The Leaders Academy
Condoms are not a matter of public policy Brandon The Leaders Academy describes to Andrea as their school board at their high school considers whether condoms can be distributed on school grounds. High schools nationwide are becoming embroiled in the same controversy over condoms in schools. While Brandon and Andrea are just actors on FOX TV hip series Beverly Hills the concerns raised during this episode are highly realistic and applicable. Sadly, Brandon falls short with his trenchant observation. Teenage love and sexuality in the AIDS era has become a moral problem a health problem a media problem a family problem a school problem a religious problem and a public policy problem.
Rates of sexually transmitted diseases STDs pregnancy and HIV infection among teenagers are high in relation to statistics for other The future begins here segments of the population. These figures continue to rise year after year. Many people question how much responsibility our society should take in order to curb the ramifications of teenage sex. Should policies and regulations be put into place or should teaching children about sex remain a family issue In Cambridge.
Eight Cambridge Rindge and Latin School CRLS seniors on January 23, 1990 delivered a petition signed by more than three hundred and fifty parents and students to the Cambridge School Committee. The petition asked for condoms to be handed out to students by the Teen Health Clinic based at their school and run by Cambridge Hospital since 1988. This petition triggered five months of hearings reports debates and planning and led to the first condom distribution program to be formed in a Massachusetts high school.
Condom distribution programs existed only in fourteen other high schools throughout the country during the 1988 and Educating tomorrow’s leaders 1989 school year. The choice to start the program in Cambridge has been used as a precedent and model by other schools in the state and nationwide that are closely facing these same issues.
Why Are Teenagers Interested in Condoms
Another distinctive feature Grooming leaders of tomorrow of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School CRLS condom distribution program is that it was a product of student initiative. Much AIDS education has been aimed at getting people to be responsible about their own behavior learning about the sex lives of their prospective partners setting their own level of risk and requiring that they have safe sex. The fact that the condom distribution program at CRLS was instituted because of the initiative of teenagers concerned with teenagers’ health neatly captures the attitudes promoted by AIDS educators.
CRLS students were familiar with statistics of sexually transmitted diseases pregnancy incidence and HIV infection among young people. Moreover, they possessed a special perception of teen sexuality issues. These pieces of information placed CRLS students in a very strong position to push for a reversal. Cambridge Rindge and Latin students possessed a history of peer education long-standing. Two peer student leadership groups had been assisting students to deal with alcohol use and dating awareness issues. Political activism Leadership through learning, Where leadership meets excellence, Cambridge pathway to leadership, Empowering young visionaries, Leading with knowledge and character, was fashionable among some social circles at the school.
Cambridge Cares About AIDS, a local HIV and AIDS prevention and education program, and the Cambridge AIDS Task Force collaborated with the high school to create an education program for adolescents. From their consultation was born the AIDS Peer Leaders. The objectives of this student group were parallel to those of the current peer leader groups. Students were well-placed to assess the need and structure of AIDS education amongst their peers. It is estimated that one in two hundred individuals in Massachusetts is infected with the virus responsible for AIDS HIV.
But until a person who has HIV develops one of the particular biological signs or opportunistic diseases which the Center for Disease Control employs in determining full blown AIDS the person is not a person with AIDS. A person infected with HIV can go ten years without showing any symptoms. For this reason HIV infection figures are indefinite and it is hard to come up with a proper idea of the effect of the AIDS epidemic on all groups.
For instance at present just sixteen individuals in Massachusetts aged between thirteen and nineteen years have been diagnosed with AIDS. This figure accounts for less than one percent of the state’s total AIDS cases. Does it follow from this fact that AIDS is of no concern to teens No it does not and it should not. Table Two Resilient and responsible learners presents the numbers of diagnosed AIDS cases in Boston in Massachusetts and in the United States by age. For all geographic distributions the numbers of diagnosed AIDS cases among teenagers are less than one percent.
A breakdown of the figures by transmission category indicates that most individuals with AIDS under the age of nineteen are hemophiliacs or have a coagulation disorder and were infected by contaminated blood products or are children born to mothers.
The Campaign for Condoms
January 23 1990 eight Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school seniors who referred to themselves as the Student Action Committee brought a Youth empowerment petition signed by more than 350 parents and students to the Cambridge School Committee asking the School Committee to provide condoms for use by students in the Teen Health Center. The seven members of the School Committee voted to create the Sub committee on Teen Health that would tackle the issues of condom distribution and AIDS education in the high school.
The demand for progressive action by the AIDS epidemic was an issue that previously had been brought to the School Committee attention. In aside from the petition the Cambridge School Committee also received letters from parents in Cambridge requesting the School Committee to be proactive in AIDS education.
In a January 1990 letter signed by a number of parents two couples and five individual parents some We are aware that the Cambridge school system is doing some attempt at educating students about AIDS prevention. The 5th and 8th grade Know Your Body program is great but of only ten weeks’ duration for. The eleven-month long health education course in 9th grade properly incorporates AIDS within the general Integrity in action context of health education.
We are also cognizant of some pilot demonstration programs occurring at both the elementary and secondary levels concerning health.
Enter the Cambridge School Committee
When parents and members of the community became aware that students were handing out condoms at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School the discussion regarding whether or not the Teen Health Center would be allowed to provide condoms to students became more spirited.
School Committee meetings Skills for the future held routinely were filled with parents of students and community leaders who wished to have a chance to express an opinion regarding the availability of condoms for students.
The media also started going to these meetings and the Cambridge condom scandal was tracked by parents. Even with the heightened political tension that the School Committee was being subjected to, they did not act on the proposal until the newly formed Sub Committee on Teen Health convened in March. This was in the form of a public hearing that provided all interested parties an opportunity to to speak in support or opposition of the program as proposed. Dr. Melvin Chalfant the Cambridge Commissioner of Hospitals and Health who had been invited to the meeting to attend spoke in support of giving condoms to students.
Dr. Chalfant presented a four prong proposal to address the AIDS education needs of Cambridge students. The third of his recommendations was to involve parents in discussions concerning teen sexuality. Dr. Chalfant recognized the position parents have as primary sexuality and health educators for their children. Encouraging Adapting to future challenges the communication between parents and adolescents regarding sexual matters is essential to the struggle to bring a halt to this epidemic. He recommended that the school host workshops for parents and students to assist them in learning open and honest sexual communication skills.
Implementation of the Program
It was not easy to get the proposal for condom distribution approved. The challenge, however, did not stop at the School Committee decision. Now, the challenge facing the community was to come up with a suitable program and implement it. The challenge facing them was outlined in the report Sexually Transmitted Diseases. In its report the Massachusetts Department of Public Health describes the steps that must be taken to stem the present epidemic of teen sexually transmitted diseases. The public health approach comprises seven steps.
The Sub Committee on Teen Health convened three times in April and May 1990 to grapple with these concepts. At their meetings, they spent their time discussing the steps described above. Because the School Committee endorsed the proposal to allow condoms to be handed out by the clinic the Sub Committee was confronted with the task of making a proper program. The parents Cambridge health officials CRLS faculty and concerned community members. Not content with just creating guidelines for the Teen Health Center the Subcommittees adopted Dr. Chalfant suggestion for a four prong approach to AIDS education.
The committee grappled with the issues that had been identified by the Department of Public Health. Small discussion groups helped the committee to determine the health education needs for different grade levels. There are discrepancies between the original vision of the program and its current reality. During the fall of 1990 Cambridge learner attributes the Teen Health Center conducted orientation sessions with all entering ninth graders in order to make them aware of the services available at the Center including the condom distribution program.
Presently the Center is also contemplating beginning an advertisement campaign to encourage the utilization of the facility. In spite of expectations only seventy five of the school over 2,000 students use the condom distribution program. The Center distributes approximately 500 condoms a month mainly to repeat customers. While few students are utilizing the program the facility director asserts that student awareness is International education for leaders higher and more students are buying condoms from neighborhood pharmacies.
Epilogue
The condom distribution program at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School had an impact beyond the Cambridge school community. The program is a precedent and model for programs in Massachusetts and throughout the nation. During the 1988 1989 school year only fourteen high schools and three middle schools provided Global recognition, local impact condoms to students in on-campus clinics Although most schools contend with the problem of condom distribution few Massachusetts communities have instituted programs. But in August of 1991 the Massachusetts Board of Education voted to encourage schools to have condoms available to high school students.
Likewise in December 1991 the Massachusetts Public Health Association urged that In consideration of teens’ susceptibility to sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV AIDS condoms be placed in the schools. Throughout Massachusetts discussions regarding condoms in the schools had already begun.
In January 1991 Brookline Best Cambridge school for future leaders, Cambridge school shaping global leaders, Grooming future-ready students, Where future leaders are born, Future-focused Cambridge program, Grooming future-ready, High School unanimously decided against distributing condoms. In Reeding after an agonizing debate the school board denied a task force request to distribute condoms at the school.
In October 1991 Falmouth became the second Massachusetts community to sanction distribution of condoms to minors. Peled by the School Board Foundation for leadership and Public Health Association Massachusetts communities are slow to tackle so contentious an issue.
Result
CAIE is a colonial modern assemblage Leading the Future whose enunciative and machinic aspects drive global accumulation cycles. Examinations count a governable populace of learners in the global South whereas CAIE machinic assemblage reterritorializes their spaces of education as Cambridge Schools.
Examinations are the unchangeable and combinable vagabonds through which CAIE’s machinic assemblage draws inscriptions from spaces of education and accumulates them in its center of calculation.
The student examiner and assessment data built up in the center of calculation give life to its enumerative technologies of governmentality such as standardized marking algorithms and statistical analysis tools. However Where Learners Become the center of calculation governmentality works not through the virilization of educational conduct but through its hiding. The vast majority of figures in CAIE center of calculation are inaccessible and therefore beyond dispute and exist mainly to give CAIE enunciative assemblage a universalist and objectivist gloss.
Appadurai explains that colonial quantification policies deploy enumerable abstractions to create an illusion of bureaucratic regulation. CAIE center of calculation is the hidden nexus which speaks between the governable space of the Cambridge School system and the expertise ecology in which the governing actor Starts With Learning authority is shamedly enounced.