AIDS Sufferer Who Won Job Back Dies

Vincent Chalk, the Orange County teacher who made national headlines when he won the right to stay at the helm of his classroom while suffering from AIDS, died Tuesday.

Chalk, 45, died at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach at about 5 a.m., said his attorney, Marjorie Rushforth.

Chalk’s lawsuit against the Orange County Department of Education established a landmark ruling protecting the job security of AIDS patients in government jobs.

“Vincent settled, for every person with AIDS who had a federally related paycheck, their right to maintain their employment in spite of an AIDS diagnosis,” Rushforth said.

Chalk prevailed in a court battle against the education department, which had removed him from the classroom because of what it said was uncertainty about how AIDS is transmitted. Chalk, a homosexual, contracted pneumonia in February, 1987. Tests revealed that he had AIDS.

Thomas Prendergast, chief of the county’s Health Care Agency’s disease control unit, said Chalk posed no health threat to others, but education officials took him out of the classroom anyway, touching off the litigation.

In the fall of 1987, a Los Angeles federal judge refused to let Chalk return to his class. But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that schools could not bar Chalk from teaching, and he returned to his post.

In a landmark decision, the appeals court held that AIDS should be considered a disability under federal law, and that people with AIDS who hold government jobs should be entitled to protection from discrimination.