Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: New York City's Condom Scourge Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 13:30:17 EST Message-ID: \HD New York City's Condom Scourge \BY Evan Gahr \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: The issues of condom distribution and sex have touched off explosive controversy in New York City's public school system. At ground zero stands Irene Impellizzeri, vice president of the Board of Education. Denounced by opponents as a tool of the Catholic hierarchy, she says her foes are unwilling to set high standards for kids. TEXT: As far as Irene Impellizzeri is concerned, her numerous foes consider the New York City public schools and their students unredeemable, while she still has faith in both. This translates into a stance that critics of the Board of Education vice president call unrealistic and a peril to the lives of students. Impellizzeri is the most prominent opponent of distributing condoms in New York City high schools. What others call a lifesaving program, she sees as the white flag of surrender, a signal to the kids that adults don't believe they can muster the self-restraint to abstain from sex. "Giving out condoms," she says, "sends the message by an institution that is supposed to be holding the very highest ideals before them that less can be expected." Condom distribution was narrowly approved by the Board of Education in February 1991, and many major cities have since followed suit, as has public opinion. A policy that would have been considered unthinkable not long ago is now widely accepted as an unfortunate fact of life. But Impellizzeri has not given up; she not only keeps the issue on the front burner in New York, she persists in turning up the heat. She has had some small but significant victories. One board member switched to the anticondom side, giving Impellizzeri a 4-3 majority on the issue. And in May, she pushed through, over the objections of Schools Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, a resolution that requires AIDS education in the public schools to stress abstinence over safer sex. Meanwhile, the board has been hamstrung by lawsuits related to the condom program, including one filed by Impellizzeri and another board member. Battles loom over the curriculum for the seventh through ninth grades. Noting a shift of forces in her direction since the original vote for distribution, Impellizzeri's longtime friend and former colleague Donald Barr says: "It reminds me of a play where all the schemes of the devil fall into disarray because there is a little particle of integrity." Kym Vanderbilt, who watches the Board of Education for the nonprofit Public Education Association, sees things differently. The public school system is falling into disarray, Vanderbilt thinks, over Impellizzeri's endless challenges to the condom distribution. Vanderbilt and other critics speculate that Impellizzeri, a devout Catholic whose lawyer often represents the New York Archdiocese, has become the church's useful idiot. "Her motivations are highly suspect. These board members will not let this rest. They seem to be willing to derail the education system." Impellizzeri, 70, has long been part of that system. She got her first job as a public elementary school teacher in 1942 and later served as a dean at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York. These days she is best known for pushing sexual abstinence at a time when most people only give it lip service. "You can not just gratify every desire at every point," she says. "That's what it means to attain maturity, adulthood." If abstinence these days sounds like a fringe position, especially in New York, Impellizzeri says she has lots of support - from parents, who want more information about school policies and have demonstrated outside the Board of Education, and from children, who want adults to expect the best from them. Students, she says, can control their behavior - or change it. "Young people have been receiving the message [against] smoking. They've been receiving the message about drugs. We must not give up hope that they will receive the message of abstinence," says Impellizzeri. Appealing to the better nature of students by promoting abstinence is "the right thing to do for this generation of children who are in the midst of an AIDS epidemic," she insists, but "it would be the right thing to do at any time. The role of the adult guiding the young towards gaining control over themselves has not changed. The role of the parent has not changed." Impellizzeri has gotten a sympathetic hearing from some political figures. Says former New York Mayor Ed Koch: "I consider her courageous, being able to stand up to all these pressures." Former Board of Education President Robert Wagner, with whom Impellizzeri served, says he does not agree with all of her positions but admires her integrity. New York City Board of Education meetings these days are consumed with controversy over sex. A typical public meeting in the Board of Education chambers makes the Clarence Thomas hearings seem like the height of civility. In a cross between a delicatessen line and The McLaughlin Group, speakers are handed numbers and ushered into the room when it's their turn at the microphone. Then they are ushered out to make room for the next orator. A diverse crowd turns out. At one recent meeting the speakers were black, white, Hispanic, Catholic, gay, self-professed former gays and a woman who said she lost her virginity in the sixties but later found Jesus. All this diversity would have been a politician's dream but for one fact: The speakers hated each other. Impellizzeri sat quietly through most of the meeting. The speakers usually focused on the Children of the Rainbow curriculum guide for first-graders. The guide, which emphasizes multiculturalism, has come under fire because some of the books on its reading list concern gay families. It was attacked by many parents for promoting homosexuality. Impellizzeri, according to her lawyer, John Hale, wants parents to be aware of what's in the guide. But she voted for the multicultural education resolution that spawned it. Board of Education regulars called this particular four-hour meeting tame by their standards. There were attacks on "Jesus freaks" and "homosexual thought police"; cheers at the mention of religion being removed from school, boos at the mention of family values; a call went forth to "stop the flood of perversion and promiscuity"; and homosexuals were accused of wanting to sodomize America. One speaker denounced "crazy white liberals" and rattled off a list of famous homosexuals through history. His declaration that Jesus was gay nearly started a fistfight with another audience member. There also was tension between blacks who came to support multiculturalism and white gay activists. (About the only ones not singled out for abuse were Jews; score one small victory for tolerance.) A majority of the abuse seemed to be directed at homosexuals. But there was plenty to go around. Various board members and Chancellor Fernandez were attacked by name. Many speakers said that the "loyalty oath" pushed by Impellizzeri - a requirement that outside AIDS educators sign a statement promising to stress abstinence - would cost children's lives. Tom Duane, an openly gay city councilman, said people "not giving schoolchildren information are participating in murder. If one child becomes HIV positive it is murder. These people know who they are." Another speaker, representing parents who came to support multiculturalism, dispensed with the subtleties: "If anybody is opposed - Irene Impellizzeri - come into our community rather than behind our back." Impellizzeri shrugs off the comments directed at her during Board of Education meetings as unsurprising, once "you see the force of the emotions behind the discourse, when you see the hissing at the Board of Education meetings when words like 'family' and 'marriage' are used." The high-water mark for personal abuse came after Impellizzeri addressed a group of prominent Catholics in Brooklyn. The May 28 speech at the Cathedral Club repeated many of her standard objections to condom distribution. But a comment about inner-city children gave the city's tabloids a field day: "In the inner city, a high proportion of poor children have to carry out their escape without having before them . . . any moral models except their teachers." "Racist" and "insensitive" were among the milder charges hurled her way. She was summoned by Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden, who appointed her to the board. After a meeting, Impellizzeri said she was sorry if her remarks were considered offensive. "I just felt that people had not read the speech," she says now. Her supporters call the accusation of racism particularly unfair. Jim Soler, executive director of the La Guardia Memorial House, which serves mainly black and Hispanic neighborhood kids, points to Impellizzeri's service on the East Harlem establishment's board of directors as one sign of her commitment to all children. "There is a lot to be said for people who will stay and work in a neighborhood," says Soler. The gridlock at the Board of Education due to the continuing controversy over condoms and AIDS education led to calls in late October from powerful New Yorkers to disband or change the makeup of the board. As it stands, each of the presidents of the city's five boroughs appoints a member, and the mayor selects the remaining two. Municipal Assistance Corp. Chairman Felix Rohatyn said Oct. 19 that he supports the creation of a new board controlled by Mayor David Dinkins. Rohatyn held out the possibility of more money for schools from a bond refinancing if the board were reorganized. The next day, United Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman, who has clout with the state Legislature, which would have to approve changes, said her union would consider other selection methods, but not a board chosen solely by the mayor. Impellizzeri, of course, owes her slot on the board to current selection procedures. And short of being removed through reorganization, she is unlikely to be quiet. The AIDS curriculum now in place for kindergarten through sixth grade is particularly offensive to her. "In the fourth grade, if your community wants it, [students] are to learn about the forms of intercourse," she says. The lesson plans include "no statement that anal intercourse is not recommended by the surgeon general . . . because the rectum was not made for that - that's a quote by [former Surgeon General C. Everett] Koop," she adds. "Some of the practices are being promoted - encouraged." Another ongoing battle concerns implementation of the board's May resolution requiring AIDS educators to stress abstinence. Many of these are outside consultants, required by the resolution to sign a statement promising to do so. Impellizzeri says both provisions are consistent with New York State Board of Regents policy, which the Board of Education must follow. Critics call the requirement for outside providers a morality oath. She calls it "very much the same as the agreement form that must be signed by any of the other outside providers with whom we deal. We have a whole set of policies and laws" - such as minimum wage and affirmative action guidelines - for "which we require compliance. Because there has been so much of a battle to oppose the signing of this agreement form, perhaps they had no intention of complying." The policy has been challenged by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Impellizzeri says many parents support an emphasis on abstinence and oppose condom distribution - but she and her allies stop short of claiming majority support. Polls have found that a majority of New Yorkers support condom distribution. Parents interviewed at the Board of Education meeting were mostly ambivalent. One woman who came to the meeting with her 3-year-old daughter said, "I think it is a necessity with all that is going on now. It tells them they have the freedom to have sex, yet it protects them from being victims of whatever might be going around." Another mother responded that condom distribution tells black and Latino children they are trash. She teaches her kids at home and seems to have given up on public schools. That's something Impellizzeri won't do. Public "schools have been her life," says former board President Wagner. "It's the same commitment that she has in living in [a mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood]. It's faith in the community." Impellizzeri has lived all her life in Brooklyn, where her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a lawyer. Since graduating from New York University in 1941, she has spent her working life in education, serving on the board since 1980. Her half century of devotion to public school students is not always reciprocated these days. Students, for the moment at least, seem unreceptive to the abstinence message. A typical statement from an 11th-grade girl, just old enough to see R-rated movies: "They can't tell you don't have sex. That's for you to know. It's not for other people to tell you go and have sex or don't have sex." A ninth-grade boy: "Don't do it, it's wrong? It's a part of life. You can't just stop it." These are the results, Impellizzeri would say, of low expectations. In her Cathedral Club speech, she held fast to her two weapons: "One is a conviction that the children of this era are as capable of being wholesome, productive members of society as any who have gone before them; the other is the courage to speak bluntly and truthfully about what is going on." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM