The union representing Los Angeles school employees — cafeteria workers, custodians, teachers’ assistants and others — is launching a pilot program to help students at four schools get access to counseling and health care.

They say their workers can help provide a missing link.

“Optimizing Access to Services, Inspiring Success,” or OASIS, will train employees to coordinate  with outside providers, tapping into city, county and nonprofit agencies that provide counseling, dental and vision care as well as tutoring and vocational support.

“It’s a little bit odd, I think, when people hear a labor union – specifically a classified labor union – is taking on operation like OASIS that focuses on the health and wellness of kids and families,” said Lester Garcia, a spokesman for Service Employees International Union Local 99. “I think it’s important for us as a labor union and as a labor movement to think about how we mobilize our members and our supporters for the public good.”

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Lydia Ponce at the podium

Once upon a time people turned to local parishes in times of need, whether they needed help for aid for family counseling, putting food on the table or finding safe shelter.

Now, labor and city leaders in Los Angeles want that hub of help to be your local school.

SEIU Local 99, the school workers union, is the driving force behind OASIS — Optimizing Access to Services, Inspiring Success — a new program that will coordinate existing public and private programs to bring health care, tutoring, meals, counseling and other services directly to families in local schools.

By integrating resources from city, county, and community-based organizations, educators hope to improve students outcomes and increase parent engagement.

“Nobody can be sure if this approach is going to work,” School Board member Steve Zimmer told LA School Report, “but we owe to our students to see if this type of a model will work.”

“I think it will,” he said.

The program gained a boost today from the the Los Angeles City Council as members approved a motion to work with OASIS to improve the delivery of city services to families at LA Unified schools. It was unanimously approved today by the council in a 12-0 vote (three council members were absent).

“The success of our city depends on the success of our students,” Council President Herb Wesson said at a news conference on the steps of City Hall. “By reaching out to students and their parents directly in our schools we’re working to address real barriers that impact student achievement, and ultimately, building a better Los Angeles.”

The resolution directs LA City Departments, including the Economic and Workforce Development, Housing and Community Investment, Library, Parks and Cultural Affairs to develop plans for the implementation of services in the next 45 days.

Funding for the program comes from federal dollars, through the district’s California Office of Reform Education Waiver, which part of the No Child Left Behind waiver granted by the U.S. Department of Education last year. The waiver frees up about $80 million in Title I dollars that LA Unified can decide how to spend.

Lydia Ponce, an SEIU 99 member and Parent Community Representative at Venice High School, works to connect families with with local resources.

“In my position I’ve seen hunger, depression, fading hope, and longing,” she said at the news conference. “There are people who need help but there’s too much red tape . . . they don’t know how to get access to the resources that are available.”

“Having OASIS in the school will mean that a family won’t have to trek across town on a bus to apply for food stamps. They can come into the school and do it when they drop their kids off,” she added.

The official kick-off for OASIS is timed to coincide with the start of summer school programs in mid-June. If success, officials are planning to continue it through the school year.

Starting as a pilot program, the first centers will open at Utah Street Elementary in east Los Angeles, Venice High School on the westside, and Audubon Middle School and Fremont High School in south Los Angeles.

“The Great Recession has left many families struggling, and all too often their children feel the greatest impact,” Congresswoman Karen Bass said at the conference. “I believe that as lawmakers we have a responsibility to our children, especially those most in need, to provide opportunities like OASIS that address the needs of children and their parents. When children have a stable home and academic programs that stimulate their minds and ensure their health, students have a much greater chance to succeed in school and thrive in life.”

John Deasy, the LA Unified superintendent, was scheduled to join parents and other officials at the announcement, but after addressing the City Council, he did not attend.

*Adds comment from Rep. Karen Bass.

That might be about to change.

In a presentation to the LA Unified School Board on Tuesday, SEIU local 99 Executive Director Courtni Pugh laid out a vision to better connect community services to schools. Dubbed OASIS, for Optimizing Access to Services, Inspiring Success, the plan aims to turn local schools sites into a hub of community services, such as park space, libraries, health care providers and technology.

“Not everyone enters the classroom in the morning with the same experiences the night before,” Pugh told LA School Report. “We have to recognize that a child’s day does not start and end in the classroom.”

It is, by her own admission, not a new idea. Earlier this year, the Youth Policy Institute launched an initiative called Los Angeles Promise Neighborhoods, which aims to fuse a variety of anti-poverty services into one program centered around a school. (The idea was inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone.)

Pugh’s goal is to set up six to 12 OASIS schools within LAUSD starting in the next school year. She hopes the project will get funding from a range of sources, including the City of Los Angeles, LA Unified and non-profits.

At Tuesday’s meeting, school board members were practically falling over themselves to praise Pugh’s idea.

“I love this,” said Steve Zimmer. “This is what we should be doing.” Even Monica Ratliff, against whom Local 99 campaigned heavily against last year, thought the plan was “fantastic.”

Pugh, a former political director of the powerful LA County Federation of Labor, has headed Local 99 for just over a year. She was also recently named the chair of SEIU International’s education council. From that platform, she is wading into the education reform debate, staking out a middle ground between charter school advocates and teachers unions.

“The debate on reform is false and silo-ed,” she said.

More than half of her members have children that go to LA Unified schools, she said, and the majority of them live within 2.5 miles of schools they work in. Not only will OASIS create jobs (some, presumably, for her members), but her members will benefit from the services it creates.

In a sense, OASIS grew out of Breakfast in the Classroom, an LA Unified program that provides, well, breakfast in the classroom. It has been heavily criticized by many teachers, who said it distracted students and left a mess. But when Superintendent John Deasy put the program to the board for a vote, hundreds of service workers rallied to support it, and the normally divided board unanimously voted to continue the service.

“That was a fight that we thought was for the moral good,” said Pugh. “Our members, many of them are part of the working poor that stood to move further down the food chain if they lost their jobs.”

Pugh expects getting OASIS off the ground to be even tougher.

“This is a humongous undertaking – very complex, multiple layers and a lot of red tape involved,” she said. “It’s a big step for us.”

Previous posts: Slideshow: Deasy’s Cafeteria Shift; Deasy’s School Breakfast Gambit Confuses Supporters; Campaign 2013: How Ratliff Won (& Reformers Lost)*; Local 99, LAUSD’s “Other” Labor Union