|
11.1.99
Town rallies around boy with AIDS By PAUL EDWARD PARKER Journal Staff Writer SWANSEA -- In the mid-1980s, most people only knew one thing about the new mystery disease AIDS: If you got it, you were going to die. While scientists scrambled to learn more about the disease -- and to educate the public about how it was transmitted -- school officials across the country faced a dilemma: What to do about children infected with the disease. In Kokomo, Ind., the schools banned Ryan White from attending. In New York City, thousands of parents virtually rioted to keep infected students out of public classrooms. In one Florida town, opponents resorted to arson. In Swansea, Supt. Jack McCarthy faced a tough decision: Mark Gardiner Hoyle, a student at Case Junior High School, had contracted the deadly infection during treatments for hemophilia. Just a few weeks before classes began in 1985, McCarthy met outside the back door of the junior high with Principal Harold Devine. McCarthy had already made up his mind, but he posed the question to Devine: ``Do you think I should let Mark Hoyle attend classes?'' ``How can you not admit him?'' Devine asked. ``I can't,'' McCarthy replied. ``The boy belongs in school, and that's where he'll go.'' The two men braced for the storm they were sure would follow. Mark Hoyle would be the first student knowingly admitted to public school with AIDS. ``This was a time when Time magazine was running blood red covers about AIDS,'' Devine recalled a decade later. McCarthy and Devine used the several weeks before school started to learn everything they could about AIDS, then teach those around them. First they taught teachers who would have direct contact with Mark, then other teachers at the junior high. The first week of school was quiet. Then word leaked out. Reporters from around the country descended on Swansea. Parents, angry at not being told and scared for their children's safety, kept students home. McCarthy and Devine, backed by the School Committee, stood behind their decision. They scheduled a public meeting for a week later, hoping people would become more educated about the disease in the interim. Meanwhile, the entire faculty at the junior high -- shop teachers, gym teachers, English teachers -- all became health teachers, encouraged to answer any questions their students had about AIDS. Some 500 people filled the high school auditorium for the meeting on AIDS. It didn't go well at first. Parents were angry and scared. One compared the situation to a student walking around the halls with a can of gasoline and a match. Another wanted guarantees that his daughter would not contract the disease. As the meeting wore on, the mood shifted. Jay Hoyle, Mark's father, had slipped into the auditorium unobserved. ``By the end of the night, with the applause, I could just tell Swansea was going to back him,'' the elder Hoyle recalled a few years ago. Ultimately, only two children were officially withdrawn from school, and both eventually returned. One refused to attend private school. The other returned to Swansea when faced with the same prejudice as Mark: A private school said the child would have to pass an AIDS test to attend. In the weeks and months that followed, headlines about a petition to bar Mark from school faded in favor of stories about fundraisers. His classmates rallied around him, attending dances to raise money to defray his medical expenses. Throughout the ordeal, Mark remained upbeat. ``A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins. It's never too late to rally,'' he was fond of saying. As the disease progressed, and Mark became too sick to attend school, he sent his father in to pick up his assignments. The reality of the killer infection, though, caught up with the star Little Leaguer with the can-do attitude. After helping a community to teach the nation about compassion, Mark Gardiner Hoyle succumbed to AIDS on Oct. 26, 1986, at the age of 14. |
|
Copyright
© 1999 The Providence Journal Company |