Just because you have leukemia, need a liver transplant, or are on kidney dialysis, it doesn’t mean you can’t learn. In fact, for a critically ill young person, going to school on the 7th floor of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital may be the only part of life that’s still “regular.” “At a time when so much is unfamiliar, even horrifying, we represent a respite from worry, a piece of normalcy,” Pollman says.
I try to create an environment that is serious but fun, nurturing, and accepting. In the schoolroom we’ve designed for Mission Bay, all our students will thrive.
Pollman’s school is a little like an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse. At any time, you might find a kindergartner working on shapes and colors, a special ed student reading, and at the next table, a high schooler plowing through advanced placement calculus. Pollman started the program in 1991 and expanded it in 2004 through a cooperative agreement with the San Francisco Unified School District that lets students earn transferable credits. Today, she is one of six teachers who work with pediatric patients in the UCSF classroom, at their bedsides, or in the pediatric dialysis center.
The school even offers high school students the Exit Exam and the SAT. When kids are well enough to go back to regular school, Pollman helps smooth the way—dispelling myths with facts, teaching things like wheelchair etiquette. And when, sadly, a gravely ill child never returns to family, friends, and teachers, there is community coaching and age-appropriate grief counseling.
Tales Pollman tells about her students could melt the hardest hearts: There are chronically ill kids who keep coming back to the only school they know… kids with traumatic brain injuries who make movies about their recovery… kids who, too ill to attend their school ceremony, “graduate” at UCSF, complete with diplomas and celebration. And there was the 16-year-old with a degenerative disease, gradually losing muscle control. He loved to write, so Pollman gave him a laptop, and he edited the UCSF school newsletter. “Every day I say to myself, ‘I’m going to give a little extra, because if he can, I can,’” she says.
She and her team envision it as a place that nurtures young minds and spirits while young bodies do their most important work: healing.
