Visiting Navajo Children Barred From L.A. School : Health: Officials feared students would be exposed to deadly illness. Medical authorities say they overreacted.

For the 27 Navajo third-graders from the little town of Chinle, Ariz., Tuesday was to have been a day of big-city excitement.

After raising $10,000 from carwashes and candy sales on their remote, mesa-dotted reservation, the children had flown to Los Angeles on Friday to visit their pen pals at a private Jewish school in Northridge. Together, the youngsters were to perform Navajo and Jewish dances, sing songs and have lunch Tuesday.

But before the Navajo children could leave their Van Nuys hotel Tuesday morning, they got a call: They were being barred from the Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School because its administrators feared the visitors might be carrying the mysterious, flu-like disease that has killed 12 people on the vast, four-state reservation where they live. “There is an outbreak in Chinle; we decided it’s best not to expose the children because we just really don’t know right now,” Heschel principal Shirley Levine said. “It’s a very disappointing and traumatic thing.”

But public health authorities in New Mexico, Arizona and California said the Heschel school overreacted.

Charlietta Bowman, 9, a third-grader at the Chinle Primary School, agreed. “Because we’re from Arizona, they think we’re sick. But we’re not sick. They didn’t even want us to come near their school,” she said as she and her rambunctious schoolmates awaited a flight home at Los Angeles International Airport on Tuesday evening.

“I’m sad. I waited all this long to see my pen pal. I wanted to see her school and her classroom.”

As of Tuesday, there were 19 confirmed cases of the illness, called unknown respiratory distress syndrome, or URDS. Authorities say those who contract it develop flu-like symptoms first, and then suffocating levels of lung fluids. But the health officials said the disease probably is not very contagious, if at all, since health workers and relatives of victims have not contracted it.

There are another 12 possible cases for which authorities do not have enough evidence yet to make a diagnosis of the syndrome. All but one of the cases have been linked to the 24,000-square-mile Navajo Reservation, which sprawls across the “four corners” area of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.

Arizona public health and school authorities said there have been no cases of the disease in the Chinle area. They noted that the Navajo children were healthy and that, in any event, the Jewish children had visited the reservation last month. Also, health authorities said, no quarantine or travel restrictions have been imposed on reservation residents.

“It’s an arbitrary decision. It has no public health merit whatsoever,” Dr. George Gellert, Arizona’s chief epidemiologist, said of the Heschel school decision. He said that only six cases of the illness have been reported in Arizona, none of them in the Chinle area.

“We’re talking about a small, isolated outbreak of disease. I don’t see any basis to exclude people from traveling who are healthy, who have no symptoms,” Gellert said.

Dr. Gary Simpson, chief of the infectious disease unit of the New Mexico Department of Health, said there is “no evidence of direct person-to-person transmission and no evidence of the disease in children of that age.”

He called the withdrawn invitation to the Indian children “a tragedy that should never have happened.”

Dr. Laurene Mascola, chief of Los Angeles County’s acute communicable disease control department, agreed, saying: “Sounds sad. Poor kids. They probably have less risk for disease than a lot of people walking around Los Angeles County.

“Sure, it may be prudent, but . . . I don’t think people need to panic yet. Just because you’re from (the reservation) doesn’t mean you’re a plague (carrier),” she said.

Mascola added that Heschel school officials should have consulted public health authorities before turning away the Navajo children.

But Levine, Heschel’s principal, said she tried without success to call a variety of state and federal disease experts over the holiday weekend. She said she placed calls to Los Angeles health officials, the New Mexico Department of Health, disease experts at the University of New Mexico and the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

She was unable to reach anyone, she said, and with no reliable expert information, was forced to make the decision herself.

“We are not panicking,” Levine said. “It is an unknown, mysterious disease; until we know more about it, I can’t risk the safety of children. There are so many things out there now, unknown viruses and things like that, we need to be intelligent about it.”

“I just want people to know it wasn’t done in a cavalier way,” Levine said.

Her decision, however, produced tears among children from both schools and angered some Navajo teachers and school officials.

“Some cultural exchange,” said Cheryle Dalton, a third-grade teacher at the Chinle Primary School who was escorting the Navajo children.

“Our children are very upset. They were really looking forward to meeting their pen pals. . . . We’ve been fund raising all year. We were not allowed to come last year because of the riots. We finally made it out here and now this.”

“They are having a hard time trying to understand,” Dalton added. “We didn’t tell them exactly what it is, although some of the kids know.”

The incident marred a decade-long tradition between the two schools of reciprocal letters and visits by third graders--a cultural exchange designed to encourage understanding and break down stereotypes between children of very different cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Many Heschel children are the offspring of lawyers, judges and other well-paid professionals, according to an administrator at the school. Their parents pay more than $8,100 in tuition annually; 95% of the students go on to college.

By contrast, the Navajo children are the sons and daughters of sheep herders, rodeo riders and small-scale cattle ranchers living in and around Chinle, a town of 5,000 in the rural high desert of northeastern Arizona.

Their average family income is less than $12,000 a year and most live in homes with no electricity or running water, said Dennis O’Connell, assistant principal at the Chinle Primary School. Sixty-five percent of the residents of the reservation are unemployed.

Students from both schools look forward to the annual exchange trips. On a trip to the reservation three years ago, for example, the Northridge students were shown how to weave, prepare corn meal and dance an Indian two-step. The Heschel students sang and danced in a presentation explaining Rosh Hashanah, the Hebrew New Year.

Dalton said Navajo school officials had to scramble Tuesday to come up with last-minute activities after their students were kept away from the Heschel school.

The five-day visit wasn’t a total loss for the Navajo children. Between Friday and Tuesday, they managed to visit Disneyland, Universal Studios and Sea World in San Diego. They were clearly upset, though, at not having seen their pen pals.

But Susan Parker, the mother of a third-grade boy at Heschel, said she agreed with Levine’s decision, even though it badly upset her son.

“My son is an insulin-dependent diabetic and we have a history of auto-immune disease in the family,” she said. “I’m happy only in the sense that as a parent, it was a dilemma. We really looked forward to this.

“I support the decision, without having any information on it. It was playing it safe and protecting the health of the children at the school. It made it easy for us that she made the decision,” Parker said.

Heschel officials said some of their students were in tears after the Navajo children were told not to visit. They spent part of the day writing a new round of letters to their pen pals.

Wrote one 9-year-old to her Navajo friend:

“Dearest Henrita: I am very very disappointed. I have to use a lot of guts to keep myself from crying. I’m scared for you and I couldn’t fall asleep thinking about you.”

* HUNDREDS SEEK HELP: Scientists step up efforts to find cause of deadly ailment. A17