HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS WOULD DECIMATE SCHOOL-BASED HIV PREVENTION FUNDING

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that slashed the budget of the CDC Division of Adolescent School Health (DASH), eliminating 25 percent of the Division's funding. In previous years, DASH has received $40 million in funding for coordinated school-based sexual health promotion efforts including pregnancy, HIV, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention education.

If this appropriations bill is signed into law, $10 million in HIV funds used to help states and large urban school districts plan, carry out, and evaluate youth HIV prevention programs will be lost. This, at a time when 25 percent of all new HIV infections are among young people.

DASH has effectively worked with schools across the country to build the infrastructure necessary to provide a coordinated approach to school health education. This innovative infrastructure provides an integrated mechanism through which youth receive a broad array of health education, including teen pregnancy, HIV and other STD prevention education.

"It is unconscionable that Congress would cut funding for the CDC Division of Adolescent School Health while at the same time steering funds towards ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage programs," said Debra Hauser, Executive Vice President of Advocates for Youth. "Now more than ever, we should be funding programs like DASH that have a proven history of actually keeping teens safe, rather than wasting money on ideologically-driven programs that specifically withhold information about HIV prevention in the era of HIV and AIDS."

The Obama administration's historic National HIV/AIDS Strategy shines a spotlight on the central role played by poverty and health care disparities in the current HIV epidemic — factors that disproportionately impact the nation's largest urban school districts. It is particularly troubling that many of the DASH funds at risk of being eliminated go to large urban school districts comprised primarily of youth of color, in communities with high HIV and AIDS case rates and high levels of poverty.

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Advocates for Youth is a national organization that promotes programs and advocates for policies to ensure young people have the information and services to make informed and responsible decisions about their reproductive and sexual health.