Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1991. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The New York Times - Sunday, December 1, 1991
After nearly two years of fuss, it happened quite matter-of-factly. Two 17-year-olds strolled into the health room at John Dewey High School in Brooklyn on Tuesday and asked a gym teacher for condoms.
They got two each, a manufacturer's instruction sheet and a small card warning that condoms can break and that abstinence is the only sure way to avoid AIDS.
That was how New York became the first city in the country to begin making condoms available to all its public high school students. The program was inaugurated at Dewey and at City-as-School, an alternative high school in Greenwich Village, but Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez hopes to have it in all 120 high schools by the end of the year.
The manufacturers of Trojan and Ramses brands have donated 400,000 condoms -- enough, officials hope, for a year's supply for the system's 261,000 students.
Mr. Fernandez startled many New Yorkers two years ago when, as new chancellor, he proposed giving away condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. There was immediate opposition from some Board of Education members and several religious leaders, John Cardinal O'Connor prominent among them, who argued that letting the schools distribute condoms would signal students that teachers and administrators condoned pre-marital sex. School officials argued that students were having sex whether the city liked it or not, and that the debate was really over saving lives.
Infected as Teen-agers
According to the Health Department, between 1981 and 1990, AIDS was diagnosed in only 53 New Yorkers aged 13 to 19. But the number of cases rises to nearly 800 for New Yorkers aged 20 to 24, and health care experts say most of them are first infected with the HIV virus as teen-agers.
As the plan evolved, side issues took center stage: Would parents be able to refuse to let their children be given a condom? Would counseling be required with each foil packet? In each case, the eventual answer was no. In order not to chase away those who might be shy or embarrassed about being sexually active, no student requesting a condom even had to give his or her name.
Instruction was available for those who wanted it. Reporters were not allowed into the room, but Mary Matus, 16 years old, and her boyfriend, Jose Guzman, 18, said outside the school that the Dewey gym teacher opened a packet and pulled a condom over two fingers to demonstrate its use.
And counseling was available, though students differed on whether they wanted it. One 19-year-old said she saw little point in asking a teacher for a condom when she could buy one at a store and keep her sex life her own business.
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