N.Y. Parents Vow School Boycott in Protest Over Pupil With AIDS

Many parents vowed Sunday to keep children out of public schools when they open today because a second-grader afflicted with AIDS will be allowed to attend classes.

Thousands of schoolchildren were expected to be kept home in the protest, which was planned by parents as a show of support for two community school boards that had voted to exclude AIDS victims.

The boycott threat followed an announcement Saturday by a special Board of Education panel that the second-grader will be allowed to go back to school.

The two local school boards opposed to the AIDS victim’s enrollment, both in Queens, planned to file a lawsuit in Supreme Court today against the city and its health and education officials, said Samuel Granirer, president of Community School Board 27.

“We plan to have a temporary restraining order signed by a judge to enjoin the city from allowing a child with AIDS to be mainstreamed into our school system,” Granirer said.

“Feelings are running very strong in our district,” said Cass Vanzi, a Queens mother who vowed to keep her children home today and march in a protest outside one of the schools.

She said parents from six other Queens schools were planning to participate in the boycott. “I think you can estimate one-third to two-thirds of students (in those schools) will be held back,” she said.

Officials would not identify the student, who has suffered from acquired immune deficiency syndrome for three years, or say which of the city’s 623 elementary schools the student would be attending. But officials stressed that the child would not endanger other children.

The second-grader was the only one of four children with AIDS given permission to attend public school after the special city panel reviewed their cases.

The panel, set up to review cases on an individual basis of children stricken with the usually fatal virus, ruled that two of the other children will be taught in hospitals and the parents of a fourth must find an alternative school for him because the confidentiality about the child’s illness had been broken.