Bill Aims at AIDS Education : Would Require Schools to Offer Prevention Films

In the first effort of its kind, a bill that would require California school districts to present AIDS prevention films to students in grades 7 through 12 was introduced Tuesday by state Sen. Gary K. Hart.

“Prevention is our only means of stopping the spread of AIDS,” Hart (D-Santa Barbara) said, echoing the admonitions of Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s AIDS report in November. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, which has no known cure, has already infected about 29,000 people in the United States and is expected to victimize 270,000 by the end of 1991, according to federal health researchers.

Approval of the bill would make California the first state in the nation to mandate an AIDS prevention program in the schools, according to Hart and activists on AIDS issues. Instruction about AIDS is already provided in seventh- and 10th-grade health classes in the Los Angeles Unified School District and some other districts. Hart’s bill would expand the AIDS education campaign statewide.

Hart, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, chose an appropriate setting to unveil his bill--a classroom at Los Angeles High School. The press conference was attended by the media and the 11th-graders in teacher Tamara Hoffman’s advanced-placement American history class.

The students were also shown an AIDS prevention video made by Walt Disney Productions discussing the varying risks of vaginal, oral and anal sex and intravenous drug use and recommending condoms as protection against the virus. The decision to show the film is “not an endorsement of the Disney product,” Hart said, but rather to exemplify the nature of films that would be shown under his proposal. Several AIDS prevention films have been produced.

Under the proposal, the state Department of Education would be required to purchase one or more AIDS prevention films and distribute them to every public junior and senior high school. The schools would be required to screen the films at least once each year to students in grades 7 through 12. As with other instruction concerning the reproductive organs and sexually transmitted diseases, the schools would be required to notify parents and give them the option of excluding their children.

Hart was joined at the press conference by AIDS researcher Dr. Donald P. Francis of the Centers for Disease Control, Wendy Arnold of the community education agency AIDS Project Los Angeles, and a Disney representative. They acknowledged that instruction endorsing the use of condoms would be viewed by some parents as an endorsement of promiscuous behavior. But Hart noted that the film shown Tuesday “makes a specific reference to abstinence as obviously the most effective means of avoiding AIDS.”

Hart said that, like Surgeon General Koop, he ultimately wants AIDS education to begin as early as third grade, with instruction appropriately tailored for younger children.