Over 7 million children in the U.S. miss 15 days or more during the school year.
The issue is more concerning for seriously ill children who are hospitalized and face the fear of being held back a grade.
To make sure that doesn’t happen, one hospital built its own school.
Not every student would call school fun. But for 15-year-old Reuben Roldan and his classmates, that’s exactly what it is.
“Honestly, this is my highlight of the day,” Roldan said.
Roldan is a patient at Stanford Children’s Health and has been attending its fully accredited school for a year. It’s become a bright spot during his health journey.
“It’s a safe place where they can just be a kid,” said Kathy Ho, educational coordinator for Stanford Children’s Health School.
She says the primary goal is to make them feel like they’re not a patient while in school.
“What we do is to normalize the experience, provide them with all those childhood experiences that any normal kid is going to have,” Ho explained.
That begins by making sure they receive classwork that meets all their educational requirements. And it took some serious ingenuity when it came to creating the science lab curriculum.
“The problem was when you’re in a hospital, there’s a lot of restrictions. You can’t have open flames,” said Ho.
That problem became the launchpad for Lab Sci. It’s a collaboration between the hospital and students at Stanford University to develop educational and slightly silly labs for the kids.
“We have to adjust. There’s one that comes to mind that utilizes counting the colors in an M&M box,” said Hana Buabbas, Lab Sci volunteer.
“And we try to think of really fun and collaborative ways that the students can work together and really be hands-on,” said Ryan Sathianthen, Stanford medical student.
He says volunteering was his way to give back to the school he attended years earlier when he was undergoing treatment for cancer.
“It doesn’t feel like learning, but you learn a lot,” said Maceo Alvarez, patient at Stanford Children’s Health School.
Stanford Children’s Health School is working to share its science curriculum with other schools across the country.
So far, 30 labs have been created all using items that can be easily found in a grocery store.
This year the school is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
