"Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS out:" Anti-Aids Activism and the Legacy of Community Control in Queens, New York‪.‬

On September 9, 1985, the first day of classes in the New York City public school system, James Albano, age 8, found himself inside a coffin instead of a classroom. As James lay in the coffin, his mother wheeled him around a picket line set up outside P.S. 63, a grade school in South Ozone Park, New York, a neighborhood in southern Queens. When asked by a local reporter what he made of his current circumstances, James replied, "'I don't know much about AIDS. I know it's a disease. I really know that I'm sort of scared of going to school.'" (1) James, his coffin, and the parents who used them both as a form of street theater, were just a few of the characters in a much larger drama organized by Queens activists to fight New York City's Board of Education policy allowing children with AIDS to attend public schools. (2) By the time this episode in local organizing was over, the participants would also include two community school boards, municipal officials, and public health practitioners, all of whom fought over where children with AIDS should be educated. James was one of over eleven thousand New York City public school students who missed the first day of school in school. His parents kept him home to shield him from exposure to a medical condition they feared but knew little about. Hundreds of other parents and children marched outside of eight Queens schools on September 9, holding signs that read "Save Our Kids, Keep AIDS Out" and "Teacher's Aides, Yes; Student AIDS, no." The protesting families demanded that the New York City Board of Education reconsider its recent decision to admit one unnamed student with AIDS to an undisclosed public school as part of its newly instituted policy to allow most children with AIDS to attend public schools following case-by-case reviews by a panel of experts. (3)