School to Offer Students Condoms Without Notifying Their Parents : Disease: Marin County campus becomes first in the state to have such a program. Idea resulted after a popular teacher with AIDS died.

After months of campaigning by students, a Marin County high school will become the first school in the state next week to offer condoms to the youngsters without notifying their parents.

Earlier this week, students at Tamalpais High School persuaded a panel of teachers, parents and school officials to provide the free condoms through the school nurse along with a mandatory course teaching them how to use them to prevent diseases.

“I think people have opened up their eyes and taken their heads out of the sand,” said student body president Dave Harris, who led the effort to provide condoms. “I think the students are crying out for something like this.”

The campaign was spurred when a popular teacher with AIDS died recently, leaving many students “in shock,” Harris said. In January, history teacher Chuck Smith told the youngsters of his illness and warned some of them to use condoms if they were sexually active. Smith died the next day.

“Twenty years ago, the repercussion of teen sex was pregnancy. Today it could also be death or infertility,” Harris said.

Under the program, the school nurse will provide free condoms to any interested students, but only after they participate in a 20-minute orientation session that includes instruction on condom use as well as information on abstinence, venereal disease and AIDS. The names of participants in the one-on-one sessions will be kept confidential, school officials said. The condoms will be provided by a private nonprofit organization.

“We’re not just handing out condoms,” said Yvonne Thurmond, Tamalpais’ school nurse. “We’ll discuss all of the options and certainly tell them abstinence is the safest option.”

The program is aimed mainly at sexually active teen-agers who are uncomfortable discussing sex with their parents, Thurmond said, adding that students who have a good parental rapport probably will not need the service.

“People don’t realize how many dysfunctional families there are or kids who are not staying with their parents,” she said.

Principal Barbara Galyen, like most Tamalpais educators and parents, was at first “very opposed” to the idea.

“I was converted by education,” said Galyen, who attributed her conversion to a series of presentations organized by Harris for the school’s Parent Teacher Student Assn. Health educators, representatives from the Marin AIDS Support Network, Planned Parenthood and the Marin County Health Department all appeared before the association.

“It just blew everyone’s socks off. It was just so well put together,” Thurmond said. “I didn’t think he would pull it off. I would never have tried to do this myself.”

The effort was aided by sobering public health records showing that minors account for 25% of the reported cases of sexually transmitted diseases in Marin County, including the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Young adults from 18 to 21 accounted for another 25%.

After months of persistent lobbying, Harris won the support of the parent-student association May 1. On Wednesday night, a group of educators, parents and students who oversee activities at the high school voted 14 to 1 to support the proposal. The new program does not require the approval of the school board, principal Galyen said.

“Tamalpais acknowledges that students are sexually active and we’re trying to do something responsible about it,” student leader Harris said. “We’re no different from most other high schools. I just think that students here are more vocal.”

Harris has won over most school officials and parents, but the program has opposition in the Bay Area religious community.

On Friday, San Francisco Archbishop John R. Quinn said the new proposal “implies the acceptance of causal sex as normal.”

“It can send a very destructive message that adults do not care what happens as long as youth do not cost them time or money by contracting diseases that can be both embarrassing and costly,” Quinn said.

Harris strongly disagreed. “People aren’t going to walk in here and say ‘I’m going to become sexually active because they’re giving out condoms,’ ” he said. “That’s absurd.”

Three high schools in Los Angeles--San Fernando, Jordan and Los Angeles--provide condoms and contraceptive devices such as birth control pills in school health clinics but prior parental consent is necessary.