Teacher Learns Lessons for Life

Shirley Lewis has taught some of the most determined students in Orange County.

They come to class despite limbs immobilized by casts, IV tubes intruding into their veins and powerful drugs that sap their energy. Many are terminally ill and have no hope of graduating.

Lewis teaches at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, the first teacher in a program created 16 years ago to help sick children keep up their schooling.

“School is normal. Chemotherapy isn’t,” said Lewis about the role she plays in her students’ lives.

Now 63, the gentle woman who dispenses as many comforting words as she does study lessons is retiring.

It has been a career marked by inspiring tragedies.

Last spring, a 16-year-old leukemia patient too sick to leave his hospital bed asked Lewis to read Harry Potter to him.

Lessons in the hospital must remain flexible, said Lewis, who keeps a cabinet full of instruction materials, from kindergarten reading to high school calculus.

But some of the children are simply too weak, and often the most the teacher can do is read to her student.

“He would always remember the passage of the last chapter when I forgot my [book] marker,” said Lewis, remembering the month she spent with the leukemia patient.

He was a tall, good-looking boy who kept his sense of humor despite the cancer, Lewis said. He died last Christmas at home.

His mother later donated the entire Harry Potter series to Lewis’ school.

She told Lewis how much those daily half-hours the teacher spent with her son had meant to him.

The job “has definitely affected me,” Lewis said one recent morning. But then she paused, perhaps unable to articulate 16 years’ worth of emotions, and excused herself to help one of her students.

“I can generally tell when she’s had a bad day,” her husband John, 64, said from the couple’s Anaheim home.

“When one of the special ones--I mean, they are all special to her--but when one of the kids she spent quite some time with passes away, she’s very, very quiet. Then we discuss her day, and I say, ‘Boy, I couldn’t do that.’”

Most of Lewis’ students, however, do make it.

They are usually in the hospital for only a few days, but even that can mean falling behind in school.

The hospital program allows them to keep up, while offering a welcome respite from the prodding and poking of medical instruments.

The school is run by the Orange Unified School District’s home and hospital instruction program. Although the district has always offered tutors to its local hospitals, including UCI Medical Center and Chapman Medical Center, Children’s Hospital was the first in the county to get a full-time credentialed teacher.

Two years ago, HealthBridge Children’s Rehabilitation Hospital, a children’s facility in Orange, also gained an in-house school.

Children staying less than five days are not officially the Orange district’s responsibility, but Lewis considers them all her students.

Those from other school districts bring homework to the hospital and can count on Lewis for assistance.

“We will find someone for the job,” when Lewis retires, said Nancy Shipcott, the district’s administrative director of pupil services. “But we won’t find a replacement for Shirley.”

Lewis is slender and subtly elegant, with neatly cropped white hair and a warm smile.

The Iowa native moved to Norwalk in 1959 where she met her husband, an aerospace engineer. The couple married and moved to Anaheim 40 years ago.

While their two children were growing up, Lewis was a substitute teacher for the Orange district. When her youngest was ready for college, the hospital position opened up and Lewis decided to teach full-time.

She Can Quickly Bond With Students

Teaching vulnerable children, some of whom are battling fatal diseases, can be very emotional, Lewis said.

“It is amazing how much you can bond with a kid even in a short period of time.... These kids go through so much pain throughout their treatments. You just have to have faith that it is not going to happen,” that she won’t lose another child.

Last year, it was her students who ran the risk of losing Lewis. She was diagnosed with breast cancer. It is in remission now, but during her treatment she took inspiration from the hospital’s little patients.

“When you see a 3-year-old playing with a ball in the hall, pulling an IV post....If they can do it,” Lewis said she told herself, “I can certainly do it.”

Lewis decided to retire to spend more time with her husband, who has been retired for the last six years.

She said she will return to the hospital as a part-time volunteer.

Until then, Lewis will continue her routine. She begins at 7:30 a.m. examining her constantly changing roster.

She visits students in their rooms, assessing those who can attend class and those she will have to teach from their bedside.

She opens the hospital’s two classrooms about 9:30 a.m. and students begin to shuffle in, medical equipment in tow.

Lewis and her teaching aide, Debbie Violette, work with about a dozen students each day in the classrooms.

Lewis later visits the handful of bed-bound students, often staying long past her 3:30 p.m. checkout time.

The third-floor classroom is reserved for the hospital’s cancer patients.

One recent morning, Lewis was going over a reading lesson with Jorge Perez, 9, a leukemia patient who is awaiting a bone marrow transplant.

His mother, Elena Gonzalez, a Garden Grove homemaker, watched nearby.

“The school helps him a lot,” Gonzalez, 27, said. “It keeps his mind off of the cancer. It makes him feel normal.”

Making her students feel normal is a big part of Lewis’ job. When a student’s IV monitor sounds an alarm, Lewis casually asks a hospital volunteer to page a nurse, and proceeds with her lessons. Her students remain calm.

They also hardly noticed one recent morning when a 12-year-old boy was wheeled into the fifth-floor classroom.

The fifth floor is where all the noncancer patients are located.

The boy’s body was contorted, his movements not entirely his. He can’t speak, and lets out murmurs and short grunts. He has been in and out of the hospital for years, Lewis later said.

“Thanks for coming,” she greeted him cheerily. “What would you like to do today?”

His eyes darted from side to side, and, apparently finding nothing of interest, he wheeled himself out of the room with the little coordination left in his body.

Lewis’ attention returned to the spunky 6-year-old girl she was teaching how to count.

Minutes later the boy was back, in through another door.

He slowly wheeled his chair and eased it between Lewis and the girl.

“Oh! You are back,” Lewis said. “We missed you.”

The boy stared at Lewis, his head swaying beyond his control, his neck craning toward her.

Then his eyes moved to the lesson sheet on the table. Lewis continued.

“OK! So how many toothbrushes here?” she said. “Let’s count them. 1, 2, 3....”