School AIDS Talk Angers Parents : Education: 175 sign petition to Newport-Mesa board calling seminar ‘pornography’ and betrayal of trust. Board apologizes, promises preview next time.

A group of irate parents this week blasted members of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District Board of Education for allowing explicit AIDS-prevention seminars to be given at Costa Mesa High School this spring without parents previewing the presentation.

Saying that the district betrayed their trust, the group presented a petition signed by 175 parents and called the seminars by the Garden Grove-based AIDS Response Program “pornography.”

They decried the “false information” given to students about the effectiveness of condoms and the speaker’s demonstration of how to use a condom on sexually explicit devices.

“Over and over, I heard parents lament, ‘I trusted the school, I trusted the district.’ Obviously, that trust was misplaced,” said Kathy Koenig of Costa Mesa.

The board issued a unanimous apology to the parents and promised that, in the future, parents would preview all AIDS-related material. In response, the district is compiling a list of “acceptable presenters” for AIDS education and a set of guidelines for schools that want to invite someone who is not on the list.

Speaking at a school board meeting Tuesday, the dozen parents at the meeting accused board members of violating state law by not having parents preview the ARP seminar, which about 80% of Costa Mesa High’s 1,050 students saw in three sessions this spring.

But Eleanor Anderson, the district’s director of instruction and evaluation, said that state and district rules require parental review only of classroom materials and that assemblies such as the ARP program are approved by school-site administrators.

Parents also said the presentation violated the district’s policy, set by then-Supt. John Nicoll in 1991, which prohibits condom demonstrations “utilizing natural or artificial devices or artifacts.”

Costa Mesa Principal Mike Murphy and a group of teachers did preview the ARP seminar. Parents did not have a chance to preview the material, but they were invited to attend the assembly, and students were required to bring permission slips signed by their parents before entering the auditorium.

Murphy said that teachers organized the ARP program in response to a survey in which students asked for more AIDS education and that he thought the seminar shocking but important.

“I think it had very scary information. If I were an adolescent, that presentation might have scared me from doing anything, to walk around in a body cast or something,” Murphy said. “These young people are really at risk. To me, it was similar to showing those shock movies in driver training so kids would at least drive carefully.”

Some parents, however, did not agree.

In a letter to acting Supt. Stanley Corey, a father of three who attended one of the assemblies criticized the ARP program for stressing condom use rather than abstinence, for saying condoms are 99.9% effective, and for describing anal and oral sex in detail.

“This ARP presentation crossed the line of decency,” Michael Hylton wrote in the three-page letter. “This ARP presentation promoted sexual experimentation and sexual activity in a pandemic of HIV infection. . . . I was shocked, appalled and alarmed. . . . I question whether ARP really had the best interest of my kids at heart.”

Jack Herzberg, assistant director of ARP, said that his group’s program was tailored to what the Costa Mesa High School organizers requested and that if they had said not to use condoms, condoms would have been left out. He defended the 99.9% effectiveness statistic, saying that if condoms are used correctly, they are nearly foolproof for protection against HIV transmission.

“We’re not interested in controversy,” Herzberg said, adding that most of ARP’s seminars are at colleges or businesses. “Our goal is to educate people in an appropriate way. It has never been ARP’s goal to shock people.”