LAKE ELSINORE - School district officials are considering cutting health classes in an effort to save money, worrying teachers who say the classes are necessary to inform students about the risks of sex, drugs and mental illness.

High schoolers now are required to take a semester of health to graduate, but the Lake Elsinore Unified School District is considering eliminating the class as a requirement.

While California schools are required to teach different aspects of health, including HIV/AIDS education, a formal health class is not a graduation requirement. However, several local districts require students to take health class to earn a high school diploma.

District spokesman Jose Carvajal said the possible change is prompted largely by an anticipated budget shortfall caused by statewide budget cuts and dropping enrollment. He said high school principals have also asked for more teachers for remedial math and English classes and identified health as a class that could be dropped to free up teaching positions.

"We're not saying it's not a good class," Carvajal said. "It's just one of those tough choices we have to make."

But Merrill Waayers, who has taught health for eight years at Elsinore High School, worries that without health classes, students will lack crucial information on topics such as suicide prevention and the dangers of mixing alcohol and drugs.

"I am so worried they're not going to have a forum to get that information that will keep them alive," Waayers said.

Health classes cover topics such as HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, healthy eating and exercise habits, drug and alcohol use, and the prevalence of depression, eating disorders and self-mutilation among young people.

Health teachers say those topics are especially important to discuss at the age students take the class, 15 or 16, because that's when teenagers are grappling with those issues.

Kathy Parks, a health teacher at Temescal Canyon High School who has been notified that she could be laid off as part of next year's budget cuts, said class discussions about mental illness, for instance, can prompt students to confide their worries privately.

"I've had countless kids report friends who have eating disorders or friends who are cutting themselves or kids who are drinking too much," said Parks, who said she typically refers the students to school counselors. "I don't think anybody else talks about these things in any of their other classes."

Any vote on changing graduation requirements would be months away because the move would have to be approved by a district advisory committee. Carvajal said the committee would look at whether topics now taught in health class, such as the HIV/AIDS curriculum required by the state, could be taught in other classes. However, health teachers worry teachers won't be able to cover those topics in the same depth as in they have been in health classes.

School trustees have asked administrators to look into keeping health as an elective. Trustee Jeanie Corral said making health an optional class would better serve students whose schedules are often packed with classes they must take to graduate.

"A lot of times kids have so many requirements that they can never take anything else except (classes for) meeting those requirements," she said.

Teachers worry, however, that students who need health classes the most won't take them voluntarily.

"We're still going to miss a lot of kids who could benefit - kids who know they don't eat right, they know they don't exercise, they know they take drugs," Parks said. "The last thing they want to do is take a class that shows them what they're not supposed to be doing."

- Contact staff writer Rani Gupta at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2625, or at rgupta@californian.com.