Schools Official Tells Of ‘Living With Aids’ Billings Urges Education About ‘Equal Opportunity Disease’

Judith Billings, Washington state’s superintendent of public instruction, scoffed at her physician’s suggestion she be tested for the AIDS virus.

It turned out positive: She had contracted the deadly virus during artificial insemination in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

“I guess that’s why we call it an equal opportunity disease,” said Billings, who was the keynote speaker Friday at the annual Idaho HIV/ AIDS Conference in Boise.

Although she looked thin, she spoke energetically to a crowd of several hundred people.

“I am living with AIDS,” she said. “It is very important you hear it that way. I am living with AIDS. I am not dying with AIDS.”

She talked about public apathy toward AIDS and about the need to educate children about the disease.

Many people believe they are invulnerable because they are not intravenous drug users, gays or sexually promiscuous heterosexuals. Others think medical advances are taming the lethal virus.

The truth, Billings said, is that AIDS hurts everyone.

“All of us, one way or the other, will be or are personally impacted by AIDS,” she said.

In 1994, a total of 39 states required AIDS education in public schools, Billings said. Idaho is among the 39, but exactly what children are taught is left up to each school district.

“This generation holds in their hands the possibility of stopping HIV, through their behavioral choices,” Billings said.

Meridian school health teacher Wendy Spiers said parents, who needed to hear it the most, were not there.

“The people we need to reach are the parents, so they will allow us to teach in the schools,” she said.

Spiers spends two weeks teaching 8th-graders about sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. In the abstinence-based curriculum, condoms are mentioned only in connection with their failure rate.