N.Y. Schools to Begin AIDS Instruction

Schools Chancellor Nathan Quinones said Sunday that teachers in the nation’s largest school system will start instructing students about the deadly disease AIDS in sex education classes as early as February.

“We can’t afford much time, in terms of the dimensions of this disease,” Quinones said in television interview.

The chancellor said that “given the experimentation that starts in adolescence with drugs and with sex, the odds are that we certainly have” students suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome in the city’s 111 high schools.

Cardinal John O’Connor of the Archdiocese of New York said he wanted to see the plans before he commented but added: “If you teach that if you participate in certain activities you get AIDS, what do you teach next?”

Orthodox Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a former mayoral candidate and a member of the Family Defense Coalition, said he feared that the AIDS education program would encourage promiscuity among students. He said it could put a train of thought in children’s minds that would lead them to do activities that might otherwise have not done, such as sodomy.

Other groups hailed the city’s plan.

Sam Granirer, head of a school board that led a boycott against classes in Queens over a city decision to allow the second-grader with the AIDS virus to attend school, said it was “long overdue.”