THE GREAT THIRD GRADE AIDS SCARE

In fall 1993, Kevin isn't the only new arrival in the third grade.  There are three others: a girl from Buenos Aires, a Palestinian boy, and a girl who transferred from a school in another Washington, D.C., suburb.  As far as Kevin knows, he=s the only hyperactive kid in the class, maybe the whole school.

"Who would like to be the first 'Student of the Week?' " the teacher asks the room of 26 students on the first day.  She has been at the school so long that she now teaches the children of her first students.  She will retire in another year and she hopes this class is as well-behaved as her last one.  But already trouble is brewing.  The Palestinian boy could have some trouble with the morose Goldberg twins, who sit with their arms folded at the back of the room.  There are at least three children from Central America who are in supplemental English classes.  And this new boy, Kevin, has the squirming fidgets.

Just last year she attended an in-service class called "Managing the Hyperactive Child in the Elementary School Classroom: Some Practical Approaches."  It was a day-long seminar given by a consultant who had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder as a child and had gone on to successful careers in teaching and now consulting.  "Hyperactive children are very impulsive," she had told the teachers.  "They want to be first in line; first one to raise their hands; first in the hearts of their countrymen."  She had paused to allow for appreciative murmurs.  When there were none, she continued.  "Never give a inch," she advised, then added quickly:  "Before all you teachers correct my grammar (laughter all around -- that's better) let me remind you that this slogan was in Ken Kesey's book, Sometimes a Great Notion.  "Well," she said, smiling, "that's a great slogan to remember when it comes to hyperkids.  'Never Give A Inch.'  These kids are insistent, so you have to be firm.  On the other hand, you have to be flexible enough to know when to give them recognition.  It's a fine line."

The teacher remembers this equivocating advice as Kevin raises his hand and waves it around.  He is such a cute kid with those dark eyes and freckled nose.  Should she be firm or flexible?  "Me, Me," he says insistently.  So the teacher nods at Kevin sitting right there in the front row.  "Would you like to be the first Student of the Week?"

Kevin nods.  His eyes are a bit glazed, as she had heard they would be.  She knows that Kevin takes Ritalin, the number one drug for hyperkids, 15 milligrams (one white pill, one yellow) in the morning and 15 milligrams after lunch, and that sometimes Ritalin can impart a slightly drugged-out look to hyperkids.  "If they're too 'druggy,' the consultant had said last year, "you should bring that up to the kid's parents.  Dosage is tricky with these kids."

He doesn=t look too bad, she thinks, but she will keep her eyes on those enlarged pupils in Kevin's eyes.  She had taken another in-service training called "Drug Abuse in the Classroom: Seven Telltale Signs," so she knew what to look for.

The teacher arranges the kids in clusters and assigned them tasks.  Kevin's cluster is assigned to interview him for the initial "Student of the Week" poster.  Each of the kids will take a turn as student of the week and each of them will be interviewed by their cluster which builds teamwork and will help these students adjust to the work force of the 21st century which, she knows from yet another in-service training session, will be more attuned to "decision by consensus" than "top-down decision-making."  These kids will be excellent leaders.  They had been clustering since the womb!

The students ask the questions --

"Where did you come from?"

"Wyoming," says Kevin.

"Do you like cowboys?"

"Yes.  I learned to ride a horse."

The student scribe scribbles Kevin's answers.  The kids ask questions about sports, TV shows, hobbies, skills.  He blurts the answers, never stopping to consider what he says.

"Anything else?" one of the clustered students ask.  

"I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder -- ADHD."

They blink at him.  Nobody writes a thing. 

"I'm ADHD," Kevin says.  "I take Ritalin for it."

They look at him.  The other clusters are noisy around them.  They are all preparing to be useful members of society.

"Why don't you write it down," Kevin asks.

The scribe, a petite girl with dark braids whose family had moved from Manila to Washington, D.C., two years before, writes it down.  She writes what she hears, and then turns the interview sheet over to the teacher.  That evening, the teacher, who knows calligraphy, gracefully transfers the notes to a poster.  "Interesting," she says to herself, "this new boy's favorite sport is cricket; his favorite TV show is "Entertainment Tonight."  She pauses when she comes to the last thing.   "That's odd," she said, noting that the girl had written:  "I have AIDS and I take Ritalin for it."

Meanwhile, over at the girl scribe's house, she=s sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework.  Halfway into her subtraction problems, she raises her head and said to her mother, "The new boy in class has AIDS."

Her mother was having tea and cookies for desert.  She pauses in mid-chew.  "He has what?" she asks.

"AIDS," says the girl scribe.  "He takes some drug for it."

The woman is new to the U.S. and she still struggles with English.  But she is familiar with the initials for the dreaded Auto-immune Deficiency Syndrome.  She knows two other mothers from the third grade class.  She calls them both and tells them the news. 

That next day, the principal at the school fields a half-dozen calls from concerned third-grade parents.  She tells them all the same thing.  "The boy in question does not have AIDS but ADHD," she says.  Then, of course, she has to describe what ADHD is.  The parents all have a much better grasp on sexually transmitted diseases than neurobiological malfunctions. 

But it is not so easy to stop a rumor based on mistaken initials.  One of the girls in Kevin's class has been taken with his affinity for horses and invites him to her birthday party.  The girl's name is Nora and her mother is not too sure about mixing a boy into the all-girl line-up for this party.  "Does this bode well or ill for the future?" the mother wonders.  She works at a Washington think tank that specialized in futurist scenarios and it is usually her first instinct to look at least 10 years down the road.  "My daughter is 9 and she likes boys," she thinks.  "This makes her socially aware, but is she being precocious?  Does this mean she will be sexually active at an early age and if so..."

"He's a cowboy from Wyoming," the girl says to her mother.

"Is that so?"  She arches her eyebrows in the way Easterners do when they hear "cowboy;" that odd juxtaposition of words and species that is part of American myth-making.

"Not really a cowboy," the girl says.  "He learned how to ride horses when he was in the West."

"That's interesting," says the mother, her sandy brows already furrow as she contemplates the demise of the cowboy and the ever-changing roles of the rural population in Western states such as Wyoming. 

"He likes cricket!"

"Crickets?"

"Mom," says the girl, knowing that her mother's thoughts are constantly focused on a site just over the horizon.  "It's cricket.  Some sort of game."

"It's played with a bat, a flat bat, not like the round bats that baseball in the U.S. is played with."  She looks at her daughter -- it startles her that she was so pretty at such a young age.  It was sad to think of the ravages that time would visit on that face.  "It's a British game."

"Oh."

"What else about this boy?

"He's nice," the girl says.  "And he has AIDS."

AIDS?  It brings her back to the present, this plague that may wipe out half of Africa and a good portion of India, if her scenario for the disease is correct.  She just wrote a report on the disease for the World Health Organization.  She is not ready to consider its inclusion into her daughter's birthday party.

            The girl's mom decides to call Kevin's mom.  She is not sure what she would say but knew she needs an answer.  Her daughter's birthday party is a swimming party, for God's sake.  Are AIDS people allowed to swim?  Of course they were; she is an intelligent woman and she knows that AIDS was only contagious through transmission of bodily fluids and dirty hypodermic needles.  It=s ridiculous but, well, it is her daughter's health at stake here, and not some eight-year-old in sub-Saharan Africa.  Why didn't the school tell us that a boy with AIDS as coming to the third grade?

The girl=s mom decides to call Kevin=s mother to get at the bottom of this.  She likes facts; investigation was her forte.

The girl's mom is struck by the pleasant, cheery voice on the woman on the other end of the line.  Nora's mom -- Sarah -- introduced herself, as did Kevin's mom -- Chris.  It isn=t nice to have a name to attach to the voice.  She wonders: is Chris taller than average or shorter than average?  Are people from the West taller on the average than people from her native New Jersey?

"So you're Nora's mom," Chris says.

"Yes," says Sarah.  "She insisted that your son come to her party since he's a cowboy."

Chris laughs.  "He's been on a horse twice."

"I heard he likes cricket?"

"Everyone in Wyoming plays cricket," says Chris.  Then she laughs again.  "I don't know where he comes up with this stuff."

By nature, Sarah is not a person who likes to equivocate.  When the conversation reaches the inevitable lull following the initial pleasantries, she asks, "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

Kevin's mom pretty much knows what=s coming.  Over the years she had received many calls from many parents.  Some are polite, "May I ask you a personal question?"  Others are belligerent.  One neighbor in Wyoming cursed her up some side and down the other before threatening to pepper Kevin's hide with buckshot the next time he came around.  Once, in Denver, a man arrived at the door with his six-year-old son, whose nose was bleeding because Kevin hit him with a stick.  "That son of yours needs a spanking," the man yelled.  Michael, her husband (that would be me), who quite possibly was the most mild-mannered man living west of the Mississippi, told the man that he would punish Kevin if he could find out what happened.  The man was apoplectic with rage and Michael couldn't understand a word the man said.  "I can't understand a word you said," Michael said, and that's when the man hauled off and punched him in the nose.  Michael jumped on the man and Chris had to turn the hose on them as she would a pair a raging dogs before they finally gave up the fight.  Michael had a bloody lip; blood was streaming from the man's hand after its contact with one of Michael's incisors.  As he stomped off, he threatened to pepper Michael's hide with buckshot if Kevin ever came near his kid again.

The questions are always about Kevin  Chris had become immune to them.  The best approach, she knows, is to project an air of helpful indifference or, if that fails, an indifferent helpfulness.  She can listen to the caller's complaint.  She can tell the caller about hyperactivity.  She can posit a couple solutions to the problem.  She can muster an understanding tone.  They are all much better than saying, "there's nothing I can do."  This is not what people want to hear, and it isn't quite accurate, either.  There is plenty they could do and they have done it all.  To salvage her sanity, she remains calm.

Sarah asks:  "Your son, is he...I mean, does he...."

"Yes," Chris says.  Well, that is getting easier.  She doesn't even have to hear "hyperactive" anymore to know the question.  Maybe at some future time she will just leave a message on the machine.  "If you have a personal question for me or Michael about our son, the answer is yes.  Beep."

"I see," says Sarah.  "I'm so sorry."

"Thank you."  This is a switch; she has never had empathy before.  An empathetic impulse or two, especially from parents with kids that are disabled or had Down Syndrome or something that is a lot more serious than ADHD.  But empathy?

"Please don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think your little boy should come to the party," Sarah says quietly yet firmly. 

"Why?"

"I know it's not contagious but Nora is our only child and..."

"Hold it," Chris says.  "We have some crossed wires here.  "What do you mean, not contagious?"

"AIDS," she blurts, " I know it's not contagious unless..."

"What does that have to do with my son?"

"He has AIDS, doesn't he ?"

"He does not.  What in the world gave that idea?"

"You did.  I asked you if your son had AIDS."

"You did not.  You asked me, well, you really didn't ask me anything.  I just supposed that you were going to ask me if my son had ADHD so I said yes because I'm tired of people asking about it."

"Your son doesn't have AIDS?" Sarah asks sheepishly.  "Oh god, I'm so sorry."  And embarrassed too.  She prides herself on knowing what she is talking about before she spoke. 

"Where did you get that idea?"

"He told the class he had AIDS.  That's what Nora said."

"He told the class that?"

"The first day."

Suddenly, Chris realizes what had happened.  Her son, the impulsive one, made a clean breast of it to his new class in his new school.  Somehow, in his attempt to get the hyperactivity thing on the record, he was misunderstood.  She laughed at the ridiculousness of it.

"Am I missing something?" Sarah asks.

Chris takes a deep breath and briefly relates her son's struggle with ADHD.  She explains what she thought happened in the classroom that day.

"Not AIDS?" Sarah asks.

"Not AIDS."

Sarah again is embarrassed and now just wants to get off the phone.  "Of course your son is invited to the party," she says.

"He'll be fine," Chris says, uncomfortable with the situation.  "He'll be on his Ritalin and will be a perfect gentleman.