Making the Grade

Paola Matta misses sitting in geometry class and doing science experiments. She misses eating pizza with her friends at lunchtime. And she misses school basketball games.

Simply said, 14-year-old Paola misses school.

Seven months ago, the shy athletic teen was diagnosed with cancer and hasn’t been back to class since. Too many germs. Too many stuffy rooms. Too many opportunities for infection that would further weaken her already compromised immune system.

So Paola has her own eighth-grade teacher who comes to her Ventura home several times a week. He keeps her caught up so she won’t skip an academic beat when she starts ninth grade at Buena High School as expected in the fall. He brings normalcy to her life, between chemotherapy treatments and blood transfusions. He takes her mind off red blood cell counts and lost hair.

Throughout Ventura County, dozens of students like Paola are taught in their homes and hospital rooms through a program called “Home Hospital Instruction.” They are children living with cancer. Adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder. Teens hurt in serious car accidents.

They can’t go to class, so they study at home or in the hospital. They do everything they can to keep their hopes up, and to keep up with their schoolwork.

“If somebody didn’t fight for these kids, they would get lost,” said Neelu Stafford, a Simi Valley home and hospital teacher. “We do whatever is needed to make sure they don’t get behind. And for some of them, it’s the only contact they have with the outside world.”

Home and hospital instruction is available to any California public school student who has a temporary physical or emotional disability and can’t go to school. Parents of sick children can request a home teacher, and must present a doctor’s note outlining the child’s illness. The students’ problems range from severe asthma to clinical depression to multiple broken bones.

County school officials don’t keep records of how many students are served by the programs, but district educators estimate several dozen each year. And each of the county’s 20 school districts has at least one teacher who focuses on home and hospital instruction.

The program is designed for students who will probably miss school for at least one month, officials said, not for children who have to skip school for a few days. The students are usually in the program for three or four months.

The district assigns a teacher, who goes to the student’s home or hospital room five hours per week. The teacher, paid by the school district, works with the student’s regular school instructors to plan lessons and homework. Some home instruction teachers are substitutes, but others are full-time teachers who do this when they are not in the classroom.

“The whole idea is that the students can go back to school and be right up to speed with the classroom work,” said Kristal Oz, who helps coordinate home and hospital instruction for students in the Conejo Valley Unified School District. “It allows for continuity.”

Paola’s olive skin is pale from chemotherapy treatments and months inside her home. Her eyebrows are thin and she covers her bare head with a hat. She paints her nails lavender and wears small stud earrings.

In May, her right arm was swollen and sore. She thought she had pulled a muscle playing sports. Then she fainted while standing in the kitchen. And when her mother took her to the hospital, doctors ran several tests and discovered a malignant tumor. Paola cried. Her mother, Paola Rivera, felt as if the whole world had fallen on top of her.

Since that day, Paola and her mom have tried to stay optimistic. And Rivera tries to let her daughter still be a teenager. Sometimes, when Paola is feeling well, her mom takes her to eat lunch with her friends at Anacapa Middle School.

Paola wants to be a children’s dentist. And she knows that she has to keep studying, even if she is sick.

“School’s important,” Paola said. “I can’t stop learning or I’ll fall back in my studies. And when I go to ninth grade, I’ll be behind.”

So in September, when she found out she was going to get her own teacher, she was really excited. Ventura Unified teacher Michael Goldowitz comes to Paola’s house, to help her through the eighth grade. They sit at her kitchen table, surrounded by textbooks and backpacks, and read science fiction stories, work on decimal points and learn about the colonists.

To prepare for a recent session, Paola read an excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s “The Naming of Names” and later answered questions about the story’s setting. After reading the words “marrow” and “white bone,” Paola wrote that the setting was in a hospital.

Goldowitz nodded and leaned forward across the table. Then he reread one of the sentences to Paola. “At any moment, the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from white bone,” he read aloud.

“As you read good literature, you’ve got to read between the lines,” he said. “Bone marrow--yeah that sounds like a hospital. And I see why you’d think that, because you have to deal with some of those things. But do they have rockets at hospitals?”

Paola shook her head and smiled.

Studying is often a safe haven of thought for these youths, teachers said. If they are thinking about algebra or European history, then they aren’t thinking about their next doctor’s visit.

“My hope is that education becomes a refuge,” said Goldowitz, who is also an independent-study teacher at El Camino High School in Ventura. “I try to encourage children to get away from their problems and concerns for a few hours by making their studies be a refuge from their physical problems.”

But sometimes, the students’ illnesses become so overwhelming that they can’t do their schoolwork. One afternoon, Goldowitz arrived late to Paola’s house, so his time coincided with the nurse’s visit.

That day, shortly after Paola received her chemotherapy treatment, she thought she was well enough to keep working with her teacher. But moments later, she got sick. So Goldowitz packed up his green backpack and told Paola to feel better.

“I didn’t really feel good,” Paola said. “Sometimes I don’t work a lot, because I feel weak.”

Goldowitz said he has to ride a fine line. Though he wants to motivate students to work hard in their studies, he also has to know when to pull back. He tells his students to do as much work as they can, but to rest as much as they need to rest.

“Sometimes I feel over my head,” he said. “On one hand, I want the kids to be productive and keep learning. But on the other hand, some are really sick and frightened.”

Goldowitz said he worries that some day he will have a student who won’t get better.

Often, the students and teachers form close relationships. The teachers become counselors and nurses, confidants and mentors.

Stafford taught a bright Simi Valley High School student for more than three years--until she was too old to attend public school.

The student was 16 when she was driving on California 118 and swerved into a semitruck. She suffered traumatic head injury, and was indefinitely bound to a hospital bed. She was attached to an oxygen tank, and paralyzed throughout much of her body. The only way she could communicate was by tapping her foot. Up and down for yes, side to side for no.

So Stafford planned her daily visits to the hospital around naps and tube feedings. And she looked forward to those visits every day. “She was my friend, and I was her friend,” Stafford said.

The girl loves Shakespeare, so Stafford read her sonnets and stories. “She could never get enough poetry,” Stafford said. “That’s what brought her peace, because she was literally trapped in her own body. Poetry gave her an opportunity to escape.”

Though Stafford doesn’t teach the Simi Valley teen anymore, she still visits her a couple of times a year.

Teachers like Stafford and Goldowitz said they feel lucky to be getting paid to do what they love to do. Stafford teaches kindergarten at Garden Grove School in Simi Valley in the morning and does the home and hospital teaching in the afternoon.

“It’s a very humbling experience,” Stafford said. “It makes me put my life in perspective and keeps me grounded as to what’s important in life.”

Parents are also grateful for the support. “For parents who have children who are very ill or have sustained some sort of trauma, they really appreciate the support at a difficult time,” said Richard Morrison, director of alternative programs for Ventura Unified School District. “The teachers become a big part of the support system and recovery of the child.”

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Rivera is one of those parents thankful for home and hospital instruction. Goldowitz brightens both her and her daughter’s day with every visit. But even though Paola likes having her own teacher, she and her mom are counting the days till next fall.

“Right now, her immune system is like a roller coaster,” Rivera said. “It goes up and down, and she is so susceptible to infections. And I’ve been so worried about her. But we hope, we pray, we wish that she will be well and will go back to school.”