The Student Coalition for Relevant Sex Education

The existence of the Peer Information Project is a testament to SCRSE's political will; even bureaucracy proved no match for these student-activists’ contagious enthusiasm. SCRSE representatives first met with the Ford Foundation in mid-1971 to discuss the possibility of a grant, and foundation representatives coached the students to clear a path for their project. With help from mentors at Planned Parenthood and New York City's Human Resources Administration, students from SCRSE's steering committee drafted a proposal, expanded their ranks with new members, made appointments with representatives from the teachers’ union, petitioned the Board of Education for an endorsement, obtained the chancellor's endorsement, and urged the Board of Education to formally accept the grant one the Ford Foundation awarded it. Early in the 1973–1974 academic year, students enthused, it was time to get to the “real” work: peer education. Peer educators - some with previous SCRSE experience, and some newly trained in the techniques of peer-led sex education - made themselves identifying T-shirts and hung posters. They publicized that on-campus “rap rooms,” primarily staffed by students, were a good place to get answers for sex-related questions. And then the peer educators waited to see if anyone would show up.Footnote ¹¹

Madeline Oberle, a peer adviser at John Jay High School in Brooklyn, explained how students found their way to the sex education rap room: “A couple of guys came in with birth control questions the other day,” she noted. “I told them to come back tomorrow with 15 kids and we'd have a workshop. We wound up with 30 or 40, including the whole football team.”Footnote ¹² At Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx, the rap room was open for two periods, and averaged fifteen to thirty student visitors per day.Footnote ¹³ Stevenson High School's peer educators met with drop-in visitors to discuss sexual questions and concerns at over two hundred student conferences by April of the rap room's first year.Footnote ¹⁴ As peer educators were trained and developed their knowledge, these young people gave their rap rooms tongue-in-cheek names such as “Living, Loving, Learning,” “S.P.I.C.E.,” “The Happy Room,” and “Speakeasy.”Footnote ¹⁵ In the rap rooms, they showed films, demonstrated contraception devices, and distributed pamphlets to groups, in addition to meeting one-on-one with fellow students.

By placing information about contraception within a larger program of offerings regarding dating, gender norms, and communication skills, SCRSE's Peer Information Project had appealed to the Ford Foundation's interest in population control. The project guided individuals’ decision-making practices – considering the whole person, and the culture within which that person lived -- rather than simply providing medical intervention for their bodies.Footnote ¹⁶ As such, this student-led program arguably laid the groundwork for the types of programming that Ford Foundation consultant Michael Carrera and Ford Foundation trainer Adrienne Germain would eventually promote as leaders of the Adolescent Sexuality and Pregnancy Prevention Programs for the Children's Aid Society and the International Women's Health Coalition, respectively. SCRSE was, at the time, making the case for a new approach to adolescent development.

This is not to say that there were no missteps. Abbi Smith, a Stuyvesant High School student and member of the SCRSE steering committee, shared a long list of grievances with a Ford Foundation secretary. According to a memo paraphrasing the message she left, Smith accused the “Board, Superintendent Tobin, and others of incompetence and foot-dragging and accused the Ford Foundation of being nearly as bad because SCRSE members were sometimes excluded from the grown-ups’ meetings.” A Ford Foundation representative not directly involved in the SCRSE program found the complaint annoying and affirmed that “I have been uneasy about this project from the outset,” in part because he wondered if SCRSE could be trusted to behave in a way that was “consistently thoughtful and responsible.”Footnote ¹⁷ In addition to the Board of Education and the Ford Foundation, a variety of people at the schools created obstacles: physical education faculty and guidance counselors guarded their turf, staff refused to copy Peer Education materials, and fellow students took down posters for the fun of it.

Mundane scheduling issues also existed. Because the peer educators trained through elective offerings in the health sciences, volunteers at most schools had to revise their schedules to accommodate the new course. Scheduling glitches also explained some of the persistent difficulties with wrangling student visitors into the rap rooms. The rap room at Flushing High School in Queens seemed destined for failure because the school operated on end-to-end scheduling (in which students had no free periods) and required students to conspicuously obtain a special pass – asking for this pass in front of all of their friends and fellow students -- if they wanted to leave the cafeteria to visit the rap room during lunch.Footnote ¹⁸ Closely related to the scheduling issue was the problem of assigned space. At Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, the Peer Information Project service was moved from a prime location in a room at the front of the building because “the decorations were deemed inappropriate for evening meetings when the room is used for other purposes.”Footnote ¹⁹ Some rap rooms were merely glorified closets.

There were additional difficulties related to faculty advisers. The fact that only half of the appointed faculty advisers for the peer education program attended a SCRSE organizational meeting in September 1973 was not a promising sign.Footnote ²⁰ Some principals appointed faculty advisers who had no background in sex education and, in at least one notable case, had a “general lack of cooperation and initiative,” which manifested in the inability to maintain a consistent pool of peer educators, no student training, and a refusal to attend teacher training sessions.Footnote ²¹ That particular adviser had managed to do very little in exchange for being released from two teaching periods. At Benjamin Franklin High School in Queens, the problem was not that the teacher didn't care but rather that she was a “serious woman” totally dedicated to a student-led program. She wasted a semester waiting for peer educators to sufficiently “emerge” rather than nominate anyone.Footnote ²² These two examples compared poorly with the excellent work done by faculty advisors to peer educators at other schools. Trainer reports completed at the end of the 1973–1974 school year noted a correlation between successful programs and those with faculty advisers who had advocated for sex education before their schools implemented the SCRSE project, received instruction in health sciences, and expressed respect for peer educators’ competence.

Fortunately, invested students could turn even the grimmest situations around. Consider Martin Van Buren High School, where the faculty adviser appointed peer educators who were not part of SCRSE, giving the SCRSE members no chance to protest their exclusion.Footnote ²³ Initially the program floundered, but when the initial faculty adviser became ill and left, the program picked up steam. A new adviser, Phyllis Lourine, “had experience with students from the Student Coalition for Relevant Sex Education and … worked in peer centered programs”; liberated from the previous adviser's domineering style, peer educators stepped up, ran parent workshops, arranged for outside speakers, and moderated weekly discussion groups.Footnote ²⁴ The peer educators at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan thrived when working with a faculty adviser they helped choose and who was willing to challenge the administration to protect the students’ autonomy. Trainer Martha Drexler concluded that “students are active and committed to the peer project and truly take the responsibility of running the program themselves.”Footnote ²⁵ Another trainer noted that the rap room was open and staffed four periods per day, as many as eighty students per week attended peer-led seminars, and peer leaders had proven proficient at researching and coordinating programs.Footnote ²⁶

The extraordinary dedication of some peer educators, and the willingness of so many students to draw upon peer education resources, obscures a perhaps equally important trend: SCRSE's gradual withdrawal from the Peer Information Project; this retreat began simultaneously with the program's roll out in fall 1973, and accelerated thereafter. SCRSE's original proposal had emphasized that students would not only provide counseling, but also manage and organize the program districtwide, overseeing everything from room reservations to hiring. Understanding why SCRSE sought such logistically difficult and time-consuming responsibilities for students, and why it felt that the program was inadequate without it, requires an understanding of SCRSE's interpretation of how schools worked.

For SCRSE, the matter of their leadership was crucial because they assumed schools were incapable of representing students’ interests. In fact, SCRSE routinely argued that schooling was a problem that amplified the oppression of young women. Take, for example, the SCRSE evaluation of how schools treated pregnant students and teen fathers, often expelling young mothers (but not fathers). As reported in Time magazine and even in Family Life Education textbooks, this procedure had been developed to protect “the good of the school.” The New York City Board of Education defended this, based on the assumption that permitting pregnant women to continue in school would “invite even more schoolgirl pregnancies.”Footnote ²⁷ A member of the High School Women's Coalition, SCRSE's earlier moniker, had condemned the practice where pregnant teens were “sent to special schools … all New York schools are in bad shape, and the schools for pregnant women are even worse—in terrible condition and overcrowded.” The thirteen-year-old student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan further explained that “what high school women face is the oppression of women combined with the oppression of minors.”Footnote ²⁸ SCRSE had impressed upon the Ford Foundation, if not necessarily the Board of Education, their desire for “a program structure that permits students to share significant operational decisions with the Board of Education,” and it was this ambitious agenda that had made their grant application stand out in the first place.Footnote ²⁹

SCRSE members, like other students investigating sexism in schools, could cite Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 when protesting dress codes, gender-segregated vocational courses, and team sports opportunities, issues that the women's liberation movement did not always prioritize but that were consistent with its ideals.Footnote ³⁰ Likewise, the organization's style and approach resonated with the diverse student movements erupting on high school and college campuses—sit-ins and walkouts, resistance to dress codes and curfews, and demands for more minority faculty hires.Footnote ³¹ Students at high schools and colleges had begun demanding a seat at the table, shaping curriculum and even governance. There was a whisper of the campus free speech movement's influence, for example, in the High School Women's Coalition's protests at weekly Board of Education meetings or at SCRSE's all day “speak out” held at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.Footnote ³²

Nationwide, it was becoming obvious to educators that the decades-old movement to consolidate schools and increase the number of enrolled students had bifurcated consequences; this clustering both improved the efficiency of adult supervision and created opportunities for students to communicate and organize against this supervision. Exchanging stories about the Peer Information Project on their individual campuses, SCRSE members expressed “a deep concern that this project may be co-opted by teachers, high school principals and the Bureau [of Health and Physical Education]” in November 1973.Footnote ³³ This was particularly embittering because these same faculty and administrators were, according to SCRSE, the people who had oppressed young women in the first place. Frustrated, SCRSE lent its letterhead to representatives from Planned Parenthood, the Citizens’ Committee for Children, and the New York City Human Resources Administration, hoping that these friendly adults could intercede on their behalf and restore SCRSE's influence.Footnote ³⁴ For their trouble, the Bureau of Health and Physical Education never answered the adult allies’ letter because the Bureau director was “irritated by its tone, its inaccuracies, its use of Coalition letter-head.”Footnote ³⁵

As the Peer Information Project continued, SCRSE deployed both confrontation and a perfected form of teenage belligerence to maintain some influence over the program's organizing structure, focusing on two areas: recruiting peer educators and selecting pilot program schools. Indeed, some faculty advisers were cherry-picking their peer educators. Ford Foundation consultant Carrera noted as early as February 1974 that “there seems to be an absence of any unified method by which students are selected,” and that “to avoid the potentiality of an elitist, strictly homogeneous group,” there needed to be a more open process. “At the very least all students must be made aware of and enfranchised to participate,” declared Carrera, noting that this had been “the intent of the High School Coalition for Relevant Sex Education” since the program's origin.Footnote ³⁶ By the end of the 1973–1974 academic year, the Bureau of Health and Physical Education gained enough self-awareness to avoid reinforcing the unseemly impression “of being teacher-dominated rather than student-directed.” Going back to the drawing board, the Bureau speculated that “students from other pilot schools or the Student Coalition for Relevant Sex Education could be involved” in recruitment.Footnote ³⁷ For SCRSE activists, who had at one point been promised that it was students who would choose their advisers, this patronizing permission was further evidence that adults refused to help unless granted controlling authority.Footnote ³⁸

It was especially frustrating for SCRSE when peer educators took for granted their own incompetence and the superiority of an adviser's knowledge. When peer adviser George Dunn remarked that “the most difficult part is when a pregnant girl comes in and wants to know whether to have the kid, have an abortion, or what. I'm not in a position to tell her,” it was a forfeiture of his own authority as a counselor; this is not to say that he should “tell her” what to do, but that neither should the faculty adviser to whom he directed her.Footnote ³⁹ It also leads to the question of what he was doing as a “peer educator” if not educating. Advisers were quick to appropriate organizational oversight regarding budgeting, staffing, and goal setting. Adults rarely expected students to have a substantial role in maintaining the program, with Carrera reporting with surprise when “the program is well ahead of last year's pace with the rap rooms open in each school … It appears also that the students are taking more responsibility for the conduct of the rap rooms this year.”Footnote ⁴⁰ SCRSE, in contrast, had assumed that students would have supervision responsibility from the beginning. Yet SCRSE representatives would have had to risk truancy to meet with non-SCRSE peer educators during school hours, making opportunities to air tensions or sternly influence nonexistent. Germain recalled students describing that “the Coalition feels isolated from the pilot schools because it is difficult, often impossible, for students to meet let alone visit the schools.” It did not elude SCRSE that “if the Coalition had been involved in visiting the schools at the initiation of the project last fall, they could have been helpful in generating enthusiasm, giving advice from their perspective and so on.”Footnote ⁴¹

With a new year on the horizon and reports from schools still trickling in via training reports, SCRSE exploited a small opportunity to reopen the matter of which new schools could host the program in the 1974–1975 year. Members pushed for Queens Vocational, Bushwick, Aviation, and Truman High Schools, repeating their position that schools with existing SCRSE branches had a better foundation on which to build.Footnote ⁴² They got nowhere, and the Board of Education's previous promises seemed forgotten. The students turned sullen. When the Ford Foundation created an Advisory Council to bring foundation, Board of Education, and student stakeholders together, the meetings proved unproductive. At a meeting in which the Advisory Council evaluated schools for future funding, Germain recorded that “the two students present did not say very much and they had no input to report.”Footnote ⁴³ The students’ characterization of the Bureau for Health and Physical Education's inflexible and authoritarian behavior is credible given a parallel problem noted by the Ford Foundation's consultant: Bureau trainers complained of “fragmentation, disenchantment, and distress” at their workplace in sufficient amounts to assure rapid employee turnover.Footnote ⁴⁴

In his May 1974 report to the Ford Foundation, Bureau director Irwin Tobin outlined a pretty superficial projection of SCRSE future involvement. He offered a few meetings to discuss project progress and the opportunity for SCRSE to visit programs at pilot schools. Moreover, the Bureau would provide trainers for SCRSE meetings, an offer that no documents suggest SCRSE had requested and that anyone attentive to SCRSE's activists would realize was undesired.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Ford Foundation considered even vaguer interventions: “We ought to reach out to the High School Coalition and try to involve them more intimately next year,” noted Carrera. “I believe that the Bureau is willing to write them off—we may have to be more direct with regard to them assuming a more active position in the future.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Reflecting upon the struggle to represent students to the bureau, Columbia University graduate student and SCRSE advocate Sharon Katz would dryly describe how the endeavor was “if not the most rewarding experience, a very educational one.”Footnote ⁴⁷ By the end of the 1974–1975 academic year, SCRSE was estranged from the project, with many student activists refusing to respond to summonses by either the Ford Foundation or the bureau. From SCRSE's point of view, what remained of their program was a stripped down and soulless exercise that wasn't worth fighting to defend. From the Bureau's point of view, however, the students were simply flighty. In coming decades, Carrera would emerge as a pioneering proponent of social services as part of pregnancy prevention curricula, receiving awards from Planned Parenthood, Advocates for Youth, and the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists. He would take quite seriously what young people told him about what they needed to succeed. But in 1975 he was an early-career professor who had been conditioned to expect that the program's efficiency depended upon only the transmission of sexual knowledge, rather than upon the matter of who directed the distribution of this knowledge. This assumption showed through when he noted in his Ford Foundation report that “only a couple of students remain interested in its original work,” a situation that was “disappointing but not surprising.”Footnote ⁴⁸ More provocatively, when Maude Parker, supervisor of the Board of Education's Family Living/Sex Education program, and her team published their findings in the Family Coordinator, they would write SCRSE out of the narrative, refusing even to identify the students’ organization by name.Footnote ⁴⁹

SCRSE made one last play, asking the Ford Foundation for funding independent of the Board of Education, suggesting a new program for the 1975–1976 academic year. That request was denied.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Ford Foundation also reconfirmed that it would not provide money to the ongoing Peer Information Project beyond its second year because the previous years of funding had already accomplished their goals: creating and assessing a pilot program, and assuring that information about this experiment was distributed to other districts around the country. But to assume that the Board of Education would begin to independently fund this relatively successful program in the post-grant era was a disingenuous hope, especially given the worsening condition of the municipal budget. The Board of Education's employment ranks, for example, would be cut by almost 20 percent between 1975 and 1978.Footnote ⁵¹

This was no doubt disappointing to Parker, who wanted to expand the program to twenty schools during the 1975–1976 school year.Footnote ⁵² She regretfully noted in June 1975 that “I am not hopeful about refunding of the project by the Division of High Schools or the other sources that were contacted. It may be that we will have to think of our effort as another ‘Camelot.’”Footnote ⁵³ In a memo addressed to the Ford Foundation, Planned Parenthood noted the likely implications, especially if Parker's position as supervisor of the Family Living/Sex Education program was eliminated: “This action will, in effect, wipe out sex education in the school system, after years of struggle to get it going.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Not protests by parents and conservatives, but mundane matters of budgeting and poor institutional planning would be responsible. A few days later, a scribbled note from Parker found its way into the Ford Foundation grant files: “Sex Ed. is dead; it seems I am being reassigned.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Perhaps Parker was a bit harsh when she deemed sex education “dead,” but it was definitely in hibernation. Whereas other districts, including San Francisco, had looked to New York City's peer-led sex education as worthy of emulation, making “scores of inquiries” and asking for copies of the Peer Information Project's annual reports and training outlines, there would be no one on staff ready to distribute these reports. Likewise, the thirty Japanese sex educators who wanted to see that now-departed program in action would be disappointed.Footnote ⁵⁶ With peer-led sex education eliminated, the sex education that remained would be woefully insufficient to the HIV/AIDS crisis, with the consequence of tens of thousands of deaths in the coming decades.

YELL and a Wave of Peer-Led Sex Education

By the mid-1980s, HIV/AIDS was a widely acknowledged public health crisis, one that warranted both medical and educational responses. The demands for new treatments and a cure were the priority; ACT UP emerged as the city's most potent direct-action organization, pressuring city and federal officials to dedicate more resources toward research and caregiving. Urging an educational response, a small group of young teachers within ACT UP founded the affinity group YELL (Youth Education Life Line) to spur the Board of Education, specifically. This affinity group would come to include and eventually be led by students, for whom peer education both illuminated the school district's failure to disseminate HIV/AIDS education, and compensated for this failure.

YELL's direct-action protests, called “zaps,” had as their initial purpose the provocation of Board of Education members, and public-school staff and faculty, into publicly stating their support for or opposition to expanded HIV/AIDS education. Consider the first zap at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn: YELL handed out five hundred pamphlets and condoms and recorded a greeting from one teacher who grumbled that “it's about time you folks got out here” as he walked by.Footnote ⁵⁷ Some teachers and school administrators probably hoped that YELL would provide students with much-needed education without educators having to suffer conflicts with parents and conservatives.Footnote ⁵⁸ Others likely suspected that the presence of condom distribution immediately off-campus might compel parents to get behind classroom-based sex education as a preferable option. This might explain why YELL received an off-the-record welcome and police were seldom called; when police were called to the sites of future actions, activists suspected that the police were deliberately lax.Footnote ⁵⁹ The key obstacle, direct action had clarified, was the Board of Education rather than the schools.

As both activists and teachers, YELL's founders enthusiastically advocated for their students. Teacher-activist Jeffrey Fennelly was therefore shocked when “there were these kids, literally high school kids from New Jersey, [who] came in and starting joining us in our zaps.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Far more than Fennelly and other adult activists had suspected, students sensed the contempt for young people that left them especially vulnerable. Indeed, the Board of Education and independent scholars reminded the public of troubling findings from New York City's Department of Health: While only 3 percent of America's teenagers lived in New York City, the city's population contained 20 percent of reported adolescent cases nationwide, including a large number of young Latina and African American women.Footnote ⁶¹ Moreover, the consequences of an HIV/AIDS diagnosis for teenagers in the era before highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) could be especially dire. Teenagers were infrequently recruited for clinical trials, which were the only way for those who did not tolerate the antiretroviral medication AZT to receive treatment. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and elsewhere preferred to use adult white males as their subjects to reduce variables that might produce outlying results.Footnote ⁶²

The likelihood that people contracting HIV/AIDS would die, and the rate at which the virus was spreading through the teenage population, is the context behind why the New York City Board of Education response was insufficient. As ACT UP pointed out in 1990, the city unreasonably expected the Board of Education's AIDS Unit to operate with a budget of only 8 cents per year per pupil.Footnote ⁶³ This meant timid educational responses; during the 1985–1986 academic year, New York City broke ground by hosting information nights for parents and showed the film A Special Report on AIDS to 100,000 teachers and staff. Curriculum adjustments followed, with a small pilot program of HIV/AIDS education for students.Footnote ⁶⁴ On the one hand, this was consistent with the way that the Board of Education generally investigated curriculum options, and it was progress; San Francisco, in comparison, did not offer so much as teacher in-service training regarding HIV/AIDS until a year after some New York students had received instruction.Footnote ⁶⁵ But the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS was a problem these careful introductory ventures could not address. In response, some students became petulant; they heckled teachers during brief class lessons or threatened to engage in unprotected sex if condoms were not made available.Footnote ⁶⁶ Other students—often identifying as gay or lesbian, and with experience in progressive politics—saw peer-led sex education as a way to compensate for adults’ failures, mistakes, and inaction. These same students began joining and transforming YELL. And while no evidence exists connecting them or the adults who started YELL to an earlier generation of student sex educators, SCRSE had given peer-led sex education a “history” and therefore credibility. When YELL's youngest volunteers initiated peer-led sex education, it would be controversial but not extraordinary.

Like the peer-led sex educators who would answer anonymous phone calls with Teens Teaching AIDS Prevention (Teens TAP) at Kansas City and Missouri's Good Samaritan Project, what YELL valued about peer education was that it circumvented school authorities.Footnote ⁶⁷ YELL's student members at the same time leveraged the rules requiring them to attend school, noting that these same rules meant that grown-ups “can't ban students from school. If young people are educated so that they can tell each other the facts, that cuts right through everything else.”Footnote ⁶⁸ They were quick to point out that adult activists depended upon young people; adult activists might distribute condoms outside of a school, but the action's success always relied upon students taking more than they needed and then sharing them inside the school building.Footnote ⁶⁹ Teachers like Fennelly saw a virtue in this necessity and revised their vision of sex education to promote “a peer-education structure.” This approach would “encourage them [students] to take their lives into their own hands and… acknowledge their decision-making autonomy.” Fennelly went on to explain why peer education and condom distribution were associated issues. Condom distribution was “in many ways a symbolic gesture” in which students’ ability to make their own decisions was validated, and this expression of trust should be “backed up by the demand that a student-directed program be instituted by the schools. Kids know what they are doing.”Footnote ⁷⁰

With YELL's second significant action in 1991, the organization sealed its transition from “mostly adult teachers, who were concerned about the lack of AIDS education” to a student-led group.Footnote ⁷¹ During a take-over of Brooklyn borough president Howard Golden's office, “12 people, including 7 high school students, were arrested,” and the students and teachers bonded while chained together in the precinct's waiting room.Footnote ⁷² Fifteen-year-old student Kate Barnhart noted, “That gave us a lot of time to talk and get to know each other.”Footnote ⁷³ Barnhart had been raised in Brooklyn, attended her first gay pride march at six months old, attended the Little Red Schoolhouse in Manhattan and then P.S. 58 in Brooklyn, and interviewed New Jersey governor Thomas Kean about incinerators when she was in middle school.Footnote ⁷⁴ She ran a program called Youth, AIDS, and Activism at Stuyvesant High School.Footnote ⁷⁵ Immediately after the Golden action, Barnhart came “home” to ACT UP, and became YELL's co-coordinator.Footnote ⁷⁶ The other young people organizing YELL included Sarah Kunstler, daughter of lawyer William Kunstler, lead counsel for the Chicago Seven trial in 1969.Footnote ⁷⁷ While some undoubtedly had more experience than others, these young people were not political rookies.

Youths can be used in a variety of ways that are not empowering: they can be mascots, or room-fillers, or even offered up for arrest to deflect from adults. One thing worth considering is how authentically YELL's young people were politicized and the extent of their autonomy. Here we have to rely upon admittedly scattershot evidence. Interviewed in 2004, Barnhart, who had become a case worker at a drop-in center for homeless and at-risk LGBTQ+ youth, recalled that “when I talked to these people from ACT UP, it was the first time I'd ever met adults who were not trying to manipulate me.” This was important, she noted, because with other groups “their purpose wasn't to help us or support us, but to colonize us and try to take over.” She contends that the students in YELL were the ones who “mobilized doctors who worked with adolescents, and teachers and young people and parents and all these people,” rather than it being the case that adults organized student support.Footnote ⁷⁸ It makes sense that ACT UP adults would listen to these young people because the organization's own operating procedures required democratic and nearly leaderless organization, exemplified by the controlled chaos of now-legendary Monday Meetings and the rapid proliferation of affinity groups.

The 1991 Brooklyn action had been a gesture of support for New York City Schools chancellor Joseph Fernandez's new sex education proposal, the Expanded HIV/AIDS Program, which recommended K-12 classroom curriculum with revised lesson plans, professional development, separate educational brochures for students and homeless youth, AIDS education teams at each high school, condom distribution by trained staff, counseling, resource libraries, and coaching to prepare parents to talk with their children.Footnote ⁷⁹ Funded through philanthropic donations and coordinated through the Board of Education and the HIV/AIDS Technical Assistance Project, the Be Active In Self-Education (BASE) grant program would additionally provide 121 grants of $2,500 for schools to “develop and implement peer education programs on HIV and/or other health issues.” In preparation, the district acquired 600,000 condoms for distribution.Footnote ⁸⁰

For YELL members, this was a plan they could rally behind. Student-activists—now truly leading YELL—attended the meetings, learned new technologies to create fliers, and raided their allowances and household change to finance printing. Most of all, they pressured the Board of Education to drop all counseling or parental consent requirements for condoms.Footnote ⁸¹ Among Board members, there was general agreement with all aspects, except for condom distribution, which opponents categorized not as “education” but as a usurping of parents’ rights or as an immoral enterprise. Board member Michael Petrides, who had previously served as a professor and administrator at the College of Staten Island, explained that the unprecedented nature of the condom distribution plan was what gave him pause, resolving that “to be dealing with issues of health on an experiment that could involve a quarter of million children is insane.”Footnote ⁸² He was out-voted, and starting in the fall of 1991 sixteen of the city's 120 high schools distributed condoms (accompanied by a sternly worded pamphlet urging abstinence).Footnote ⁸³

BASE grants, in turn, supported the proliferation of more peer-led sex education projects around the city, ranging from theater productions to murals and student assemblies.Footnote ⁸⁴ BASE grants also lent legitimacy to projects already under construction. Cosponsored by the AIDS Resource Center and the New York City Board of Education, and funded through philanthropic donations, the HIV/AIDS Peer Leadership Project was an after-school program that created original plays, developed bilingual lesson plans, and ran “rap groups” – discussion groups -- in eleven public high schools.Footnote ⁸⁵ Highly motivated teachers such as Thomas Porton initiated programs that did not require district oversight or funds. Starting in 1992, Porton enlisted peer educators from James Monroe High School in the Bronx to work with Montefiore Medical Center's Project Bravo they provided in-class presentations, distributed flyers, and visited HIV/AIDS patients in hospitals.Footnote ⁸⁶ There were enough of these experiments around the city to warrant the AIDS and Adolescents Network of New York's (AANNY) City-Wide Conference on AIDS Education for Youth, co-sponsored with the City of New York in 1992. Participants included the Adolescent Health Center at Mount Sinai Medical Center and the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, who each reminded the AANNY to include “some adolescents in planning the process,” such as those from the T.H.E. Group at the Bronx High School of Science, or to at least bring peer educators to the conference itself.Footnote ⁸⁷ These programs transformed the sex education landscape in New York City, even as the official Board of Education condom distribution program paved the way for similar programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia.Footnote ⁸⁸

Between 1991 and 1993, new appointments shifted the Board of Education's politics, and Board members voted to overturn the policies that treated students as having interests apart from their parents, especially regarding condom distribution. In the course of explaining why the existing policy was dangerous, Board member Petrides declared that “when a child whose parent does not want that child to have a condom, and that child has a condom that fails—and some of them will fail—and that child dies eight years from now, somebody should sue the hell out of this Board.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Newly-appointed replacements for Board members would assure that Chancellor Fernandez's contract was not renewed. And at the end of 1993, in response to a lawsuit brought by Petrides and several Staten Island families, the state of New York suspended the condom distribution plan on the technical grounds that it did not comply with state statutes.Footnote ⁹⁰

As the peer-education organization with the most experience using direct action, YELL took the lead in challenging the increasingly conservative Board of Education. Members began with a high-profile, if unsuccessful, campaign to oppose parental opt-out policies, which they feared would “break student confidentiality, create more bureaucracy, and squander limited public resources” even as “the NYC Board of Education has only 9 full-time Support Service staff to coordinate the health education needs of over 1 million students.”Footnote ⁹¹ In one zap, members distributed 45,000 sex education pamphlets and condoms in New York City.Footnote ⁹²

When the Board of Education started treating HIV/AIDS as just another curriculum area, rather than as an emergency intervention, it began a slowdown that meant irreversible damage in the form of missed opportunities to obtain grants, undereducated students, and possible student deaths.Footnote ⁹³ Teacher training fell behind schedule; a compliance review would soon find that 35 percent of New York City's secondary school educators and 28 percent of elementary school educators who taught health remained untrained in HIV/AIDS instruction, with 30 percent of the elementary classroom teachers who had received training nonetheless feeling undertrained.Footnote ⁹⁴ HIV/AIDS community-based organizations such as AANNY feared that the 1987–1988 curriculum was still used in many schools, despite the fact that best practices had shifted.Footnote ⁹⁵ By October 1993, the Board of Education's HIV/AIDS Advisory Council was “pissed off about the process,” frustrated that grants for in-school, peer-led programs had not been renewed because of Board foot-dragging, discouraged by the fact that “there's not enough teacher training happening,” and annoyed that “schools are saying they don't know where to go to get AIDS education.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The Advisory Council even found fault with its own composition, noting that its 1994 membership initially included “no young people, no gay men, and no one with the HIV/AIDS virus.” When three nonvoting student representatives were added as a compromise gesture, their words were not recorded as part of the HIV/AIDS Advisory Council's minutes.Footnote ⁹⁷ Seemingly, the people with the greatest risk and fear of HIV/AIDS were the ones with the least ability to influence Board of Education politics from within that institution.

YELL's ensuing direct actions not only expressed members’ anger but also created opportunities for people within municipal governance to express their support, as when Advisory Council member Erica Zurer campaigned to appoint Sarah Kunstler as a student representative. Perhaps Kunstler made an impression when YELL interrupted the Advisory Council's Feb 14, 1994, meeting to distribute valentines, temporarily stopping a discussion about abstinence-based education.Footnote ⁹⁸ As a second example, consider a feature in YELL's second zine, which depicted the aftermath of a disruptive Board of Education protest. An article featured a photo of “K” with her likewise grinning arresting officer. A scribbled annotation on the side explained that K and the officer bought the attending student activists pizza for dinner; many police offers were hostile to HIV/AIDS activists, but this particular officer became an ally.Footnote ⁹⁹ Everyone had a part to play in assuring that protests dramatized the stakes of HIV/AIDS education and that word of these events made the newspaper.

By the mid-1990s, peer-led sex education was an established strategy within HIV/AIDS educational institutions, both within and outside of schools. This was in part because students did not wait for permission and in part because what the Board of Education mandated was obviously inadequate. Most of all, endorsement of peer-led sex education, initially a necessity, had become a means for adults to communicate a whole set of values regarding sexuality, social hierarchy, and trust. Essentially, the organizations committed to a peer-led sex education strategy were also the organizations that offered multi-day or multi-week sex education programs, included information about condom use, distributed condoms, and emphasized communication and decision-making skills.

These were the organizations that would define “comprehensive” sex education as the mainstream against which “abstinence-only” educators rebelled, and their programs would come into closer and closer communication with each other. For example, when Barnhart, John Won, and Elliott Silverman started the Coalition of Peer Educators (COPE) in 1993, the new organization would unite YELL with CASES (Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services) Peer Education Program, the New York Peer AIDS Education Coalition, Youth Fighting for Change, and S.T.A.R (Serving Teens Through Arts Resources) Theater. Peer-led sex education was also being used by Beat HIV, Queens Teen Pregnancy Network, Morrisania Health Center, Hetrick-Martin Institute, Greenwich Village Youth Council, and ASPIRA.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By the time peer-led sex education was prevailing in New York City, the rest of the country had begun to habitually reference New York's example when developing their own responses to HIV/AIDS. YELL groups developed in San Francisco, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Milwaukee.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Activist Jonathan Berger, describing his pre-ACT UP life, recalled that ‘‘when I was in eighth grade, I had a little bit of the teen angst thing going on.” In YELL, he saw a model of what young people really could accomplish and had this vision validated: “It should be young people having the original idea, having complete control, but adults being there to assist them.”Footnote ¹⁰² Peer-led sex education was a national phenomenon, and if adults still often coordinated these programs, the idea that students had some consulting or educational role in them was now understood as a best practice.