Airyanna Cain needed to sleep in that Wednesday morning. The 9-year-old Shasta County girl had finished her last 24-hour chemotherapy treatment at the UC Davis Medical Center the day before and had celebrated by chatting with her roommate late into the night. If she recovered quickly enough from treatment, she hoped to be able to go home the next morning.

But when Airyanna – an outgoing fourth-grader known to her nurses as AJ – woke up around noon, she was plenty annoyed. She had missed school.

It’s a common reaction for any of the dozen or so patients working with Nicole Fernandes, the medical center’s teacher. Children gravitate to the youthful-looking Fernandes, who travels the pediatrics floor, luggage cart stacked with crates of files behind her, to teach children with chronic conditions like sickle cell anemia, diseases like leukemia and others recovering from trauma injuries. Fernandes helps young patients keep up with their studies during long hospital stays, and her instruction provides a sense of both normalcy and diversion for many sick children.

"It’s fun being with her," said Airyanna, a leukemia patient whose favorite subject is math. "It makes me feel better."

So when she awakened, a still-sleepy Airyanna, IV pole in hand, wandered from her room down the hall to join Fernandes’ other students in a science experiment.

In the floor’s crowded teen room, they sat squeezed between a jukebox and a foosball table to test an experiment showing the chemical properties of salt and water.

Airyanna yawned throughout her lesson, fifth-grader Michael Nunley had to leave early for X-rays and eighth-grader Terrance James’ IV beeped, signaling the sickle cell patient needed more pain medication. But the children’s "ice fishing" experiment worked, their string lines sticking to salt-topped, melting ice cubes bobbing in a bowl of water.

For the 31-year-old Fernandes and her students it was a typical class – and a success. "One (patient) is either coming or going, or they are beeping," she said. "I’m always going back and forth."

Feels like a one-room schoolhouse

Fernandes’ lessons, conducted in the teen room or at bedside, are often spontaneous and frequently cut short by doctor visits, X-rays and treatment. Some of her students come with homework prepared for them by their regular teachers. For other children, she must call their schools to get assignments. And for patients with a less-stable school career, she follows California’s grade-level standards to develop lessons.

Trained as an elementary-school teacher, Fernandes now works students ranging from kindergarten through high school.

"This is like the one-room schoolhouse," she said. "It’s interesting to me."

The resources and structure of the hospital school are far more limited than the Danville private school where she once worked, but Fernandes says she wouldn’t want to leave UC Davis, where she has worked for close to two years. She only wishes she could do more for her students.

"These children," she said, "deserve school."

Position was a perfect fit for teacher

When Fernandes moved from Walnut Creek to Davis to be closer to family, she looked for a job in the area that would combine her interest in medicine and teaching. For several years during college at UC Berkeley, Fernandes worked as a hospital communications coordinator, running messages and files back from the front desk to doctors and nurses. But she also became known at Alta Bates and John Muir medical centers as "a kid person" who would play with children admitted to her floor, Fernandes said.

She was originally hired to work part-time at UC Davis through a yearlong grant from the Children’s Miracle Network. This school year, for the first time, Fernandes is working fulltime though an arrangement with the local Sacramento City Unified School District, which pays her salary. The medical center hopes to hire another teacher to ease Fernandes’ load and enable children with shorter hospital stays to also get help.

Learning fosters health, research says

Before Fernandes arrived, the children at the medical center had no schoolteacher. Instructing them was left to a combination of parents, dedicated home teachers and the child-life specialists in pediatrics who help children deal with the emotional side of being sick. Without a regular schedule, patients often spent much of their days watching TV or playing video games, said Bob Byrd, an assistant professor of pediatrics who was one of a group of staff members who pushed to have Fernandes’ position created.

"(Watching TV) doesn’t help them develop," Byrd said. "It helps them pass the time."

In his research, Byrd studies the connections between pediatric care and schooling. When a sick child is stimulated academically, he said, it promotes the "right mind-body connections."

Jean Cain, Airyanna’s mom, appreciates the academic push Fernandes gives her daughter.

"We tried to have school for a while, but we weren’t quite the motivators that Nicole is," Cain said. "We didn’t have the classroom setting, and that’s what Airyanna looks forward to."

But the wrong kind of teacher could turn an ailing child even further away from school, Byrd said. Fernandes is the right teacher.

"She has the right kind of energy and a warm smile," he said. "She’s sure to give the kids positive strokes at every opportunity without giving them false strokes. I’m really committed to making sure that we keep her."