Staying the Course : Poisoned Littlerock High Teacher Says She Will Return to School

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

The teacher, Susan C. Ennis, said Sunday she still cannot believe it.

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

So far, Ennis said she has received about 150 get-well cards from students, some even promising to get the kid who 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 backwards to save me.”

Authorities, who have made no arrests in the case, 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 that she has been attacked in her two years as a teacher 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 makeshift blowtorch fashioned from a cigarette lighter and an aerosol spray can.

Ennis said she does not believe that 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 a local newspaper.

Despite pleas from her family to quit, Ennis said she plans to return to her classroom when she recovers. She met her husband, a local sheet-metal worker, when both were working in Grand Forks, N.D. Later, the couple moved to California.

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 what has happened, though, Ennis said she will stay at the school.

“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 concluding 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 to protect one 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 it away, she noticed it was not empty.

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

Ennis was taken to Palmdale Hospital Medical Center, where she remains, able to talk and move about but for now 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 hurt so badly.

Earlier that period, Ennis said she had disciplined two students, a boy and a girl, for not sitting in their assigned seats.

She said she does not believe that gang members in her class were involved, even though she was the target of threats last year.

In May, Ennis spotted a student walking outside her classroom blowing fire at other students with a lighter and an aerosol can.

Ennis caught him by the arm and was about to escort the boy to the vice principal’s office.

“But his gang friends surrounded me and backed me up against the wall,” Ennis said. “I was screaming for security while I was being jerked and dragged by the students.”

Two boys were expelled as a result, Ennis said, which prompted a threat on her life.

“I can tell you in my heart, I do not believe any of my gang students did this because they love me,” Ennis said. “They have too much respect for me.”

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

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