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Wednesday, April 30, 2003

By Jane Elizabeth, Post-Gazette Education Writer

MINERAL RIDGE, Ohio -- If anyone had told him there'd be days like this, school Superintendent Rocco Adduci would have stayed in his job as principal of a small suburban high school.

	Dominic Romeo, left, 16 expresses his disappointment that yesterday's Mineral Ridge High School baseball game had been canceled as he and Micah Hall, 15, leave the school. (Martha Rial, Post-Gazette)

But three years ago, he took on the superintendency of the Weathersfield Local School District just north of Youngstown. And now "trouble is finding me," he said yesterday.

There were personnel problems, ones he can't talk about. A major business in town went off the tax rolls and left a whopping hole in the district's budget. An upcoming community vote on an income tax increase to fund schools looks shaky.

And now, SARS.

On Thursday, 39 kids from Mineral Ridge's marching band returned from a three-day trip to Toronto, home of a recent outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Non-band parents began worrying that the band students could be contaminated with SARS. Over the weekend, they called Weathersfield school board members. Board members called Adduci.

Adduci called off school.

Under pressure from at least two board members, Adduci said, he canceled classes districtwide on Monday.

He wishes he hadn't.

After the school cancellation made the local newspaper, Adduci and the high school principal, Michael Hanshaw, were bombarded with calls from reporters and producers at ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, radio stations and newspapers.

Adduci answered phone calls from baffled or angry or concerned parents; Hanshaw transferred his calls to Adduci.

And yesterday afternoon, Adduci got a call from the district's athletic director, who informed him that two nearby high schools had decided not to show up for a scheduled track meet with Mineral Ridge. And another high school refused to play in yesterday's baseball game against Mineral Ridge.

"People are treating us like animals," said Dominic Romeo, a Mineral Ridge freshman who pitches and plays first base.

Adduci said, "None of this would have happened if we hadn't canceled school."

It's not that anyone in this 1,100-student district has come down with SARS, which has claimed 353 lives in 27 countries.

On the other hand, parents say, no one can prove that they won't.

"Does anyone have SARS? Could I win the lottery? Is the sky falling? I mean, what the hell?" said an exasperated James Enyeart, Trumbull County's health commissioner.

He's telling the parents who are calling him that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the local health department "don't find a problem with those children being in school."

SARS, he said, "is not an ephemeral gas that soars through the air and attacks people willy-nilly."

He had not recommended the Monday closing of Weathersfield schools, which Adduci reopened yesterday with no intention of closing down again.

But Adduci said the one-day closure gave him time "to gather more information."

What he found was that SARS in Toronto has been confined almost exclusively to health care facilities; that bodily fluids typically must be exchanged for someone to contract the disease; and that no schools in Toronto had closed due to the SARS scare.

Even the World Health Organization, which had been at odds with the CDC over the SARS danger level in Toronto, backtracked on its travel ban to Canada.

Adduci is quick to point out that the marching band's trip to Toronto "was not school-sponsored." Some band boosters raised the money and made arrangements on their own.

Only about half of the marching band attended -- mostly high school students along with a few middle school students, because the small district doesn't have enough older students to field an entire band.

Adduci said he met with band boosters before the trip, and felt reassured that the school nurse was one of the travelers and that one parent even brought along a child who'd had a liver transplant.

Adduci said he had no authority to nix the trip because it wasn't a school event. "If it had been, I would have canceled it," he said.

Yesterday, high school students seemed unconcerned.

Micah Hall, a freshman, laughed about a band member who coughed on him in class and said, "Watch out, you're going to get SARS!"

"People are joking about it," he said, dawdling with friends in the school parking lot yesterday afternoon. "We don't understand why it's such a big deal."

He said his mother kept his younger sister at home yesterday. "She wanted another day, just to be safe," he said. But his mother gave him a choice, and he chose to go to school.

Overall, absenteeism was up about 5 percent districtwide, although attendance at the high school was about normal, school officials said.

Sophomore Jamie Goodman's friends told her, "My mom told me not to hang out with you," after they learned that Jamie's brother went to Toronto.

But Jamie's own parents weren't worried about SARS, she said. "They knew it was under control."

Still, some parents say that the band members never should have gone to Toronto.

"Our anger is toward the parents who sent those kids there in the first place," said Debbie Moore, who works at Chris's Dairy Cream, the local ice cream stand. Her 10th-grade son plays tuba in the band but didn't go to Toronto.

"This whole thing could have been avoided," said her boss, Chris Rose, who has a daughter at the elementary school.

Enyeart doesn't disagree. He thinks about how much easier the past five days would have been had the students not traveled to Canada.

"Why would you go out of your way to do this?" he asked. "They come back home and no one wants to play with them."