By The Numbers

A recent poll asking 598 adults in North Carolina if children with AIDS should be allowed to attend school with other children showed that 64 percent believe they should be allowed to attend school, 23 percent say they should not, and 13 percent have no opinion.
The poll was sponsored by the School of Journalism and the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Of the adults with a college education, 68 percent said they would allow it, while 54 percent of adults without a high school diploma said they would allow it.
Kathy Kerr, a health educator with the AIDS Control Program of the North Carolina Division of Health Services said it is encouraging that more than half of the adults said they would allow children with AIDS to attend classes with other children. “I think a few years ago in this epidemic there was a lot more AIDS hysteria and probably a lot more people said they wouldn’t let AIDS children attend school with other children,” she said.
“More and more people are recognizing that AIDS is not transmitted casually,” Kerr said. “You certainly don’t get AIDS by sitting next to someone in class.”
The margin of error in this poll is 4 percentage points, meaning that in 19 of 20 samples, the results would vary by no more than 4 percent from what would have been obtained if every telephone in North Carolina had been dialed.
Telephone numbers dialed were chosen by a random computer process by KPC Research, which is the market research arm of Knight Publishing Co., in Charlotte.