AIDS Education Project Report by Jimmy Paulk

by Jimmy Paulk

AIDS Education Project Report Buckhead Rotary has participated in this project for a number of years. It's a joint effort with AID Atlanta, with the Rotary Foundation for Fighting AIDS and the District both providing organizational assistance. We go to middle and high school audiences, taking with us staff members from AID Atlanta as well as young people who are HIV-positive and who have been carefully trained to make a presentation to youth groups. The presentations of these volunteers are the heart of the assembly program. They talk about the impact of living with AIDS and prove to the audience that AIDS is real, that it happens to real people like them, and they talk about how to keep from getting HIV.

The club's job is to contact the appropriate people at each school (usually the principal or the head of the health education dept), and get them to let us schedule a presentation. Then one of our members goes with the team and introduces them to the students. For a variety of reasons, our club has had responsibility for all of Atlanta Public Schools. However, the number of schools we have actually managed to schedule and visit has been fairly low, ranging from a high of 7 schools two years ago to 3 schools last year.

In order to improve these numbers, we are doing several things:

• Meeting with APS administrators early, before the school year, and again during the year, to plan and to solidify their support for the program

• Attending the workshop that all health education teachers attend before the school year begins, making a presentation to them and getting them to sign up with possible dates, so that we can contact them right away, getting started early and increasing awareness of the project

• Recruiting a team of Rotarians to help in contacting the teachers or principals. After a bit of training, each Rotarian will be responsible for trying to set up a list of schools, perhaps as few as 5 apiece

• Enlisting several Rotarians to go to the schools to introduce the programs

• In addition, inviting other members of the club, including members of the board, to come along at presentations, so they can see what we're doing. This will build support and good will for the project, and our members will be impressed with what we're doing

• In addition, we have met with AID Atlanta about offering a more flexible program to the schools, and the result is that we are now giving the schools the option of: (1) the traditional program, which focuses on a personal message about how the volunteer became infected and how to avoid becoming HIV positive; (2) for situations where a significant number of students and their parents are HIV positive, the program can be modified to include more information about "living with HIV;" and (3) if a school prefers, we can offer a program that includes more information about how to become a volunteer and get involved in AIDS prevention in their school or in the larger community.

Last Thursday was the date of the workshop for APS health educators. I was able to recruit a team from AID Atlanta, including the two key leaders connected with this project and one of our best volunteers, to come along. We explained the process, gave them a mini-program like the one we give in the schools, answered questions, and passed around sign-up sheets. We met separately with the high school teachers and the middle school teachers. The presentations went extremely well, with great questions and interest shown by the teachers. Surprisingly, only five or six of the 80 or so attendees at the two sessions (about 40 in the middle school group and 40 in the high school group) indicated an awareness of this program. 26 different schools signed for us to contact them, and some of these were signing up for multiple presentations. We also distributed literature to the teachers. We all considered this to be an amazing result and a great start for the project. I should caution you all that these schools have not yet been scheduled, but we will follow up with each of them as soon as we can get organized to do so.

At the same meeting, I met with the three key administrators in APS who head up the health education efforts. All expressed total support for the project and said they would follow this up with communications to their teachers assuring them that this project is important and is fully approved for use in their schools. They also promised to invite me and the AID Atlanta people to attend their key planning session later in the year, so that we could continue to make our case to the key players at APS.

Our club has contributed $3000 to AID Atlanta in support of this project, which will be used to pay for the gratuity we pay to the volunteers when they participate in one of our presentations and to offset the direct costs to AID Atlanta.

Best,

Jimmy Paulk

Project Chairman