Jeffrey Crocker, left, gives a bedside lesson to Brittany Rosa, 17, of Cumberland, in her hospital room Wednesday afternoon. Her illness has made her hair fall out and forced her to remain in isolation since December. At right is Brittany’s dad, Ildeberto Rosa.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

PROVIDENCE

Inside the cheery fifth-floor classroom, 6-year-old Hunter Humeston wrestled with a geography puzzle, his brow furrowed in concentration.

At a table next to him, Trevis Woods, 9, made his way through a math work sheet.

It was a regular school day in “Ms. Sandra’s” elementary school class, except that the students — patients at Hasbro Children’s Hospital — worked in their pajamas, IV poles hugging their sides.

Since 1977, the school has provided academics to patients as one of the oldest hospital-based education program of its kind in the country.

Those well enough to attend class work in the elementary school room, or a second one for middle and high schoolers. Those too sick to do so receive tutoring at their bedsides.

The program helps them keep up with schoolwork and to feel normal when nothing around them does.

For two hours a day, these children are not cancer patients and cystic fibrosis sufferers — they’re just students learning to read and write like their peers, succeeding and sometimes failing.

But as the state copes with an estimated $384-million deficit in the next fiscal year, Governor Carcieri’s budget proposal had called for eliminating the $100,000 in financing for the Hasbro program — about 80 percent of its operating budget — a move that hospital officials feared would force the school to close.

That changed Wednesday evening. As The Journal was preparing a story on the program, the Carcieri administration reversed course, saying the budget office would do what it could to secure the Hasbro money.

The news brought relief to hospital staff members.

Among them is “Ms. Sandra,” Sandra Dawley. In her seven years at Hasbro, Dawley, a retired teacher with great patience, has come to think of her students as her own children. She laughs and learns with them in the good times and cries with them in the bad ones.

During a break last week, Dawley opened a discreet cabinet near her desk. The walls inside were papered with photos of youngsters who have died.

She calls this her wall of fame and she smiled as she ran a hand over the faces.

“I do this,” she said of her teaching job, “because school is important to all children, even the ones who aren’t here anymore.”

THE HASBRO PROGRAM is one of a handful of formal hospital schools around the country. Most are at much larger pediatric hospitals such as Children’s Hospital Boston and Philadelphia Children’s Hospital, statistics show.

When Rhode Island’s program started 30 years ago, pediatric patients were treated at Rhode Island Hospital and the classrooms were in the basement of the dated Potter building. When Hasbro opened on Valentine’s Day 1994, the children and their teachers got the best kind of valentine: two airy classrooms.

Later that year, the passage of a new state law required the state Education Department to finance the program.

Since then, the school has educated the children who fill its 87 beds, from youngsters spending just a few days in the hospital to those who watch the seasons change from inside the brightly colored building.

Brittany Rosa is among the latter. A 17-year-old with big eyes and a love of all things pink, Brittany’s long-term illness has made her hair fall out and forced her to remain in isolation since December. Privacy rules prohibit staff from divulging the exact nature of any child’s diagnosis.

Each day that Brittany feels up to up to the challenge, Dawley’s secondary school counterpart, Jeff Crocker, suits up in a sterile gown and gloves and arrives at her bedside toting geometry and English books.

When she doesn’t have the strength for schoolwork, Crocker politely ducks away from the door and promises to return. On better days, Crocker leans close near her bed and the two of them read the classics, Crocker in his gown, Brittany covered in a sea of blankets.

STATE LAW dictates that any child who misses 30 consecutive days of school is entitled to supplemental education services. For some that means a pile of workbooks sent to the hospital with a parent. For others it could mean a tutor who visits from the home district for periodic sessions. It’s up to the school system to decide what to provide.

But Hasbro officials have found that system fractured and often unreliable, especially now with school budgets stretched. Patients don’t always miss 30 consecutive days or they’re too sick to focus on several hours of work, making some districts reluctant to pay for traveling tutors.

Myra Edens, director of nursing, said that’s where the hospital steps in, to fill in the gaps and prepare kids for the transition back to their classrooms.

When hospital officials learned last month that the school program’s state funding could be eliminated July 1, they began scrambling to save it.

Meanwhile, state education officials and legislators, whose jobs it is to propose and OK the cuts, acknowledged knowing little about the Hasbro program or why it was being eliminated.

Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal said the governor’s policy staff had discussed the Hasbro program, but he acknowledged that Carcieri was not formally briefed about the proposed cut until The Journal inquiry.

“We have come to understand that this spending reduction might make it difficult for the hospital to sustain this educational program over the long term. That was never the Governor’s intention or the intention of the Department of Education,” he said in an e-mail Wednesday evening.

Officials from both offices will work together, he said “to ensure we can continue to provide this funding to Hasbro Children’s Hospital in order to support this worthwhile program.”

Now it will be up to the Assembly to find $100,000 it can cut elsewhere in the governor’s proposed budget.

ONE FLOOR above “Ms. Sandra’s” elementary classroom, Crocker’s secondary school room looks like it belongs in a high school, with science charts and graphs and SAT workbooks.

Crocker, 46, has an open face and a calming voice. When teenagers walk through the door, he lets them know it’s OK to leave their illnesses behind. In a building where poking and prodding are a fact of daily life, children, he says, deserve a break.

On Wednesday afternoon, he made good on his pledge to return to Brittany Rosa’s bedside when she felt well enough for a one-on-one session.

That morning, Brittany had left her room for the first time since December for a spin around the corridor in a wheelchair.

It was, the staff said, a very good day.

The pair dived into a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the book she just finished. Because the illness has badly weakened Brittany’s voice, Crocker adapted the lesson so she could answer his questions with a basic yes or no. Streamers and get-well wishes lined the room around them. A sign on the wall said simply: “Courage.”

One by one, Brittany and Crocker worked through the trials of Hawthorne’s heroine Hester Prynne. If she hesitated on an answer or seemed to lose confidence, Crocker prompted her to think it through. They worked that way methodically, like any teacher and student in any high school.

When they finished, Crocker looked the teenager in the eye and praised her hard work.

Brittany, exhausted, leaned back on her pillow and smiled.

cneedham@projo.com