Workshop Focuses on AIDS Education

Teachers from all corners of the county met in Camarillo on Wednesday to discuss how to carry out a state law mandating AIDS education in the classroom.

While most teachers gave high marks to the HIV/AIDS Prevention Workshop, sponsored by the Ventura County superintendent of schools office, at least one east county school official left the all-day conference in frustration.

“The only thing I learned was consternation,” said Mildred Lynch, a trustee with the Conejo Valley Unified School District. Lynch left before the workshop was half finished. “I didn’t even want their lunch.”

The workshop was designed to help teachers teach AIDS prevention in grades seven through 12 as required by Assembly Bill 11, which went into effect at the start of the 1992-93 school year. Students, HIV-positive speakers and county health and school officials spent the day offering suggestions on teaching AIDS prevention to their students.

“We high-schoolers think we’re invincible,” Tonya Mykleby told the conference . Mykleby, 17, is a senior at Rio Mesa High School. “People don’t think it will affect them and that has a lot to do with the myth that it’s a gay disease.”

Because the law does not specify curriculum, interpretation was open to much debate.

Mary Choe, a teacher at De Anza Middle School in Ventura, said she believes many of her students are sexually active and frank discussions in class are needed, including lessons in birth control.

Diane Kubilos, a Planned Parenthood representative from Ventura, raised the possibility of handing out condoms to students.

But Simi Valley Unified School District nurses Caroline Ferber and Norma Wallace said officials at the schools they serve are politically conservative and would stop short of getting into the birth-control business.

“I don’t know that schools should be responsible for handing out condoms,” Wallace said.

The debate took place hours after Lynch left the workshop, which she described as useless.

Lynch said later that she took particular exception to a gay man infected with HIV addressing the more than 30 educators.

“Where is the education when you bring a person like that into the classroom?” Lynch asked. “The student learns that he should be kind to a person that--through his own fault--was inflicted with this illness. Teaching (that) anyone can get AIDS is nonsense. It’s a behavioral disease.”

In an interview, Kubilos acknowledged that the issue is controversial, but said such firsthand learning experiences are invaluable.

“We are required to teach AIDS prevention and we need to look beyond how the person got it and offer compassion,” Kubilos said. “And regardless, it makes the students aware of the results of risky sexual behavior.”