AIDS Education

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO surveyed public school districts' implementation of the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) educational program about human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

GAO found that: (1) although CDC believed that students at every grade level should receive age-appropriate HIV education, only 5 percent of the school districts required education at each grade level; (2) school districts most frequently provided instruction for the seventh through tenth grades and the least instruction for the eleventh and twelfth grades; (3) school districts cited already crowded curricula as a restriction on the extent of HIV education they offered; (4) districts that did not require any HIV education typically enrolled fewer than 450 students; (5) state and local education agencies' lack of adequate data regarding students' HIV-related knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors hampered efforts to set program priorities, evaluate programs, and improve operations; (6) state and local agencies attributed their inability to collect CDC-suggested data to lack of staff or authority to ask sensitive questions; (7) about 20 percent of HIV teachers received no specialized training on the subject, while the remainder typically received less than the recommended amount of training; (8) 13 school districts that received direct CDC funding generally trained a higher percentage of teachers, had longer training sessions, and more extensively covered key topics; and (9) CDC issued HIV education guidelines regarding teacher training in 1988, but did not set standards for the number of training hours or the amount of training time to be spent on key topics.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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