It’s a Monday morning, and in the big union hall of Sheet Metal Workers’ Local 73, a tall, masked man in a blue suit is darting around with the zeal of a circus impresario. He claims he’s off caffeine, meaning he has recently renounced Diet Coke, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he moves and talks.
The hall, which in normal times is the home of union meetings and the annual Breakfast with Santa, has been turned into a giant vaccination clinic, and the man speeds through the crowd with hellos and waves and fist bumps.
“Hey, folks, how you doing?”
“You’re done! You’re good to go!”
“Take a picture of your vaccination card! Make a copy! Laminate it!”
And then he spots a boy of 12 or so who sits in a black, plastic chair, crying. He crouches next to the boy, eye to eye, grows still. He knows needles can be scary. So can crowds.
“I’m Dr. Suchinski,” he says.
The boy nods, sniffles.
“We’re gonna get you out of here.”
The boy removes his glasses, brushes away tears, tries to smile.
“You’re a role model for everyone else,” Dr. Suchinski says.
“Thank you,” the boy says. “Thank you.”
“Can I get a fist bump?” the impresario says. They bump, and then he’s off again.
To watch Kevin Suchinski, you wouldn’t know he has spent a fair amount of time lately crying too, usually in his car on the way to and from work. As the superintendent of Hillside District 93, he feels the weight of keeping his students and teachers safe during the pandemic, and he figured out early on that protecting the school meant protecting the whole community. The job is endless.
On this first Monday in June, he feels other weights too. It’s the day his mother is entering hospice. And the town’s one elementary school just canceled summer classes because the air conditioning went out. His phone keeps lighting up with updates on both.
But the hundreds of people streaming into the hall for their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine don’t know any of that. All they see is an efficient operation with a friendly impresario who in the confusing time of COVID-19 has earned the appreciation of pretty much everyone he meets.
“He’s been a badass on this, he really has,” says Joe Michalski, a firefighter and paramedic in the Hillside Fire Department, who stands on the sidelines. “He has gone above and beyond.”
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Above and beyond.
It’s a phrase Suchinski uses, too, when he’s talking about the people of Hillside. The school staff. The students. The parents. Mayor Joe Tamburino and other officials. The police and firefighters. The sheet metal workers. The pharmacists at Jewel-Osco.
The willingness of everyone to go above and beyond during the pandemic is one reason he’s excited day after day to make the 30-mile drive from his home in Plainfield, where he lives with his wife and three kids.
Hillside is a village of about 8,000 residents 15 miles west of Chicago. It’s notable for its three cemeteries, whose occupants include Catholic bishops, baseball stars and mobsters, among them Al Capone. The school district consists of only one school, 450 kids in pre-K through eighth grade.
Suchinski grew up a few miles away, in Brighton Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side, with parents who didn’t go to college. When he was younger, he thought about becoming a lawyer but decided instead to heed the advice of a teacher who told him, “Kevin, you’ll be a great teacher because you talk a lot.” He wound up with a Ph.D.
In 2015, he took over as superintendent in Hillside, committed to doing what he could to rectify the inequities that beset the village and surrounding community. He liked the place, its strong sense of family and the relationships the previous superintendent had built with those families, but he knew there was a lot to do.
He also knew that in a school whose families were predominantly Black and Latino, he, as a white man, had a lot to learn.
“It means I have to work harder, make sure I’m listening,” he says. “If you don’t stop and listen, you’re going to be lost.”
Suchinski endured his share of hardships when he was young. He was 19 when his father died by suicide. His mother went to work as a Kmart cashier to support her three kids. Those difficulties, he’s quick to say, may give him insight, but they aren’t the same as the hardships wrought by systemic racism.
When COVID-19 came, systemic inequities — in health care, employment, transportation — were vividly exposed all over the country. Suchinski resolved early on not to dawdle while they got worse in Hillside.
So when kids were forced to attend school at home, he found money to help the needy ones get laptops and Wi-Fi. Grab-and-go lunch was made available to all students. And he was determined to get as many students safely back to school as soon as possible. That resolve led him to Beth Heller.
“Kevin reached out to me in early February, saying, ‘I need your test,'” says Heller, senior director for external relations at SHIELD Illinois. “I knew immediately he was a visionary.”
SHIELD Illinois is a COVID-19 screening program that uses a saliva-based test to detect the virus. It was invented by faculty at the University of Illinois and initially used with university students. It’s designed to detect asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers and have them quarantine before they spread the virus; it was recently made available to public elementary, middle and high schools throughout the state.
From the get-go, Suchinski believed in testing.
“I’m a loudmouth,” he says. “I’m going to scream that this virus is deadly.”
After studying the options, he preferred the SHIELD test. The results were quick, reliable. The procedure was easy. No nasal swabs, just saliva deposited directly into a vial.
“Anyone can drool!” he told his students.
In February, Hillside became the third district in the state to adopt the test, and students and teachers began coming back to the building on a hybrid schedule, meaning never more than half the students were there at a time. The tests were optional, but enough students and teachers took them that they seemed to make a difference.
Still, he knew that student and staff testing alone couldn’t stop the virus. He expanded his efforts.
He opened up the school testing to anyone in the community. As soon as vaccines were available, he recruited Jewel-Osco to put on local vaccination clinics. After a call from the mayor, the sheet metal workers union gladly offered its union hall. No stairs. Big parking lot. Easy in, easy out. Perfect.
“He’s created this bubble around the community,” says Heller, who invited him to talk about his experience a few days ago at an 800-person Zoom gathering co-hosted with the Illinois Department of Public Health.
By now, nearly 6,000 people have been vaccinated through the Hillside clinics. Nearly 3,000 tests have been administered. Mortality and infection rates are way down. Suchinski is the first to say it’s taken a village, but such a streamlined operation wouldn’t have happened without him.
“Kevin was the catalyst,” Joe Beck, director of communications for the village, said as he watched Suchinski speed around the vaccination clinic Monday. “You can see, he never stops.”
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Suchinski often looks out the window of his school office and across West Harrison Street at the gray headstones of Mount Carmel Cemetery. The trees are brown and bare in winter, green and full in summer.
“It gives you a perspective on life,” he says.
He has taken a break from Monday’s vaccination clinic to visit the school. It’s empty, but the air conditioning is back on.
Today, as on many days, when he looks at the cemetery, he thinks of a former student at another school where he was once principal. The student is buried out in the distance, in the graveyard next to Mount Carmel. The boy was a runner, hit by a car while crossing a road.
Suchinski reaches for his fat, battered leather satchel, a gift from his wife. He pulls out a forehead thermometer and a handful of masks, grinning as he displays the one that says “White Sox.” Eventually, he finds what he’s looking for.
A letter.
He carries it with him all the time. It was written by the boy who died running, as an assignment from a language arts teacher: Write a letter to yourself about your future hopes and dreams. The teacher planned to send it to the students in their senior year. Instead, the boy’s mother sent it to Suchinski, noting that at his Hillside job he would look out toward her son.
“Dear Me,” the boy’s letter begins.
“I can’t wait for everything that will come,” it ends. “I can’t wait til I get to look back on my life.”
Refolding the letter, preparing to return to the vaccination clinic, Suchinski gets tearful, not for the first or last time that day. He explains that the letter, these handwritten words of a student hoping for everything that will come, symbolizes the reasons he gets up early during these COVID-19 times and stays up late:
“I can’t have anything happen to these kids.”
Twitter @MarySchmich
