By Zach Patberg
The school's sentiments exactly.Last Thursday, Marshall Oreck, vice president at Oreck Corp., donated environmentally safe vacuum cleaners and three air purifiers to the Fresh Meadows preschool, which coincidentally sits a block from Hoover Avenue.The institution itself is unique. Coupled with a normal curriculum of sing-alongs and art projects involving Elmer's glue and construction paper, its teachers/specialists must also psychotheraputically evaluate the some 150 developmentally delayed toddlers in their 10 classrooms, which have labels like Jelly Beans, Busy Bees and Little Angels.Oreck's state-of-the-art gifts are intended to limit the amount of dust floating in these classrooms. Along with various handicaps the young students face, such as speech and learning problems, about a quarter of them also suffer from asthma — a condition much exacerbated by inhaling air-born particles, according to school program director Nick Pascucci.In a presentation to 30 or so 4-year-olds, Oreck demonstrated how his top-loading vacuum holds in dirt better than bottom-loaders, and pointed to the double filtration collection bags as a second padlock — leaving dirt no room to escape and invade young lungs.”This one's the ultimate,” he said.The purifiers, for their part, can recycle the air in a 30-by-30-foot room six times an hour, Oreck said.Oreck was first approached a month ago at a Manhattan event by Councilman James Gennaro (D-Fresh Meadows), who invited the appliance innovator to donate his product to Parsons.”I told him I got a great little school that can benefit from this,” said Gennaro, who chairs the Council's environmental committee.The donations came as a prelude to Friday's Earth Day and on the heels of last week's passage of a five-bill clean-air package that will require 95 percent of the city's school, transit and sightseeing buses and garbage trucks to emit as little exhaust as possible.The students at Parsons Preschool represent only a small fraction of the city's 300,000 asthmatic children — a group that is almost twice as likely to be hospitalized for the condition than the country as a whole, the Health Department reported.And it is just another burden for the special needs youngsters at Parsons, where in one class only half of those old enough to begin kindergarten will do so this year as fully integrated students, said Beatrice Pascucci, the school's executive director.But when one of the children is found to be capable of joining the regular curriculum, emotions run high, Pascucci said. “When a child who never speaks all of a sudden speaks, it whispers through the whole school,” she said. “And parents cry with joy in the hallways.”Reach reporter Zach Patberg by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
