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.Everycounty had a health department, and those health departments had a tradition andmandate to do prevention-oriented activities directed at specific diseases or risks.Within schools, the situation was different.Health was not a central part of theirmandate, and schools varied in their capacity to provide any kind of health education,much less something as specialized as tobacco use prevention.Moreover, teachinghealth issues of any kind in schools can expose the local elected board of education tocontroversy, which it may not be willing 138 to tackle.This approach, avoiding controversy, contrasted sharply with DHS'sapproach: using controversy in the media campaign to engage the public in the debateover tobacco.From the beginning, the schools viewed the tobacco money as just another categoricalprogram.Educators tend to resent categorical programs because they believe that suchprograms limit their authority to do what is best for their students and because theprograms require excessive paperwork.Thus, while the Proposition 99 dollars werewelcome, the mandate that the schools provide tobacco-specific prevention activitieswas 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 thisuncertain future made the schools even less interested in developing a long-termcommitment 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 localrevenues, had hit the schools particularly hard.Bill Honig, who served assuperintendent of public instruction when Proposition 99 passed and when AB 75 wasbeing 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 newkids.& They're just coming out of the woodwork and we are not building thebuildings.& Secondly, there has been this demographic shift of poverty.Theexplosive growth of poverty conditions makes schooling much tougher.More kids arecoming with deep problems.Then the third one was this whole language demographicshift where you've got now, one out of three kids in that early elementary school leveldoesn't speak English.So we've got that problem.And then you have the fundingcrisis 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 away to solve some of their pressing problems.At approximately the same time that Proposition 99 was passed, the California schoolsuperintendents were working to establish a regional structure to provide the schooldistricts with health expertise.At the state level, CDE had already established aprogram and an administrative unit called Healthy Kids, Healthy California, whichwas responsible for carrying out health and drug-related programs.CDE decided to use the Healthy Kids Regional Centers to implement Proposition 99.CDE pooled theProposition 99 monies with two other funding sources to 139 create the Drug, Alcohol, and Tobacco Education (DATE) program.CDE requiredeach county office to have a Tobacco Use Prevention Education (TUPE) coordinator,and generally this person was also responsible for the drug and alcohol programs and,in smaller counties, other categorical programs as well, including some that were nothealth programs.According to Kathy Yeates, who was the acting director of the Office of HealthyKids, Healthy California in 1994, schools were not really committed to doing muchabout tobacco for a variety of reasons:There was no commitment to it.It was like one more thing, given reading programsand bilingual and all the pressing problems the obvious problems. Yeah, some kidssmoke, but who cares.You know, smoking.Big deal.& It's the least of our disciplineproblems right now.We've got kids fighting with guns; tobacco, that's just a passiveproblem.It's not as active as fighting or something like that. A lot of school folkssmoke and it was just too controversial with unions and whatever.So schools reallydidn'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.& Sothey kind of tiptoed around it and didn't want to take it on.Didn't see it as aproblem& as long as they weren't smoking in their classrooms, who cares what theydo?& I mean like Oh yeah, bad drugs, but you know that's not the biggestproblem.[33]This attitude, coupled with the risk and protective factors model, provided schoolswith an opportunity to spend their Proposition 99 monies creatively.For schools, aprogram that addresses the problems that educators consider most pressing was muchmore appealing than taking on tobacco directly.From this perspective, if schoolfailure is an underlying cause of tobacco use, then tobacco money could be spent onjust about anything that would improve the schools.The method used to distribute funds added to the problem.In contrast to the criticalmass of funding created in the health departments, money went to the county officesof education and the school districts based on average daily student attendance.Oncethe money was spread over 1,003 districts, fifty-eight county offices, and ten regionalcenters, the amounts could be quite small.Some of the small districts received under$500, hardly enough to create an identifiable presence for tobacco control.Bycontrast, even the smallest county health department received $150,000.With a lackof commitment to Proposition 99 at the top, inadequate programming, and sometimessmall amounts of money, it is not surprising that schools saw themselves as therecipients of a categorical funding stream, driven by entitlements, which they couldtry to use for 140 dominant priorities of the schools.And tobacco, especially at first, was not aparticularly high priority for schools.The poor condition of health education generally in California, due to years ofProposition 13-inspired budget cuts, created further problems for implementingmeaningful tobacco prevention programs in the schools.(Increasing numbers ofdistricts were cutting back or eliminating their school nurses at that time
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