Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t seem to realize it, but he’s handing his opponents a weapon to undermine his biggest policy triumph — mayoral control of the public schools.
In an exclusive last Sunday, The Post reported that the mayor’s Health Department is running wild, distributing the controversial “Plan B” morning-after pill to city schoolchildren without many parents even knowing it.
“I’m in shock,” Mona Davids of the NYC Parents Union told The Post. “What gives the mayor the right to decide, without adequate notice, to give our children drugs that will impact their bodies and their psyches? He has purposely kept the public and parents in the dark with his agenda.”
The evidence supports her charges. In September, the city suggested this was a relatively small program limited to 13 high schools and 567 girls who were receiving Plan B. Yet as The Post’s Susan Edelman found, that barely scratches the surface.
Far from being limited to 13 schools, the program involves 40 separate “school-based health centers.” Last year, these centers handed out 12,721 doses of Plan B — up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and more than double the 5,039 doses given out in 2009-10.
That the city is concerned about teen pregnancy is fine. And state law allows minors to get contraceptives without parental consent. But that doesn’t absolve the city of its obligation to be forthcoming to moms and dads about the medications its “health centers” are offering their daughters.
Plan B is the kind of issue that raises passions on all sides. For that reason alone, the city never should have allowed this program to be imposed by fiat by one of the least accountable of the many un-elected bureaucracies: the Department of Health.
This is an issue that cries out for the people’s elected legislators to decide, acting in the open, after all sides have had a chance to make their concerns heard.
Instead, the city took the imperial approach: Officials refused even to talk to The Post about the program.
If that’s the city’s position, the mayor shouldn’t be surprised if, the morning after he’s gone, his hard-fought win on mayoral control is reversed on the grounds that it shuts parents out of key decisions involving their children.