Teacher Treated for Poisoning in Class

After a lesson on Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” last week, somebody in second-period English poisoned the teacher.

And Susan C. Ennis said Sunday that she still cannot believe it.

“I don’t want to sound like a sap,” said the 32-year-old teacher, recovering at a Palmdale hospital from Thursday’s poisoning in a classroom at Littlerock High School. “But my kids love me.”

So far, Ennis said, she has received about 150 get-well cards from students, some even promising to get whoever apparently dumped toxic cleaning fluid into her can of Diet Pepsi.

“My students have been here, some of them in tears,” said Ennis, who will undergo tests this week to check for damage to her kidneys and esophagus. “Some have written on their notes, ‘Please come back, Mrs. Ennis, subs suck.’

“They really do care. This is a freak thing. Maybe one student doesn’t like me, but 99% would bend over backward to save me.”

Authorities, who have made no arrests, will have to rely on one or more of the 38 students in Ennis’ second-period class--the only potential witnesses--to identify the culprit.

Ennis said the incident was the second time she has been attacked in her two years at the school. Last year, she said, she was roughed up and her life was threatened after she disciplined a student for harassing others with a blowtorch fashioned by using a cigarette lighter and an aerosol spray can.

Ennis said she does not believe the poisoning is related to last year’s incident, which resulted in the expulsion of two students. Antelope Valley Union High School officials could not be reached Sunday to confirm the earlier attack, which Ennis said was reported in the local newspaper.

In that incident, she said, she was about to take the boy to the vice principal’s office when his friends surrounded her and “backed me up against the wall. I was screaming for security while I was being jerked and dragged by the students.”

Ennis, who grew up in the small town of Red Lake Falls, Minn., said her family there has tried to persuade her to leave California because of what they believe is widespread crime. Despite pleas from her family to quit, Ennis said she plans to return to her classroom when she recovers.

“Teaching is the one thing I feel I was born to do,” said Ennis, who lives with her husband and three young children in a home 35 miles north of Littlerock. “I’ve always wanted to be a teacher, all my life.”

On Thursday, Ennis was wrapping up her Steinbeck lesson and students began turning in copies of the novel, which are shared by two other classes.

The 1937 book describes the lives of two Depression-era migrant farm workers, George and Lennie, and how they try and protect each another.

“We talked about how we should feel responsibility for each other,” Ennis said.

Ennis, who describes herself as a Diet Pepsi fanatic, had put a can of the soda on a stand holding an overhead projector. Next to the can was a spray pump bottle of white board cleaner, a potentially deadly substance containing glycols, according to the Los Angeles Regional Drug and Poison Information Center.

At the end of class, Ennis popped open a fresh soda. While picking up the first can to toss away, she noticed it was not empty.

“I thought, ‘Oh great, one more swig,’ and I chugged it down and immediately my throat burned,” Ennis said. “I dialed up security on the class phone and said: ‘Get here now’ and I started throwing up immediately.”

Ennis was admitted to Palmdale Hospital Medical Center. She is able to talk and move about but for now is limited to a liquid diet.

She said the poisoning was probably a prank done by “an angry student or a mischievous, quiet student,” someone who did not think Ennis would be injured so badly.

Ennis hopes that her Steinbeck lesson made an impression. In the novel, tragedy strikes when the two main characters try to cover up a murder.

“If somebody saw what happened,” she said, “I hope they would come forward.”