Teacher’s Exile by AIDS Looms as Test of Law

‘I don’t feel this is a gay issue. It’s really a human rights issue.’

--Vincent Chalk

His office for now is a sparsely furnished cubicle at the Orange County Department of Education in Costa Mesa.

And he has a temporary assignment: to study how students with serious hearing impairments adjust in high school.

But Vincent Chalk has some tight restrictions on how he does that study. If he administers any tests, “the test would have to be done by someone else with the students because I can’t be with them,” the 42-year-old special education teacher explained.

And if he needs student records, someone else will have to pick them up from his old school, University High School in Irvine, because Chalk is not allowed on campus.

It is frustrating and depressing, Chalk said. “Everything has to be done over the phone, through other people. . . . And my major interest is in teaching; it’s not in paper work.”

Described by teachers and administrators as a caring teacher who excels at communicating with deaf children, Chalk was transferred out of his classroom in August after county education officials discovered he had AIDS.

Suing to Get Job Back

But Chalk resisted. Raised as a Mormon in a small Kansas town, Chalk learned as a child to stand up for his beliefs. Now, insisting that he has fully recovered from a bout of pneumonia last winter, he is suing to get his job back.

The legal battle is shaping up as a test case over the civil rights of a teacher and the communicability of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. For on Sept. 9 a federal judge denied Chalk’s request for a preliminary injunction to return him to teaching.

“If I put the fellow back in the classroom and I’m wrong, it could be a catastrophe,” U.S. District Court Judge William P. Gray ruled, adding, “We simply don’t know enough about AIDS to be absolutely certain” that children in Chalk’s classroom would not risk infection.

Across the country--in Mansfield, Ohio, this August and Prince William County, Va., last February--several teachers have been transferred out of the classroom because they had AIDS or tested positive for the AIDS virus. (The deadly virus, which attacks a person’s immune system, has resulted in 326 deaths in Orange County and 24,070 in the nation.)

But Chalk is believed to be the first teacher with AIDS to pursue a challenge in federal court. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Chalk on Friday asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to reinstate him.

His lawyer, Marjorie Rushforth, has said a victory in the federal courts would establish for the first time that AIDS victims are covered by the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which forbids discrimination against people with handicaps by agencies that receive federal funds.

Meanwhile, Gray’s ruling has broken step with previous federal court orders, which have allowed children exposed to the AIDS virus back into the classroom, attorneys for the county Department of Education said.

It also shocked teachers and administrators in the department’s close-knit program for the hearing-impaired at University High and Venado Middle School in Irvine, who had believed Chalk would be quickly returned to teaching.

“Students are allowed in the classroom with AIDS. He should be in class,” said Patti Headland-Wauson, an interpreter who has worked alongside Chalk for seven years and who started a defense fund for her friend.

Students Surprised

News of the ruling also surprised Chalk’s students and their parents, some of whom considered Chalk, a handsome man, “the Tom Selleck” of the program.

Some had reservations about a teacher with AIDS returning to class. “If they can just give me a written guarantee. . . , “ Carol Corlew said at a recent parents’ meeting on AIDS education.

Other parents worried that Chalk’s public acknowledgement of his homosexuality would be a problem for their children, said Carol Dickson Gold, president of last year’s parent group for the 90 hearing-impaired children.

“But most of the parents want Vince to come back,” Gold said.

Chalk is fluent in three systems of sign language: Signed English, Signed Exact English and American Sign Language, the language of the deaf that is said to be as complex as Chinese. He enabled hearing-impaired children who were mixed into classes with hearing youngsters to keep up, Gold and several other parents said. Such mixed classes are known as mainstreamed classes.

Added Gold: “When I told my daughter the judge decided that Vince shouldn’t go back to the classroom, she was really saddened because he’s such a good teacher. She said, ‘He had the time for us. . . .’ When I have trouble in a mainstreamed class, he’s the bridge.”

Alarmed Educators

Gray’s ruling also has alarmed county AIDS educators who believe it has added to fears and confusion about the disease. “Right now, what it’s saying is, ‘Gee, there could be a possibility of casual transmission, so we don’t want this man around our children,’ even though the overwhelming evidence is that casual transmission doesn’t cause AIDS,” said Nancy Radyclyffe, executive director of the AIDS Response Program in Garden Grove.

Meanwhile, Chalk, a quiet-spoken man with a wry sense of humor, says he is uncomfortable with his sudden fame.

“I’m not a unique guy. I’m just a regular person,” he said softly in an interview last week. But early on, he learned to stand up for himself, Chalk said. “I don’t feel this is a gay issue. It’s really a human rights issue. It wouldn’t matter if I were a heterosexual teacher who happened to have AIDS. . . . I just enjoy teaching, and I feel like accepting a desk job would be accepting a violation of my rights.”

Chalk’s earlier battles were simpler ones. Raised in the small farming town of Lewis, Kan., (pop. 551), he was the second of three children. His father was the town barber and mail carrier. His mother was a homemaker and later a secretary for a local manufacturing firm. And Chalk, his two sisters and his parents were the only Mormons in town.

Teased on Religion

As a high school student, Chalk’s 15 classmates often teased him about his religion, trying to persuade him to drink or smoke. “It would have been easier to do it, but it was something we didn’t do,” Chalk said. Amid strong pressure from his peers, “my mother taught me the values of standing up for what I believe.”

Chalk is no longer a Mormon. In his 20s, as he struggled with his emerging homosexuality and with a religion that expressly forbade that life style, “I felt it was hypocritical to express both Mormonism and my homosexuality. One of them had to go,” Chalk said.

But his Mormon background did lead him to a career in teaching hearing-impaired children. At 19, while serving on a church mission in the Pacific Northwest, Chalk worked with a family in which the parents were deaf. And as he preached to them and later baptized them in his faith, he grew fascinated by their language.

“I was intrigued by the communication, their unique sense of humor, the animation involved, their facial expressions,” he recalled. “It was almost like working with mimes.”

At the end of the mission, Chalk continued his schooling at Brigham Young University in Utah. But instead of completing a major in music, he switched to psychology, graduating in 1968.

Two years later, after working a variety of jobs in San Francisco, Chalk decided to become a teacher. He entered a credential program at California State University in San Bernardino and at the same time found a counseling job in nearby Riverside, at the California School for the Deaf.

The job was more like that of a glorified dorm parent, Chalk recalled. Working weekends in the boys’ dorm, it was a chance to learn more sign language--but you had to be careful, he said.

“They would show me signs and tell me they meant one thing when they meant another. They would make a sign like it was an educational sign and it would turn out to be a dirty word. The hearing-impaired are, for the most part, real jokers, real teasers,” Chalk said.

Chalk got his teaching credential in 1970, earned a master’s degree in special education from California State University, Northridge, in 1971, and then spent several years teaching at the School for the Deaf and Riverside City College’s hearing-impaired program.

Got Along With All

Warren Fauth, a former principal of the School for the Deaf, remembered Chalk as a good history teacher who got along well with everyone--students, teachers, even the janitors. Fauth also recalled Chalk’s facility with sign language. “It was like a second language to him,” Fauth said, and that was unusual; most of the teachers had been raised in families in which someone was deaf.

Communicating with deaf people often is like entering a separate world, parents and administrators in Orange County’s hearing-impaired program said. But Chalk was at home. “He’s very into the deaf culture,” said Larry Belkin, director of special programs for the county education department.

Chalk joined Orange County’s program in 1980, working as a history teacher and last year as the “mainstream resource teacher” at Venado middle school. In that job, he was supposed to act as a liaison for students who were mixed in classes with hearing children, making sure they didn’t fall behind. It is a demanding job, interpreter Headland-Wauson said. “These children may be one or two years below grade level because of their deafness, and you have to be able to recognize that,” she said. She said Chalk used body language, fluent signing and a warm sense of humor to get complex ideas across.

“I’ve watched him communicate with students in math or history. . . . One day they were in a panic. And the next day they understood,” Headland-Wauson said.

Parent Paula Wirth Morrow said her hearing-impaired daughter, Sunshine, was struggling in a regular social studies class when Chalk intervened. He worked with her, explaining words like peninsula and earthquake, sometimes translating 40 words on a single page, Morrow said. With Chalk’s help last fall, Sunshine earned a C+ in the class.

But in February, after Chalk was hospitalized for pneumocystis--a common infection in AIDS patients--Sunshine dropped out of social studies “because nobody could work with her like he did,” Morrow said.

“He helped me look up what the words were,” 12-year-old Sunshine said. “And he would tell me (that) I can do it, that I can do it. . . . We miss him,” she said. “Maybe if the kids went to court with him, they could ask the judge to let him come back.”

Enjoys Teaching

Chalk said he would probably enjoy teaching hearing youngsters, but he has never really had the chance. He just enjoys teaching hearing-impaired kids. “They really enjoy being mentally jousted with,” he said.

Still, “you have to be loose--relaxed and flexible in your teaching style,” Chalk said. “You may be teaching science and something comes up and maybe you drop the lesson plan. . . .

“Maybe you are talking about the stages of a butterfly and something happens and it becomes a personal, human thing, about the stage of our lives as human beings. And you let go the butterfly and pick up talking about childhood and adolescence. It might lend itself to more learning--to teach where they are.”

As he tries to work now from the office or his Long Beach home, Chalk said he misses the students and his 40 colleagues from the program. He described them as “my family” and for a moment, as he remembered them, his eyes filled with tears.

Last year, when some of them visited him at the hospital, he told them he had AIDS. “I was real honest. It was something I thought my family should know,” Chalk said.

He was ill most of last winter, dropping from 160 pounds to 130 in a matter of weeks. But by spring, his health had improved. He began gaining weight and worked out of a depression.

By June, both Chalk’s personal physician and county epidemiologist Dr. Thomas Prendergast ruled that he was well enough to resume teaching. But, with only a few weeks of the school year remaining, Chalk elected not to interrupt a substitute teacher and return, Rushforth, his attorney, said.

Instead, Chalk made plans to resume teaching in September. But on Aug. 5, about a month before classes would begin, Chalk was asked to meet his principal, a deputy superintendent and the Department of Education attorney, Rushforth said. “They asked, ‘Are you prepared for ostracism by the staff? Are you prepared for picketing and boycotting?’ ” she recounted. “His answer was, ‘Yes, I’m prepared for that if it happens. I’m a teacher. I want to teach my students.’ ”

Chalk and the county Department of Education will settle the issue in court. “I miss my friends, I miss the kids, but I don’t think it’ll be long before I’ll be back with them. I just have to stay healthy enough to fight it,” Chalk said.