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....April 6, 4:23 PM |
| Battle Lines Drawn: New AIDS Curriculum Causes Education Rift
By ELLEN THOMPSON As thousands of New Yorkers throughout the city pinned red ribbons to their shirts and coats on Dec.1 2005, World AIDS Day, New York City’s public school teachers were attending training sessions on the city’s updated HIV/AIDS curriculum.
By March parents received letters that their children would begin their first lessons of the updated HIV curriculum in the coming weeks. On March 20, thousands of students opened their books to learn about the disease, how it is transmitted, prevented and treated. “Are most parents for it? No,” District 24 Community Education Council President Nick Comaianni said of the parents in his district. “And yes, few parents didn’t have a problem with the new curriculum being age appropriate.” What Are They Learning? Since 1987, New York State Education Department regulations have required schools to provide HIV/AIDS instruction from kindergarten through Grade 12. Taking the lead, New York City’s Department of Education developed its own HIV/AIDS curriculum for public school students in the 1990s in response to the state mandate. Through age appropriate lesson plans, students were taught about the course HIV/AIDS takes in individuals’ lives, as well as its treatments and prevention. But since the original curriculum was written, advances in prevention and treatments have increased and improved, convincing the department that the curriculum needed to be updated. Department of Education spokeswoman Alicia Maxey-Greene said very little had changed in the kindergarten through grade 3 curriculums, where the lessons are very general. The bulk of the changes occurred in the curriculum for grades 4 through 12, which deals with prevention and treatment techniques that have dramatically advanced. Kindergarteners begin the curriculum by contrasting being healthy and being ill, distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy choices. Students then go on to learn how diseases are transmitted and how the immune system works through age appropriate vocabulary, the DOE said. By grade 3, students eventually learn that HIV/AIDS, an infectious disease, disables the immune system. The same concepts are emphasized in grades 4 to 12, and students gain a more in-depth understanding of how the immune system works and how HIV affects it. Students learn both how HIV is and is not transmitted, and how to protect themselves against it. Abstinence from sexual intercourse and drug use is stressed as the only method of prevention with 100 percent effectiveness, the DOE said. “HIV/AIDS is presented as a tragedy that affects all of society, and students are encouraged to regard people with HIV/AIDS with compassion,” the DOE says in the curriculum’s introduction, which is available online and at every school. Age Appropriate? As Kindergartners are starting to learn that, “HIV is a virus (a kind of germ) that lives in the blood and can lead to AIDS” in the classroom, fourth graders are learning that HIV can be spread by sharing needles with an infected person as well as through sexual contact with an infected person – a part that has alarmed some parents and communities in Queens. “My main objection to this curriculum is that it’s not age appropriate from Kindergarten to fourth grade,” Sen. Serphin Maltese (R-Glendale) said. “I see no problem with introducing sexual contact in junior high or high school instead of fourth grade, but Kindergartners should be focusing on their ABCs not catching HIV.” Since parents have learned of the updated curriculum through letters sent to their homes a month ago by the DOE, the Senator said he has heard the voices of his district’s parents mirror his. Comaianni, a parent of three in District 24, which in the past completely exempted itself from the prior HIV/AIDS curriculum, said he is not comfortable with his sons learning of sexual contact, a topic he feels they are too young to absorb. “When developing the curriculum the Board of Education was supposed to set up a panel that would represent not only educators and health professionals but the community and parents,” he said. “But in District 24 the parents nor the CEC was included. Instead, New York City was made into one big school district and moral and family issues were left out of the curriculum.” Comaianni said he sees no problem with 95 percent of the curriculum, but when it comes to certain sections regarding prevention, which is the only section parents can choose to opt their children out of, kids are being presented with issues to which they normally wouldn’t be exposed as fourth graders. “To say that parents can opt their children out is not enough,” Maltese said. “The only section to opt your children out of is the prevention lessons, but what if parents with children in grades even younger than fourth don’t want the transmission sections taught? They have no choice, then what do they do.” To accommodate the concerned voices he’s heard, the senator has sent what he calls proper opt out forms to parents in his district and plans to help parents opt completely out of the curriculum, he said. |
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