‘Ally didn’t let cancer define her.’ Here’s how she passed her legacy on to children

A child in the hospital probably craves some normality. That’s what the Ally Project has been aiming to do for patients at Children’s Mercy Hospital.

The peer tutoring program is named for Ally Baier, a student at Olathe East in the Future Educators Academy program. Ally was also a patient at Children’s Mercy while getting treatment for glioblastoma cancer.

It all came about through an effort from the Elves of Christmas to give her a chance to be a teacher. Ally was able to participate in tutoring patients when the program first started, but she died in May 2020 at age 15.

“It really feels like we’re doing what she would have loved. She was very zany creative and unique,” said Shawna Mazeitis, a hospital-based teacher at Children’s Mercy.

The hospital and the Future Educators Academy have worked together with the Kauffman Foundation to keep it going.

“When you’re in the hospital, you fall behind in your schoolwork, and it’s really hard to ask questions,” said Shelley Staples, a facilitator at the Future Educators Academy. “It’s eye-opening for students. If they haven’t been to the hospital, just seeing how many machines there are and how really you’re isolated in own room. … That was something Ally had been living with.”

Staples coordinated all the tutoring efforts with Mazeitis.

“In the beginning, we just did really easy things like reading stories, and Ally loved reading stories. Then we brought in the whole Ally tutoring groups,” Mazeitis said.

The first group had about nine tutors. These education students got special training from the hospital on how to approach their tutoring role.

Before COVID, because of the distance between the school and the hospital, the Future Educators students would meet with the patients they were tutoring mostly online.

“Students (who were tutors) would read books or do science lessons or come up with lessons and help students (who were patients) have positive social interaction with peers,” Staples said.

Once nearly everyone’s schooling became virtual, online tutoring was difficult. Patients who spent all day at virtual school didn’t want to spend more time online for tutoring, and the tutors weren’t at school to facilitate the tutoring.

To keep up the positive impact to both the student tutors and the student patients, they came up with a new innovation: learning boxes.

Each box has a theme, such as Pete The Cat, Among Us or Hamilton, and contains eight different learning activities created by the tutors. The boxes are decorated, and Mazeitis can pass them out whenever it’s appropriate.

Staples’ students made several dozen boxes to give to participating patients ranging in age from 4 to 21. Each box goes to just one patient, and that patient can keep it.

“My patients have just loved it. They love the hands-on things.

“They had a bit of fatigue with the computer and with online learning last year. The learning boxes were amazing, especially from a teacher’s point of view,” Mazeitis said. “It’s the best thought-out idea I have seen in a long, long time.”

The Hamilton box, for example, included history lessons, a true/false quiz about Alexander Hamilton and a craft activity encouraging the participant to write his or her own song.

Mazeitis said the STEM-based boxes have also been very popular. Several of them have activities for patients to do both in the hospital and once they return home. Many of the patients are in the hospital for a month at time for bone marrow transplants and other treatments.

“They made a really rough situation not just tenable but found a great compromise to still help our patients. That is exactly what Ally was all about,” Mazeitis said.

“Ally didn’t let cancer define her. She just lived her life. She looked at this opportunity not as a sad thing but as, ‘Oh my gosh, I get to actually be a teacher.’”

Staples has plans for more innovation in the future. Right now, she’s working with her students to create virtual escape rooms that are themed in similar ways to the learning boxes but packed with riddles and clues for the patients to solve.