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Julia Countway has worked as a school teacher for the last 15 years, but has never taught inside a public school setting.
Instead, she’s built her career at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, where she’s one of seven teachers working full-time at the facility.
“My job is to help students while they’re in hospital keep up with their schoolwork or re-engage with their learning,” she said.
Countway teaches patients within the hospital’s Mental Health and Addictions program.
She says her top priority is ensuring students don’t fall behind on schoolwork during their hospital stay, along with building back confidence for patients who’ve missed significant classroom time due to illness.
“The unique setting of the therapeutic classroom that we have here, which allows us to work one-on-one with students, to provide the in-the-moment supports to be responsive and to really make a difference for these students and help them through difficult times in their life,” Countway continued.
“You know, show them that, ‘Yes, you’ve been out of school for a couple of years, but you are still able to do this. You’re capable. You know things. You can be successful and like let’s get you back into school.’”
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During the school year, Countway’s one-room schoolhouse offers classes to all ages and grades, where students attend for several hours on weekday mornings.
For each individual student, Countway and her colleagues coordinate with the respective patient’s school to ensure they’re receiving the material needed to stay up to date.
She says providing children with the opportunity to continue their schoolwork at the IWK helps alleviate any lingering anxieties.
“One of the things that often comes up, despite everything they might be going through, is that when they come into hospital, it’s like, ‘Well, what about school? I’ve got a test on Thursday,’” Countway said.
“We can right away step in and say, ‘Oh, you know what, that’s our part of the job. We can take that on for you.’”
Alex Neuffer is the only in-house teacher working on the IWK’s inpatient floor.
Unlike Countway, he says the majority of his classes are one-on-one lessons held in a smaller classroom.
“I work with any student who is here on any of our kind of main inpatient floors. So that could be students who are doing treatment for cancer, or it could be recovery from surgery, or really anything that brings them to the hospital for any amount of time,” he explained.
Countway says he appreciates the role he plays in supporting youth who are navigating challenging circumstances.
“Having childhood cancer is not normal, but having the ability to do school while you have that makes it feel a little bit more normal,” Neuffer said.
“A lot of times they’ll beat cancer and they’ll go back to kind of a normal life, and that’s very rewarding to be like, ‘Well, we have a small part in making sure their school was fine.’ And that they were ready to engage back into the classroom once they were feeling well enough.”
With back-to-school less than two weeks away, both teachers are eager to ensure patients’ education runs uninterrupted — until they return to their home classroom.
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