Principal Ryan Tomlin recently spoke to CNA teacher Emily Weesner’s classes during a unit on the heart. Tomlin fosters a child with  hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a rare disorder,  and he spoke to the students about the challenges and day to day life of caring for this child.

“Mr. Tomlin has a fostered baby that they just took in that has a hypoplastic left heart and I wanted the kids to understand what it means to have the care for one of these children and how sick they are,” Weesner said. “So I just asked Mr. Tomlin to come speak to have two worlds collide so the students could understand in a tangible way.”

The child’s mother had her rights with the child taken from her so she was sent to CPS. After many weeks of being in the hospital, Tomlin and his wife fostered the child to give her a loving home.

“My sister in-law is a nurse practitioner in Dallas and she was taking care of her, and she is a nurse practitioner for a cardiologist, and so she was caring for this girl, and the mom had to give this child to CPS and the child had nowhere to go,” Tomlin said. “So she was in the hospital about 3 weeks, she had heart surgery at birth and she had her second heart surgery about 6 or 7 weeks ago.”

Tomlin spoke to the students about the process of adopting this child and the struggle this child has been through. He also told them about the care, and dealing with the trauma this girl has experienced.

“First of all, it has opened our eyes to the orphan. Many people don’t want to go off and dive into this, so there’s more of these children sitting places whether it be homes where they’re just sitting there and not getting true love and care because their needs are so severe,” Tomlin said. “So it opened our eyes to how many more there are and that because of their condition, they don’t have any care.”