Hospital classroom helps give kids a healthy education
At first glance, the room of teacher Patti Schumacher resembles your everyday classroom.
Textbooks line the shelves, boxes containing school supplies sit against the walls and small tables and chairs dot the floor space.
But take a peek into the hallway and you won’t see students opening lockers or walking on their way to class. Instead, you’ll see patients passing by on gurneys and nurses dressed in hospital scrubs carrying medical charts.
That’s because Schumacher’s room doesn’t sit on a leafy campus but inside the heart of the Children’s Hospital of Illinois at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, just a stone’s throw away from the hospital’s pediatric floor. And her students don’t come from the surrounding neighborhoods but from various hospital floors. Serving as St. Francis’ schoolteacher, Schumacher, a teacher at District 150 for the past 34 years, brings the classroom to her students when they can’t head back to school.
Haley Carter from Bloomington is one of Schumacher’s students. Suffering from a form of bone cancer, Carter undergoes chemotherapy and physical therapy at the Children’s Hospital and is entering the fifth grade. Last year, because of her illness and treatments, she missed two-thirds of her fourth grade year at Grove Elementary School.
Her mother, Cathe Carter, said having the school just down the hall from Haley’s room is “wonderful.” Besides keeping her daughter up-to-date with schoolwork, the program can offer a welcome respite from the monotony of hospital life.
Haley Carter said she would rather be at Grove but concedes her time at the hospital’s school is well spent, too.
“I kind of like going to my regular school because all my friends are there and stuff,” the 10-year-old said. “But this is also nice, too.”
Convincing even the healthy students to do their homework can be an uphill battle. So when students are in pain, ill or stressed from the hospital, Schumacher said she takes that background noise into account when teaching.
“You have to keep the school in perspective,” she said, seated in her classroom. “We try to make adaptations as needed so as not to overwhelm them with the work.”
For example, one of Schumacher’s students, Kendrick Young, has sickle cell anemia, an inherited blood disorder that causes intense leg cramps. He takes medicine to numb his pain, but it also leaves him feeling woozy and tired.
“When I’m in the hospital, I’m in pain and I’m not really wanting to think about school or school work,” the 18-year-old Richwoods senior said. “Most of the days I just ride out the pain. There’s nothing else I can really do.”
Schumacher said for those situations, she’ll let the student set the pace, because stressing the pupil would only compound their problems.
During a normal work day, Schumacher meets with school-age patients, contacts their school to gather their homework and lesson plans and keeps the child on track as much as possible. Schumacher said she loves her work but admitted its challenges are a bit different from your normal classroom.
“There is absolutely no routine here,” she said of her nontraditional teaching job. “It’s almost impossible to plan your day.”
She and a group of volunteers have taught next to hospital beds while donning gloves, gowns and masks and to students in for routine tests or life-saving therapies. Often, the materials she takes to her students - calculators, rules, pens and laptops - have to be sterilized.
And in recent years, the job has become busier, too. Four years ago, teachers would usually serve about four to six students daily. Now, that number is roughly 10 to 15.
One reason for the increase is because teachers now help out at an eating disorder clinic in East Peoria. In fact, the program recently hired on a new part-time teacher to help in the afternoons.
Frank Radosevich II can be reached at (309) 686-3142 or fradosevich@pjstar.com.
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