The New York Times - December 15, 1985
Priscilla Van Tassel

"We're missing the boat by directing all our attention to elementary school children," said Dr. John Rutledge, the state's Deputy Commissioner of Health. "It is the junior highs and high schools we should be talking to because they are beginning to experiment with sexual practices, gay sexual practices and intravenous drug abuse, and that's how AIDS is spread."

The conference, sponsored by the New Jersey School Boards Association, was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel here on Dec. 7 to bring school board members and school personnel up to date on medical information about AIDS, inform them of the legal implications of the disease and help them deal with community hysteria. [An article on AIDS hysteria in schools in on the Opinion Page, Page xx.] Nearly a third of New Jersey's 511 school districts sent representatives to the conference, said to be the first of its kind in the country.

Dr. Rutledge told the gathering that schools must be explicit in the information they give teen-agers on AIDS prevention.

"It means condoms," he said, "and it means don't share needles. It's not enough to say that you shouldn't shoot up drugs, because there is going to be some of that no matter how much we despair over it."

Such discussions in school would not endorse questionable behavior or raise parental objections, according to Octavius T. Reid Jr., executive director of the School Boards Association, who said it was the schools' responsibility to produce well-informed students.

"It's no different from the approach to sex education that occurs in every district in the state," Mr. Reid said. "The question of moral or ethical values is something that we may well leave to the home, but students must have the factual presentation to make a sound and sensible decision."

So far, only two school districts -Plainfield and Washington Borough in Warren County - have had to deal with whether to allow an AIDS student into class, but more districts are expected to face the issue soon.

The two districts decided to bar the pupils, both elementary school-age children, an action being challenged in the courts by the state's Department of Education.

Under department guidelines, schools must admit students with HTLV-III, the virus that causes AIDS, unless they exhibit certain behavioral problems such as uncontrolled drooling or a history of biting. If an admission conflict arises, a state-appointed medical advisory panel determines whether the child should attend school.

Of the 66 New Jersey children who have contracted AIDS, 35 are alive today, and 4 or 5, in addition to the two children in Plainfield and Washington Borough, should be ready to go to school next year. Many have severe learning impairments.

Dr. Frances Taylor, director of the AIDS program for the Department of Health, told the conference that children with AIDS posed no unusual health threat to others in school because the disease was transmitted through sexual contact, contaminated needles and pregnancy, and not through casual or environmental contact.

Dr. Taylor cited three separate medical findings to bolster her position:

* None of the 15,000 AIDS cases reported in the last five years has been linked to casual contact.

* With the exception of one case where the cause of infection was undetermined, a study of 1,758 health workers caring for AIDS patients found that none had contracted the disease unless they were part of high-risk groups such as homosexuals or drug users, or had punctured themselves with contaminated needles.

* In nine separate studies, no one had contracted the disease by merely living with an AIDS patient. In many households, living conditions were chaotic, and such things as toothbrushes and razors were frequently shared.

AIDS patients probably pose less of a threat than people who carry the virus but have no symptoms of the disease, Dr. Taylor said, because "by the time a patient's immune system has been attacked by the virus over a long period of time such that he develops AIDS, the infection has begun to burn out and there isn't much virus in the system."

Fewer than 20 percent of the people infected with HTLV-III develop symptoms of AIDS. Some doctors say that as many as 10 percent of New Jersey's school employees may be unwitting HTLV-III carriers.

Dr. James Oleske, director of the division of allergy, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, estimated there were at least 80 children in New Jersey schools who were infected with the virus, but who had no AIDS symptoms.

Like Dr. Taylor, he said that neither they nor full-blown AIDS cases posed any health threat to other students.

"We spend too much time worrying about lollipops, toilet seats, being blood brothers and sitting and working in a classroom with someone," he said, "because the data clearly show that that's not how you get infected."

According to Dr. Oleske, who cares for most of the pediatric AIDS patients in the state, the children who have contracted AIDS received it either in utero or from a contaminated blood transfusion. In one case, one adult who donated a unit of blood infected 16 infants.

The current practice of screening blood banks has substantially eliminated the latter cause, Dr. Oleske said, but there is still a slight chance of receiving contaminated blood.

Dr. Oleske agreed with other speakers that concern over the spread of AIDS in school had been misdirected.

"Every question is related to the 8-year-old who is going into the classroom," he said. "Those same parents don't know what their 18-year-old is doing in the community, and that's the way AIDS is going to spread into our heterosexual families."

Screening pupils and school employees for AIDS will not control the disease, Dr. Oleske said. Such a test would cost $25 million in New Jersey alone and would have to be repeated every few months.

Paula Mullaly, assistant executive director and general counsel of the School Boards Association, told the conference that "almost everywhere you turn, there is the basis for a lawsuit."

Among the legal issues that must be considered, she said, is a pupil's right to a free and appropriate education versus the obligation of school boards to provide a disease-free environment. Also, there is a strong probability that staff members dismissed because of AIDS will sue school boards for discrimination, asking whether they had lost their jobs because they had AIDS or because they were homosexual.

Although there were some complaints about dealing with a stacked deck - there was no disagreement among the panelists, a situation that the association called just chance -the audience was generally responsive to what it heard. There was, however, repeated criticism of state officials for a lack of information on AIDS.

School superintendents, school board presidents and school medical advisers will soon be receiving a brochure on aspects of the AIDS problem, the Department of Health and the Department of Education are preparing curriculum guides on AIDS that should be available next fall and the School Boards Association is preparing a videotape of the conference for distribution to interested school districts.

At the end of the conference, one school-board member remarked:

"Perhaps if all this information had been made available, there wouldn't have been this kind of reaction to the problem."

However, asked if the session had changed her decision to bar an 8-year-old girl from kindergarten this year, Beulah Womack, a member of the Plainfield Board of Education, replied:

"No, not really."

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