Northpinellas: Teacher honored for work with homebound

Sometimes, she visits students at their homes. Other times she conducts class by conference call. Then there are the nights she spends working on the Homework Helpline to help with assignments.

For her efforts, Morse, who teaches homebound and hospitalized students, has been named by USA Today as a representative of outstanding teaching in the nation. She was named to the All-USA Teacher First Team, a group of 20 individuals and teacher teams selected by a panel of educators from more than 300 nominations. The school system will be given $2,500 for her award.

Another Pinellas County educator, Margo Lynn Evancho, who teaches fourth grade at Melrose Elementary communications magnet in St. Petersburg, earned an honorable mention for her work.

Morse, 56, is one of 22 teachers in the Pinellas County school system's program to help sick students stay up to speed with their classmates.

Teaching them requires some creative solutions.

In addition to the home visits and conference calls, Morse creates lab kits students can do at home such as germinating seeds. In between home visits she has her students maintain a journal, and she pioneered the use of the computer for lesson plans and tracking progress.

Because the number of students in the program can change by the week, she has to be prepared to juggle her schedule and her lesson plans. She teaches everything from biology to geometry to history to French 3.

"All Homebound teachers are stretched like that," Morse said. "You have to have an incredible breadth of knowledge."

Luckily the world traveler has a lot to draw on. She is a former nun who also has driven a cab, taught prep school and college, run an organic goat farm and taught international students in Iran just before the Shah was overthrown. Her personal life is filled with diverse interests, from her work with the Tampa Bay Women's Chorus to a self-published book of daily prayer she is working on.

"Everything in my life has prepared me in one way or the other for this job."

"The wide variety in her background enables her to connect with just about anyone," said Kathryn Blair, supervisor of the Homebound/Hospital Program who nominated Morse for the award. "And she is so dedicated to her students. She imparts her passion for her subjects because she knows we need to make them lifelong learners."

It's a job where Morse can count on seeing two or three of her students die each year.

How does she handle it? "You cry. Sometimes a year later you still cry. You cry with the families if it's appropriate, and you cry alone by yourself if it's not."

Her efforts to educate these students often begin with a phone call.

A 9:15 a.m. marine science class is conducted by conference call. On the line are a boy out for three weeks with mononucleosis, a girl who just had a baby, another girl with emotional problems and a boy with cystic fibrosis who still attends his regular high school part time.

Morse sits in a spare, curtainless office the size of a walk-in closet, a textbook open before her as she stares intently at a square gray office phone, leaning forward with her hands gripping the edge of the desk as if she may crawl through the phone line at any moment.

She lets long silences hang in the air as she questions the students through the lessons of groundwater and conservation.

"Why doesn't water just fall through the earth? What keeps it in place?" she asks. Silence. "It's a four-letter word," she hints. More silence. When a tentative "rock?" finally squawks through the phone line, she smiles at the phone, nodding eagerly, "Terrific."

The next day, she is on the road. First up is Donna Bishop, 17, whose diabetes played pingpong with her body's system when she hit adolescence, causing her to miss so much school she was on the verge of failing.

"Miss Morse really helped me through this, she was so understanding," Donna said. "In the beginning I failed one of her classes and I kind of felt like I let her down so I started working a lot harder."

She's back on the honor roll. She expects to graduate in January 2003 and plans to go to college.

Morse pushes them hard to keep up, especially since they have to do a lot of work on their own, in between doctor appointments.

"The last thing they need after all this is to go back to the classroom and be behind," Morse said. "That would be devastating."

Winning the USA Today award, she hopes, highlights the work of all the teachers in the Homebound program.

"I'm really tired of people thinking the Homebound teachers are babysitters," Morse said. "We are all educators who work hard and have to be extremely versatile."

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