Aids: Catalyst for Change in the Schools

American Decades | Date: 2001

AIDS: CATALYST FOR CHANGE IN THE SCHOOLS

A Glass Booth

By the late 1980s the AIDS epidemic was significantly affecting school policy. When a Florida school district mandated that a seven-year-old girl infected with HIV be educated in a glass booth, the case made it to the federal courts. In Martinez v. School Board of Hillsbrough County a federal judge reversed this decision in 1989, arguing that the child's presence in class posed "no significant risk" to the school. A 1987 survey on laws affecting students with AIDS concluded that the courts were using the antidiscrimination provisions of the Rehabilitation Act to protect infected students' rights.

AIDS Booklet

Education Secretary William Bennett, bowing to intense pressures from the scientific community, published three hundred thousand copies (one for every parent group and school board in the nation) of AIDS and the Education of Our Children: A Guide for Parents and Teachers on 26 October 1987. Another two hundred thousand copies of the twenty-eight-page document were made available, free of charge, to anyone requesting it. The tone of the booklet was highly moralistic, emphasizing the value of deferring sexual activity until adulthood and then choosing between abstinence or monogamy. One carefully written page mentioned condoms, but emphasized that their use was no guarantee of safety. Defending the message as "scientifically accurate and morally cogent," Bennett claimed, 'When it comes to AIDS, science and morality walk the same path, teach the same thing." However, Ted Weiss, chair of the Senate Human Resources Committee, pronounced the guide "grossly inadequate" because, he said, it failed to clarify Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines for containing the disease. "It's fine to have a moral message," he countered, "but that just does not deal with the real world. Seventy-five percent of singles are sexually active by age twenty." Although the Reagan administration response was to emphasize abstinence, a March 1987 U.S. Conference of Mayors' survey of seventy-three large school districts showed that the majority were taking a much more direct approach. In forty-eight of the school districts, programs defining safe sexual practices including condom use were in effect, and similar programs were planned in twenty-four more. In teaching students how to avoid infection, 78 percent of the programs emphasized abstinence, but also provided direct information about condom use and avoidance of high-risk behaviors.

Dealing with Openly Gay and Lesbian Students

In the 1980s a new assertiveness by the gay and lesbian population forced schools and districts to grapple with the fact that, as the larger gay pride movement put it, "They're here and they're not going away." After a young man in Cumberland, Rhode Island, threatened legal action in the early 1980s if he were denied the right to bring a male date to the prom, high schools in diverse parts of the nation were confronted with informal networks and formal groups of students "coming out" to teachers. The immediate need for AID S-prevention education for the male part of this high-risk population was a catalyst for a significant amount of national attention to this heretofore invisible population. AIDS experts warned that gay youths were most at risk for a "third wave" of infection, following adult gays and intravenous drug users.

A New Look at Teen Sexual Preference

For years researchers had believed that sexual preferences expressed during youth were merely a phase, that true sexual orientation was not solidified until age twenty or so. However, during the 1980s previous opinions about this issue were challenged. A December 1988 Seattle Commission on Children and Youth, after extensive public hearings, issued recommendations for schools in that area to address the "special needs" of lesbian and gay youth. A survey of all public high schools in Illinois resulted in huge numbers of requests by teachers for information on counseling gay students, and in Minnesota teachers and AIDS educators were encouraged to show "positive images of gays." However, in several other states laws forbade any positive discussion of homosexuality. California served as a microcosm of the conflict generated by the new openness about teen sexuality. Project 10, a special unit of the Los Angeles Unified School District, was established in 1985 to provide general counseling and education about homosexuality for all students and to establish a speakers bureau and library as resources for all district high schools. While the California Democratic Party resolved that "every school district in the state should provide counseling for those struggling with sexual orientation, based on the Project 10 model," conservatives organized to sponsor a bill to kill Project 10. Furthermore, their bill would require verified parental consent even to discuss the issues of homosexuality or AIDS. Both sides failed in their efforts. But the debate continued throughout the 1980s, as some believed that gay youths were merely "stuck in some immature phase of social development" and should, therefore, be ignored, while others bemoaned the fact that "at the period of life when one should find one's identity, how sad that gay youth must be mired in shame, denial and self hatred."

Sources:

"AIDS and School Policy," Nation's Schools Report, 22 May 1989, p, 65;

"AIDS Booklet Issued," Nations Schools Report, 26 October 1987, p. 187;

Eric Rofes, "Opening Up the Classroom Closet," Harvard Educational Review, 59 (November 1989): 444-453.

Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.