San Francisco Chronicle (SF) - MONDAY, November 28, 1994; Edition: FINAL Section: News Page: A1 Word Count: 2,321
Torri Minton, Chronicle Staff Writer

TEXT: One minute, the Sausalito pre-kindergartners are smashing their rice and vegetables, Cat-in-the-Hat grins on their faces. The next, they are discussing AIDS over the sticky lunch table. They are 5, and they are savvy. They have heard about AIDS. They know it is not good.

"Like when people have AIDS, I think they could die," says Derell Lundy, as he spoons peas and carrots into his mouth.

The how-you-get-it part is trickier. These pupils at Bayside/Martin Luther King School know you can get AIDS "by germs." For them, this means that maybe:

You can get it if someone licked a pack of gum, and you pick it up from the ground? When you dig in the garbage, and you don't wash your hands? From cigarettes?

Fourth-grader Laron Striplin knows where AIDS comes from. "Needles," he says. "Drugs. Blood transfutation."

If trends continue, in a few years these children will join the group that is catching sexually transmitted diseases at the fastest rate -- teenagers.

Fifteen- to 19-year-olds have the highest rate in the state of gonorrhea and chlamydia. And that, experts say, means the teenagers are also very much at risk for HIV and AIDS.

"It's like looking at the night sky. What you see as a twinkling star may have already exploded," said Tom Peters, director of the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services. Those statistics raise thorny questions about what is being done to teach children about AIDS while there is still no cure in sight. Communities are wrangling over how to teach a subject far more sensitive than plain old sex education -- trying to decide which children will learn how much of what, and when.

NOT EVERYONE IS HAPPY

Some parents, for religious, cultural or moral reasons, do not allow their children to attend AIDS education classes. Others say they support AIDS lessons but do not like how they have been taught.

Many teenagers, including a group in Marin County, are angry that teachers do not tell them enough about sex.

"Our concern is that in 10 years, students will be dying because of their behavior now," said Sherry Loofbourrow, president of the California School Boards Association, which represents more than 5,000 elected school board members in California. "People will be turning to us and saying, `Why didn't you prevent this?' "

On the one hand, there is the tendency to say little, to preserve innocence. On the other hand, there is the cry of urgency to educate before it is too late.

It is not enough to teach children on only one morning to avoid playing blood-mixing games, educators say. Youngsters forget. AIDS education has to be an ongoing process, growing more sophisticated as the children move up in school.

But how do you tell kindergartners about HIV? What do you say when a 10-year-old asks whether you have safe sex? How do you answer the 13-year-old who asks when to put on a condom?

VOLUNTARY, THEN MANDATORY

In California, AIDS education for elementary school children is voluntary. State law requires it only in junior and senior high school, as of 1992 -- and then, "at least once" in each.

Many schools are doing more, starting in kindergarten with lessons about germs and why people should wash their hands, and adding in later grades more complex ideas about HIV and how it is transmitted.

In San Francisco, AIDS education is mandatory in all 120 public schools.

"The earlier we can teach children to become comfortable with understanding the transmission of HIV -- and teaching them to practice universal precautions such as washing their hands and not touching blood products -- the better off we will be as a society," said Gail Maurer, the state's HIV-prevention education coordinator.

Statewide, 68 percent of elementary schools and nearly all junior and high schools provide HIV-prevention education, according to a survey to be released in December.

The study, by Duerr Evaluation Resources, polled all 7,669 California public schools, 1,060 districts and county offices of education, and 814 private schools.

Time spent learning about AIDS is still minuscule compared with that spent on math and science, and even on physical education.

The survey found that elementary school students learn about AIDS for four hours annually, on average. Middle school students get six hours. High school students get seven.

METHODS OF INSTRUCTION

In the Bay Area, teaching methods range from the funny to the serious -- from science teachers, to actors in hospital-sponsored plays, to comedy acts with rubbery props, to rappers, to a giant blue bunny-man.

Ruby Petersen Unger of Mill Valley, a former Ms. Romper Room, uses rubber gloves, fish and food in her metaphor-juggling AIDS ed classes, but never, ever uses the words "sex" or "condom."

"The minute I say the word `latex,' they know what I'm talking about," Unger said recently in a teachers' lunchroom.

Unger's nationally award-winning musical AIDS video, "Thumbs Up for Kids: AIDS Education," is the first of its kind for 3- to 8-year-olds, their teachers and their parents.

In an eighth-grade science class at Canyon Middle School in Castro Valley, the former stand-up comedian slaps a fake rubbery green fish on her arm. She smears Crisco on students' hands. She teaches about the "warm, wet spots," the title of her newest video.

The fish is like HIV -- it dies outside your body, Unger tells the children.

Then comes the embarrassing stuff.

"There are parts of your body that are covered by your underwear, that cover openings into the body," Unger says. There are giggles.

These are places where germs can grow, she says. More giggles.

Onto the palms of a boy and a girl she smears Crisco and spices. To show how the germs can spread between certain uncovered body parts, Unger smashes their hands together. The giggles escalate.

Then, with a square of latex between the hands, voila. Unger shows that the spice-germs do not mix.

Across the bay, inside Alamo Elementary School in San Francisco, the AIDS educators are a little more explicit.

They are two rappers, and Jason, 32, who is HIV-positive. They are all from the New Conservatory Theatre.

The rappers rap:

"AIDS is a germ/You can't see it with your eye/But it can wear you down/And make you die! . . . If someone wants to be a blood brother/Don't stick your hand with a pin/Just hold out your hand/And give your buddy some skin!"

FRANK DISCUSSIONS

Then it's Jason's turn.

The wide-eyed third-graders sitting at tiny tables grow very still.

"Does it hurt when you have AIDS? . . . How long do you get to live? . . . When you die, does the virus die, too? . . . Did your mother and father get mad when they found out?"

"It can be very scary," Jason tells them. "I can get real sad sometimes. I don't feel any different. But sometimes I am reminded when the pain starts."

Jason tells children who ask about sex -- the questioners have been as young as 7 -- that, yes, you can get the virus through unprotected sex.

"I said that it's in semen and women's fluids, and it can be passed like that," Jason said. "I'm not scared to answer, but the teachers kind of freak out. I think the teachers are scared of the parents."

There are parents who say their children have been scarred by learning too much, too fast.

Bruce Budnick of San Francisco will never forget what his daughter said she learned in her sixth-grade class one day. Two years later, it still makes him angry.

Two gay speakers, a man and a woman, spoke "pornographically" to the children, Budnick said, and told how they used dildos and performed oral and anal sex.

The talk was sponsored by a district-recommended program, Community United Against Violence, which often sends speakers to junior high and high schools to "demystify homosexuality" before AIDS lessons begin.

"If this had happened outside of the school, they would have been arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior," Budnick said.

Terry Person, program director of Community United Against Violence, said Budnick has blown everything out of proportion.

"I understand there was one isolated incident . . . an answer to a student who asked a very explicit question about dildos. It's been dogging us for years," she said.

Such questions would be answered in general terms, she said. On dildos: "That some people of either persuasion utilize sex toys. Period."

Others oppose AIDS programs because they fail to advocate straight, married monogamy.

In California's Del Norte County, a conservative group tried unsuccessfully to stop AIDS education in sixth, eighth and tenth grades, saying the message failed to stress the virtues of matrimony.

In Fremont, a group of parents has tried to get rid of a Kaiser Permanente Hospital-sponsored AIDS play for junior high and high school students. They said the play, called "Secrets," taught too much about sex and drugs.

It was "absolute censorship," argued "Secrets" director Scott Kessler.

Sex is a reality for teenagers, Kessler said at a school meeting. "We have a truly terrible crisis on our hands, and we are trying to save lives," he said.

The play has been approved for high schools in Fremont.

NO MONEY AVAILABLE

The sex debate is not the only kind of challenge facing AIDS educators

Money is a big one. Schools are so swamped with growing numbers of AIDS lessons -- plus shrinking budgets and staff cutbacks -- that educators often do not know who is doing what.

The Santa Clara County Office of Education, like many offices across the state, does not know which AIDS programs are where in its 33 districts. To find out, you have to call all 317 schools.

"The schools are continually under attack," said Linda Bonin, health prevention education coordinator. "There's not enough money. . . . It's like trying to stand up in a boat, and everybody's rocking it,"

At the Healthy Kids Resource Center in Hayward, there are more than 150 AIDS videos, laserdiscs, curriculum guides and reference books for classrooms, teachers and even food-service workers.

The state and federally funded center has a comprehensive health education lending library for schools.

Some programs aim at black girls and Latino youth at risk. Others emphasize the safer use of intravenous drugs. Others talk about safer sex practices.

Peters, Marin County's health director, said, "None of us adults has a uniformly appropriate message, from those who totally support abstinence to those who want a condom placed like a fresh mint on a school desk every morning.

"We need a whole menu to choose from," said Peters, who in the spring convened a 50-person roundtable for opinions on the subject.

But, he asked, "How do young people make the Grand Canyon leap from knowledge to behavior? It's not so much what you can recite at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning as what goes on at 11:15 on Friday night."

While adults struggle with what to leave in and what to leave out, children are often more comfortable with discussions of bodily functions.

Abigail Lawton is comfortable, shockingly so.

She is 7. She sits cross-legged in purple leggings on the Alamo Elementary School playground in San Francisco, looking like she knows nothing of kissing, much less birth control. But she does.

"A condom is like a tiny bag that you put on your vagina or penis," Abigail said. Her friends stop eating their cookies.

"You can get AIDS if a doctor or nurse makes a test with a needle and puts it in somebody else. Also by mixing blood," she said.

Her friend Elaine Yip, 8, whispered in her ear, "There's another way."

"Oh, yes," Abigail said. "It's by sex. If you're having sex with somebody who has AIDS, and you're not using condoms."

"Like a condominium?" a little girl asked.

Elaine knows what sex is. "It's gross!" she said. "You have to take off your clothes!"

NAMING NAMES

With AIDS and sex ed now inextricably linked, the old Kotex movies just will not do anymore.

"I used to start out showing films of frogs, fish and puppies," said Jan Gelatti, a Larkspur school nurse who has been teaching family life to fourth- through eighth-graders for 22 years.

"Now, kids are going to movies like `Parenthood' and coming up with questions like, `What's a diaphragm? What's a dildo?' I can't get away with a film strip on frogs."

For many older students, the adult angst over anatomical phraseology is pointless.

Not to name names -- penis, vagina, condom -- is "a symbol of sexual repression," said student Aaron Greenwald of Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo.

"You need to say `penis' and you need to say `ejaculation,' so kids are comfortable with it by the time they get to high school," Greenwald said.

"The kids know a lot of things, but it's the wrong stuff," said Laetitia Poisson de Souzy, a Tamalpais High School student. "We are asking to be educated. . . . Until you feel comfortable saying the words, you're not going to feel comfortable saying no."

CAPTION: PHOTO (4) (1) Hilary Girvin of White Hill School in Fairfax read in May about one victim memeorialized on the AIDS quilt on display at Marin Catholic High School, (2) In a demonstration at Castro Valley school, Ruby Petersen Unger showed Misty Wagner (left) and Jesseca Hawley how latex works (3) Cory Blum (right) who is HIV positive, visited with Darian Dauchan after a classroom talk at a South San Francisco middle school in May, (4) Marin Catholic High School in Kentfield hosted a display of the AIDS quilt this year which drew many viewers/BY ERIC LUSE/THE CHRONICLE

941128
SC941101

Always watch for outdated information. This article first appeared in 1994. This material is designed to support, not replace, the relationship that exists between you and your doctor.

AEGiS presents published material, reprinted with permission and neither endorses nor opposes any material. All information contained on this website, including information relating to health conditions, products, and treatments, is for informational purposes only. It is often presented in summary or aggregate form. It is not meant to be a substitute for the advice provided by your own physician or other medical professionals. Always discuss treatment options with a doctor who specializes in treating HIV.

Copyright ©1980, 1994. AEGiS. All materials appearing on AEGiS are protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation under U.S. copyright and other laws and are the property of AEGiS, or the party credited as the provider of the content. .