Sensitive School Issue : Board Delays Lifting Ban on Pupils With AIDS

After a second week of debate on the likelihood of San Diego city school students transmitting AIDS to classmates and teachers, school trustees Tuesday postponed a decision on whether to lift their 9-month-old ban on allowing children afflicted with the deadly disease into district schools.

The trustees were scheduled to vote on a recommendation from the district’s AIDS task force to replace the ban with a policy of evaluating each AIDS victim individually for admission to city schools. The recommendation also includes a provision to start a $13,000 education program about acquired immune deficiency syndrome in city schools.

Board of Education President Susan Davis, a supporter of the case-by-case approach, said she asked for the postponement because only four of the school district’s five trustees were present for the vote. Board member Kay Davis is on vacation.

“I think the full board should be here for a decision and be accountable for their decision,” Susan Davis said.

The policy appears to have the necessary support for passage when it comes back to the board for a vote Sept. 2. Trustees Susan Davis and Dorothy Smith spoke in favor of it at Tuesday’s board meeting, and in an interview last week, trustee Kay Davis said she would support the recommendation.

“I was against it last time,” said Kay Davis, who voted with trustees Larry Lester and John Witt to approve the ban last October. “I would support it (this time.)”

“I’m willing to let them in on a case-by-case basis,” she added.

Kay Davis has also said she would ask Susan Davis to postpone Tuesday’s decision if it appeared the policy would fail by a 2-2 vote.

Trustee Larry Lester said Tuesday he is opposed to lifting the ban on allowing students with AIDS into school. Trustee John Witt said he is still undecided despite sharp questions he posed about the risk of transmitting the disease through casual contact.

To date, there have been no reported cases of AIDS among district students or employees, but Supt. Thomas Payzant recommended last September that the board adopt a policy in case it was faced with the situation.

Last October, at the same time it banished students with AIDS from city classrooms, the trustees unanimously approved taking a case-by-case approach on employees diagnosed to have the disease after the trustees were advised that it might be illegal or prohibitively expensive to retire, fire or transfer all AIDS-afflicted employees.

AIDS, which is invariably fatal and has no known cure, results from a virus that destroys its victims’ ability to ward off infections. Transmitted through sexual contact and blood products, it has primarily affected homosexual men and intravenous drug users.

On Tuesday, Witt and Lester questioned Dr. Jeffrey Black, the physician consultant to the San Diego Unified School District, about two reported cases of AIDS transmission that apparently did not involve sexual contact, injections or blood transfusions.

In one, reported in the British medical journal Lancet, an impotent man passed on the virus to his wife. In the second, a mother contracted the disease from her sick infant child, who physicians believe contracted the disease through blood transfusions. It was transmitted to the mother after she apparently failed to wear gloves when she came in contact with bloody secretions while changing the child’s intravenous and feeding tubes. The woman may have contracted AIDS through cuts in her skin, Black said.

Lester said the two cases prove the possibility of transmitting the disease in uncommon ways. “That does take it out of the realm of possibility. Now we’re dealing with probability, not just theoretical possibility,” he said.

But Black, echoing the testimony of other medical experts who spoke at the school board last week, said that no one has ever contracted AIDS through casual contact, by living with an AIDS victim or even by sharing a toothbrush with someone who has AIDS.

“I think the evidence is abundantly clear that risk of transmission from saliva is extremely remote, not likely to occur from the kind of contact that occurs in a household, and certainly not likely to occur from the kind of contact that occurs in the classroom,” he said.