GLENDALE / BURBANK : Incident Prompts AIDS Seminars : Education: Glendale school district employees taking classes in wake of pin-pricking experiment involving 10 sixth-graders.

GLENDALE — Responding to a recent health scare stemming from an elementary classroom science experiment, the Glendale Unified School District has begun a series of seminars for all employees to educate them about the risk of AIDS and other diseases when handling blood.

The two-hour seminars, which began Wednesday with a session for administrators and principals and will continue through next Friday, provide training in the prevention of spreading blood-borne diseases.

The seminars were instituted in response to a number of complaints from parents over a June 8 classroom experiment in which 10 sixth-graders at Mark Keppel Elementary School pricked their fingers with shared pins to view drops of their blood under a microscope.

“It brought to light some changes that needed to be made,” said school board member Pam Ellis, a vocal proponent of increasing AIDS education for students and staff.

“Before, every new teacher coming into the district received a memo about the risks associated with handling blood, but that was not adequate. This is much more intensive,” said Ellis, who attended the first seminar.

The district’s previous approach to employee AIDS education was to follow Cal/OSHA guidelines, distributing information on AIDS and other blood-borne diseases to teachers in annually published bulletins. But officials say the new program is more comprehensive and designed to ensure employees are informed of the latest AIDS information.

All employees, from teachers and administrators to custodians and part-time workers, are to attend the seminars, which include a video presentation and lecture approved by Los Angeles County health officials.

After the sessions, all employees must sign a form acknowledging they have received AIDS prevention training. All employees will receive updated information each year, and new employees hired mid-year will receive individual AIDS training from district nurses, officials said.

“This isn’t just for teachers. It’s for maintenance workers and all employees, because if someone gets injured and there happens to be live blood, you have to know how to handle it carefully and properly or you risk being exposed to something,” said Principal Gordon Morse of Keppel School, who also attended the first seminar.

Although the pin-pricking experiment was a violation of the district’s previous guidelines for handling blood, the supervising teacher reportedly was unaware of the health risks in sharing needles and of a policy that allows only human blood obtained from commercial laboratories to be used in class experiments.

District officials said the experiment was done without the consent or knowledge of school officials. It came to light only several weeks later when a student told a parent, who became alarmed and called the school. All the students involved were tested for AIDS and hepatitis B and C at a local hospital, and all the results proved negative. District officials said the teacher was reprimanded.