AIDS Victim’s Bid to Resume Teaching Is Denied by Judge

Breaking step with past cases involving AIDS in the classroom, a federal judge on Tuesday refused to halt the transfer of an AIDS-afflicted teacher of deaf children to a desk job outside the classroom.

“No one knows the full extent of the risk,” U.S. District Judge William P. Gray said in denying Orange County teacher Vincent Chalk’s request for a preliminary injunction that would return him to the classroom.

“If I put the fellow back in the classroom and I’m wrong, it could well be catastrophic,” the judge said.

The case is believed to be the first in the nation to address the issue of teachers with acquired immune deficiency syndrome and was also unusual in light of recent court rulings which have upheld the rights of students who were exposed to the AIDS virus to continue attending classes.

Gray, in a case that he said posed “one of the most difficult dilemmas that I’ve had since I’ve been on the bench,” said Chalk does not have as much to lose as children with AIDS who face the disruption of their education if removed from classes.

Chalk, 42, a teacher with the Orange County Department of Education for the last 13 years, learned that he was afflicted with the deadly disease early this year when he suffered a form of pneumonia.

Transfer Ordered

He filed suit here after the Education Department ordered him transferred from his classroom duties teaching hearing-impaired students at Venado Middle School and University High School in Irvine and offered him an office job writing grant proposals.

“I have to admit that I’m a little bit confused right now. I felt that we would win right off the bat,” Chalk, a Long Beach resident, said after the hearing.

Speaking in sign language before television cameras for his students who might be watching, Chalk said he will consider an immediate appeal of the judge’s ruling and added that he is not certain whether he will take the office job.

“My major interest is in teaching, it’s not in paperwork,” he said. “I’m prepared to fight for what I think I have the right to do legally, within the law.”

Chalk’s lawsuit, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, was filed under a 1973 federal law that makes it illegal for agencies receiving federal funding to discriminate against employees with handicaps if those employees are “otherwise qualified” for the job.

The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that persons with communicable diseases are covered by the statute, though that case involved a teacher who contracted tuberculosis and was fired from her job in 1979. The court has not specifically ruled on whether AIDS constitutes a similar handicap.

The status of the law also has been unsettled because all of the previous court orders allowing children back into the classroom involved youngsters who had merely been exposed to the AIDS virus, not those who, like Chalk, have already exhibited symptoms of the disease, lawyers for the county said.

Chalk’s lawyers presented evidence from a broad cross-section of the medical community indicating that AIDS, normally spread through sexual intercourse, blood transfusions or from mother to fetus, is not known to be transmitted through casual contact.

Orange County’s own epidemiologist, Dr. Thomas Prendergast, has said that Chalk poses no health threat to his students.

“There is no credible, solid, medical evidence that there is any risk in the classroom,” said Marjorie Rushforth, Chalk’s attorney.

County lawyers admitted that they are bucking the tide of medical opinion and are able to find only one doctor who has indicated that there is a potential risk of transmission through casual contact.

In a sworn declaration read partially at Monday’s hearing, Dr. Steven A. Armentrout, director of hematology and oncology at UC Irvine Medical School, said he believes that the AIDS virus is “potentially infectious” in tears and saliva and that it is “probable (that) other means of transmission will be discovered.”

Risk Characterized

Responding to ACLU attorney Paul Hoffman’s characterization of the risk to students as “probably less than an airplane engine falling out of the sky onto the school,” county lawyer Ronald D. Wenkart asserted:

“Certainly, there might be a greater probability of an airplane crash, or a car crash. But they (the students) might survive an airplane crash. They might survive a car crash. So far, we don’t believe that there is any possibility of surviving AIDS.”

“We’re not trying to hide away this teacher. We’re not trying to put him in a closet,” Wenkart declared. “He’ll be working with other adults; he’ll be working in the same office I work in.”

In his ruling, Gray told Chalk’s lawyers: “I have to be concerned about the nature of the risk, irrespective of the extent of it. You understand that, don’t you?”

Being a teacher of the deaf, the judge said, “is a great calling, and he should be allowed to continue, unless there is good reason not to allow him to do so.

“On the other hand, I’m a parent and a grandparent, and I would do anything in the world to forestall the possibility of any child becoming infected. . . . It seems to me the problem is that we simply don’t know enough about AIDS to be completely certain.”

Plea for Injunction

Gray’s ruling was limited to Chalk’s request for a preliminary injunction, in which plaintiffs must prove not only that they would be likely to win if the case were tried, but that they would suffer some irreparable harm if not granted immediate relief.

In this case, while the judge conceded that “the plaintiff may well win, ultimately” when the case is tried, the risk of harm now falls more to Chalk’s students than to the teacher, who still has a job and could return to teaching later.

Chalk’s lawyers said they will attempt to schedule an immediate evidentiary hearing to allow Gray to hear testimony from medical experts, a move that county attorneys said they will probably oppose.

If that opposition is successful, Chalk’s only recourse would be to appeal Gray’s ruling or await a trial early next year.