got it under control.

Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Aaron Katon said authorities responded to a business that makes cleaning products after receiving a call shortly before noon about the cloud. Police evacuated a nearby middle school as a precaution, Katon said.

They do not yet know what the chemical was, but all shelter-in-place orders have been lifted, he said. The regional air quality management district has deployed staff to the area to investigate, said Connie Villanueva, a spokesperson for the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

The company, Shepard Bros., could not immediately be reached for comment.

Three company employees reported minor respiratory irritation and declined further treatment, Katon said.

The leak occurred in the city of La Habra near a mix of residential neighborhoods and industrial warehouses about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Anaheim.

Keary Godinez, who works in a nearby restaurant, said she saw what appeared to be a dark yellow cloud spread across the sky. The 20-year-old said she watched students across the street board buses to evacuate, but police told her the eatery could remain open.

“It looked like pollen dust,” Godinez said, adding she didn’t detect a smell from the cloud. “It just kind of smeared in the sky and started going away.”

La Habra Mayor Jose Medrano had urged residents to shelter in place and said some streets were being evacuated.

Luis Gomez, who manages a nearby pickleball program, said earlier Tuesday he saw the cloud, called police and was told anyone within a mile radius of the location was under an evacuation order.

The Los Angeles Lakers will unveil a statue of former coach Phil Jackson outside their downtown arena next year.

The Lakers announced the plan Tuesday to honor Jackson, who led the Lakers to five championships and seven NBA Finals appearances during two stints totaling 11 seasons as their head coach.

The statue will be unveiled April 9 before the Lakers’ home game against Minnesota.

After his famed tenure leading Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls to six championships, Jackson joined the Lakers in 1999 and immediately began another era of major success for the 17-time NBA champion franchise.

His first three teams in Los Angeles won championships behind the dynamic duo of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, and the Lakers added two more titles in 2009 and 2010 led by Bryant and Pau Gasol. His Lakers also made the NBA Finals in 2004 and 2008.

Jackson set the Lakers franchise record for coaches with 610 victories while leading his teams to the playoffs in every year of his tenure, which ended in 2011.

“Phil Jackson defines championship basketball for a reason,” Lakers governor Jeanie Buss said in a statement. “His masterful approach to coaching brought out the best in some of the greatest athletes to ever play the game. After he accepted my dad’s invitation to join the Lakers, Phil’s unmatched creativity and commitment to excellence restored our championship legacy, bringing five titles and setting a standard of excellence for generations to come. It is a great joy to be able to mark that achievement with the statue he so richly deserves.”

Jackson will be the ninth person associated with the Lakers to be honored with a statue in Star Plaza outside their arena. He joins Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Bryant, O’Neal, broadcaster Chick Hearn and former coach Pat Riley, whose statue was unveiled earlier this year.

Jackson’s 11 championships as a head coach are the most in NBA history. The North Dakota native and former New York Knicks forward is a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame.