By the beginning of December, New York City public schools will roll out a new curriculum aimed at teaching students how to avoid the virus that causes AIDS.

While details are still unavailable, advocates who advised the city say the new curriculum includes more positive language around condom use, updates statistics, and makes it clear that that HIV is not only a “gay white man’s disease.”

Critics say teachers have been relying on a decade-old HIV-prevention curriculum that is outdated and incorrect.

Some information included in the old 300-plus-page curriculum, written in the late 1980s and implemented in schools in 1991, promotes unsafe contraception practices, the program director for Love Heals, an organization that teaches in city schools, Claire Simon, said.

While nonoxynol-9 was used as a spermicide on most condoms in the 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have since found that it causes irritation in the vaginal wall, which makes women more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. But the current curriculum still says it’s okay to use, Ms. Simon, said.

She said abstinence is still a major component of what will be taught, but that there will be “more positive language around condom use.”

It is still unclear what that will mean, but the state chairman of the Conservative Party, Michael Long, said condom use should not be taught at all in public schools.

“To go down this road is only looking for more trouble than we need,” he said. “As a father of nine, I certainly would object if a teacher or a school was telling my children, ‘If in fact you’re going to have sex, this is what you use.’ In my home, you were taught not to have premarital sex.”

The update also focuses on the changing population affected by the disease.

“In the curriculum it never said that HIV was a gay white man’s disease, but when you talk about the history of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, the population becoming infected is not that same that is today,” Ms. Simon said.

Of the more than 1,700 adults in the city between the ages of 17 and 21 are currently living with HIV or AIDS, the majority are blacks and Latinos, according to Department of Health and Mental Hygiene statistics provided by the New York AIDS Coalition. Unlike the epidemic among adults, the disease affects both genders equally among young adults.

State law requires public schools to teach HIV/AIDS education to all students. The city requires that in seventh through 12th grades, six lessons be taught each year. In earlier grades, five lessons a year are supposed to be taught.

A study released two years ago by Assemblyman Scott Stringer’s office found that the majority of school districts violated the mandate.

A city task force has been meeting for at least two years to complete the line-by-line factual revision. Advocates involved with the project said they read a draft over the summer and were under the impression it was supposed to be delivered by September. Unable to pin the department down on a release date, advocates planned a press conference on Friday that was canceled because of the rain. They said that New York City youth “could not afford to wait another day” for HIV/AIDS education.

“We have been given three different projected dates for when the curriculum will be implemented, and three times now, the city has failed to make it happen,” the executive director of the New York AIDS Coalition, Joe Pressley, said in a written statement.

“How many more times do we need to ask you, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein, when you’ll start complying with state and city mandates? How many more times do we have to ask you where HIV education stands on your priority list?” he said. The Department of Education told The New York Sun that it planned to make the curriculum available by December 1.

“The updated curriculum is being rolled out in all schools this fall as promised. In fact every school will have it by World AIDS day, which is December 1,”a department spokeswoman, Kelly Devers, said. “Providing HIV prevention information is a critical health education activity in our schools, and we have been working closely with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as well a students, parents, and community members to ensure that our students learn from an accurate and up to date curriculum.”

The director of state and local affairs for the New York AIDS Coalition, Christina Kazanas, who said she learned about the December deadline from the Sun, said she hoped the city was committed to that date.

“The Department of Education has a very clearly delineated role to pay in stopping this public health crisis,” Ms. Kazanas said. “They have 1.1 million students who for all intents and purposes are a captive audience, and they’re not taking advantage of that? That’s criminal.”