Civil-rights groups yesterday urged the Department of Health and the Ministry of Education to safeguard the right of HIV-positive students to attend school.
The Taiwan Environmental Protection Union and Persons with HIV/AIDS Rights Advocacy Association of Taiwan held a conference to remind people of a case five years ago where a teenager with HIV gave up his place at Kaohsiung Hospitality College because the school demanded all new students take an HIV test.
Association secretary-general Ivory Lin (
"The pre-enrollment health screening required of students could become a problem for the increasing number of students with HIV," Lin said.
The union's secretary-general, Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳), said the case highlighted the importance of a HIV-friendly school system.
Kaohsiung Hospitality College president Jimmy Jung (容繼業) told reporters at the news conference that the school had made a lot of improvements in the past five years, including canceling the regulation requiring that students with statutory contagious illnesses drop out until they fully recover.
Students are no longer obliged to take an HIV-screening test before enrollment, he said.
He said the school agrees "students' rights to be educated should be the priority."
Center for Disease Control division director Yang Shih-yan (楊世仰) said schooling can provide students with HIV with the professional skills needed to make a living.
"If everyone discriminates against people with HIV, none of them will be courageous enough to face the illness," he said.
Fu Hsing-min (
But he said more efforts needed to be made in educating parents, since they usually have a major influence on the policies of their children's schools.
Vocational schools should also teach HIV-positive students strict procedures to follow at work to prevent any risk of transmission of the disease, he said.
Chairman of the National Teachers' Association's Special Education School Committee, Lily Shieh (謝曼莉), criticized the efforts of school officials and the government to promote AIDS prevention and education, saying it was nothing but "posters and handouts."
"The promotions do not address the functions of different environments in the school," Shieh said. "Procedures to take care of these students on different school occasions should be listed in detail."
Teachers should be told what to do if an HIV-positive student has an accident, including such details as class management or who the teacher should call for help.
She suggested that schools provide support to HIV-positive students by offering them individual projects that involve discussions between the students' teachers, parents and school administrators.
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