Classmates in AIDS Assembly Send a Message Home for Students

Students filing into an AIDS education assembly at Van Nuys High School on Tuesday eagerly accepted brightly colored pamphlets containing condom information, folding them into fans to use in the hot auditorium.

But the 200-member audience still got the message. Its attention was riveted when five classmates lined up with their backs to the audience, wheeling around one by one to act out scenarios of teen-agers dealing with sex and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“I went to a party and there were keggers all over the place,” said Mark Eiben, a 16-year-old sophomore playing the part of a popular student who had engaged in unprotected sex. “I got smashed, I met this girl there who was really great looking and we had sex.”

“There’s no way I could get AIDS,” he continued, shaking his head. “I’m too cool.”

The student monologues were presented to 2,700 students in 11 assemblies as part of the school’s effort to educate students before it begins dispensing condoms next week. The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education narrowly approved the condom program in January as part of a 10-point plan to strengthen its AIDS education and prevention efforts.

“Their attention has been better than I thought it would be, in spite of the heat,” counselor Joan Mills said. “To bring them in and give them an information assembly, you have to do something to catch their attention. Role-playing helps.”

After the student presentations, a program was presented by members of North Hollywood’s Valley Community Clinic, a nonprofit agency that offers services including HIV testing and information on contraception.

Representatives of the clinic, which has just set up a teen division, gave out information on AIDS, debunked popular myths and demonstrated with a plastic cucumber how to use a condom.

The assembly program was developed by Valley Community Clinic in conjunction with teachers, students and parents. Romy Guntman, director of health education at the clinic, worked with students from a peer-counseling program and student government on the performances. Together, she said, they decided what subjects to tackle. Guntman then wrote the sketches, letting the teen-agers mix in their own character improvisations.

“The role-plays are a good cross-section of what kids on campus are feeling,” Assistant Principal Gwendolyn Brumfield said. “They’re not reading a script the district prepared downtown; they are coming up with situations based on what’s happening with them, their friends and their neighbors.”

Students portrayed characters including a gay student who did not understand why people considered the virus a homosexual disease, a teen-ager who had decided to abstain from sex and a teen-age girl nervously awaiting the results of an HIV test.

“My week of waiting for results is almost over,” 17-year-old Vianca Armas said as she anxiously dug her hands into her jeans pockets and frowned in distress. “God, I wish I had waited. It is so scary.”

The portrayals elicited reactions from a snicker to rapt attention. “I had so many people come up and say, ‘Oh my God, that really had an impact on me,’ ” Armas said.

Paula Mendez, a 16-year-old junior, said that the beginning of the assembly grabbed her interest. “It wasn’t just anybody up there,” she said. “It was our friends.”

Lorenzo Amaya, a 17-year-old senior, said he was impressed by the actors’ ability to make their characters seem real. Especially riveting, he said, was the end of the performance when one of the characters stepped forward and said--in character--that she was HIV positive. What struck him, he said, was that he knew the girl who was playing the part.

“The one I knew had it,” he said. “Even though it’s just acting, it’s like, ‘What if it was real?’ ”

For some, it was. Each assembly concluded with a presentation from a young adult who actually was found to have the virus.

“I’m not role-playing,” Michael Landsman, 24, of Hollywood told the teen-agers. “This is real. I’m living with HIV every day of my life.”