The New York Times - Saturday, December 9, 1995
Maria Newman

Saying he does not believe that condom demonstrations in the classroom are appropriate for any age group, Chancellor Rudy Crew will ask the Board of Education next week to adopt a curriculum on AIDS and H.I.V. that would offer instruction on how to use a condom only to high-school students who specifically request it.

His request would require the board to reverse a decision it made in January to teach ninth graders how to use a condom. The decision addressed the issue of an AIDS curriculum for seventh through ninth grades. The issue before the board now is what should be taught in high schools.

Dr. Crew, who had vowed when he was hired two months ago to defuse the incendiary topics of AIDS education and condoms in the schools, said he believed that condom demonstrations in front of a roomful of teen-agers could not be effective.

Judith A. Rizzo, Dr. Crew's Deputy Chancellor for Instruction, said, "One can imagine that in any classroom you would have a number of adolescents with different comfort levels about such discussions,"adding that they would provoke "jokes and a lot of embarrassment."

But Dr. Crew's decision to do away with classroom condom demonstrations was criticized by Dr. Edward McCabe, a doctor of adolescent medicine at Staten Island University Hospital, who helped to write the AIDS curriculum for junior high schools.

He said that Dr. Crew, as an experienced educator, "should know intuitively that older kids are more sexually active and more at risk."

"They need more information and they don't need to sidestep the issues," he said.

The condom demonstrations approved for the ninth grade are part of a discussion of ways to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The curriculum was put in place in September, so some ninth graders have already seen the demonstrations, which involve unrolling a condom over an anatomically correct model or an instructor's fingers.

While such discussions would still take place under Dr. Crew's proposal, the condom demonstrations would not. Also, Dr. Crew wants to give parents the right to keep their children out of the prevention portion of the six-part AIDS curriculum.

Ever since the State Education Department ordered all school systems to adopt an AIDS curriculum in 1987, parents and educators in New York City have been bitterly divided over how much to tell students about the disease, particularly about how it is transmitted. Writers commissioned by the school board developed AIDS curriculums for the city's elementary, intermediate and high schools. The board named a 23-member H.I.V. / AIDS Advisory Council to review the curriculums before submitting them to the board for final approval.

The elementary school curriculum was adopted in 1992, with the board adopting a junior high curriculum in January of this year.

As in many other cities that were embroiled in similar disputes over how to balance its discussion of abstinence and condoms, the process in New York City has left its scars. Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez was ousted in 1992 after he insisted that schools needed to make condoms available to students who requested them. (Now, however, the school system makes condoms available to students through health workers stationed at high school resource rooms. Each year, officials said, condom manufacturers donate 650,000 condoms to the school system.)

Mr. Fernandez's successor, Ramon C. Cortines, who had to shepherd through the junior high AIDS curriculum, chose a more neutral stance by emphasizing abstinence as the best means of preventing disease and pregnancy. He also urged the board to give parents the right to take their children out of the discussions about prevention.

In January, some of the advisory council members wanted to require that all ninth graders see the condom demonstrations. Other members, however, said that it should not be required for the 10 percent of ninth graders who attend junior high schools.

The board voted with them, and said that because junior high schools are under the auspices of the locally elected community school boards, the decision to have condom demonstrations in those schools should be left to the boards. But at the time, they required the condom demonstrations for other ninth graders.

Dr. Crew wants the board to reverse that part of the January plan. He wants the board to adopt the proposal as written by the advisory council, which decided against classroom condom demonstrations even before Dr. Crew was hired.

Their report was ready in September, but council members waited to bring their report to the board because of the search that was under way to find a replacement for Chancellor Cortines.

The chairman of the advisory council, Bill Andrews, said yesterday that most of those on the council believed that students were more likely to obtain accurate and helpful information about condom use if they were given the opportunity to meet privately with a health professional. Mr. Andrews said he himself is not convinced that classroom condom demonstrations do any good at all.

"There is also not one scintilla of evidence that a condom demonstration does that it's supposed to do, and that is to reduce pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases," he said.

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