NCJ Number
116384
Journal
University of Pennsylvania Law Review Volume: 135 Issue: 1 Dated: (December 1986) Pages: 193-221
Date Published
1986
Length
29 pages
Annotation
Children who face AIDS-related discrimination are protected by several Federal laws that prohibit discrimination against disabled individuals as well as by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Abstract
Each of these enactments prohibits school officials from segregating or excluding an AIDS-linked child from the regular classroom. The medical evidence that is currently available indicates that AIDS is transmitted only by sexual contact, the sharing of hypodermic needles, blood transfusions, and in-utero infection from a mother to her offspring. Casual contact like that experienced in the classroom appears to carry no risk of spreading the disease. In addition, the risk that children diagnosed with AIDS will contract a potentially harmful disease from their peers at school should be assessed on an individual basis. School officials who arbitrarily segregate all AIDS-linked children from their classmates are yielding to the pressure of uninformed public fear and are preventing these children from obtaining the full educational benefits to which they are entitled. School officials should not classify these children as a single group. Instead, they should separately assess each AIDS-linked child to determine the most appropriate educational placement for that child. 144 footnotes.