ABC (2009-11) (8회)

[도현주]

STORY 20. PERSON OF THE WEEK

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally tonight, our "Person of the Week."  We've all heard the drill when we board a flight.  Turn off the blackberries, buckle up, check that exit.  It's so routine, we barely hear it.  But Bob Woodruff found one flight attendant who adds something special to her preflight announcement, and it gets everyone's attention.

ROBIN SCHMIDT (FLIGHT ATTENDANT): Thank you so much for your attention, and welcome aboard.

BOB WOODRUFF: Delta Airlines flight attendant Robin Schmidt has an announcement to make and it has nothing to do with seat belts.

ROBIN SCHMIDT: I would love to ask for your help with a very special project.  Every year, I adopt soldiers that are away on deployment and I send them care packages and journals.  If you could write some words of encouragement, prayers, draw pictures, tell jokes.

BOB WOODRUFF: The journals are passed from passenger to passenger.  On this day 148 people traveling from Cincinnati to Boston are writing to Marine Corporal Leo Romero in Afghanistan.

BOB WOODRUFF: It makes it very personal.

SHARON MADERA (PASSENGER): It is.  It's very personal.  You know, I don't know what he looks like.  I don't know what he's doing right now but I hope that the words that I and other people write, you know, make it a little easier for him.

BOB WOODRUFF: How did this start?

ROBIN SCHMIDT: What started me adopting soldiers was 9/11.  Watching the towers fall.  I just made the commitment that I would always do whatever I could to support our soldiers any way that I possibly could.

BOB WOODRUFF: Schmidt has kept her promise, adopting 73 troops in the past seven years.  She finds them on planes, Facebook, and by word of mouth.  She met her first on a Delta military charter.

ROBIN SCHMIDT: I had an airplane full of men that were flirting with all of us and one of them said to me, "I need a sugar mama to adopt me while I'm gone on my deployment.  I don't care what you send me just send me mail with my name on it.  I want my name called at mail call."

BOB WOODRUFF: For soldiers serving far from home, mail call is often the high point of their day.  Schmidt can be very creative.

ROBIN SCHMIDT: I had this tremendous idea to send a Tigger pinata over to one of the soldiers that I was supporting over in Afghanistan.

SERGEANT ED REES (OREGON NATIONAL GUARD): The Tigger pinata was packed with candy and stuff like that.  It sort of blew me away.

BOB WOODRUFF: So Rees and his fellow soldiers threw a pinata party for local children.

SERGEANT ED REES: Most of us had played with pinatas when we were kids.  And so it sort of took us back and had this real connection for us with the children.

BOB WOODRUFF: The gifts are great, but soldiers say it's the journals that really hit home.

ROBIN SCHMIDT:  "Always be strong and proud.  Thank you for keeping us safe.  You are brave and a hero, not too many people can say that."

SERGEANT ED REES: It just really connects you with each individual person.  It really brings your spirits up.  It makes you feel like what you're doing is really the right thing.  It's amazing.

BOB WOODRUFF: The compassion and love Schmidt shows the soldiers is contagious.

ROBIN SCHMIDT: For me this isn't about war, it's not about politics.  It's about honoring and absolutely saluting the soldiers for their sacrifices that they make every single day.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And so we choose Robin Schmidt, who says some of the people she supported over the years are now her closest friends, and that reward is bigger than anything.

STORY 21.  DO AS I SAY

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You don't need an MD to know that washing your hands is one of the easiest and most effective ways to stop the spread of swine flu and other diseases.  The authors of the best selling book "Freakonomics", though. have uncovered some surprising information about who hasn't been following this basic advice.  Here's John Berman.

JOHN BERMAN: It's been like the national battle hymn against H1N1, swine flu.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (UNITED STATES): Keep your hands washed.

SPOKESPERSON (MALE): Everyone to wash their hands frequently.

ELMO ("SESAME STREET"): Wash your hands with Elmo.  Wash, wash, wash.

JOHN BERMAN: Sounds easy, right?  But you will never guess who might not be doing it as well as they should.

STEPHEN DUBNER (CO-AUTHOR): Doctors should wash their hands.  We've known it for 160 years.  And yet, changing behavior is really hard.  Doctors don't do it as well as they should.

JOHN BERMAN: Or as well as they think.  Steven Dubner and Steven Levitt pointed to a study in Australia, where doctors claimed they were washing their hands 73% of the time.  But when nurses spied on them, it turned out to be just 9% of the time.

How can it be?  How come these doctors think they wash their hands more?

STEVEN LEVITT (CO-AUTHOR): When you walk up to a doctor and you ask him how often he washes his hands, it's embarrassing.  You know, what kind of self-respecting doctor is to say, "About one out of ten times."  I mean, they just can't say that.

JOHN BERMAN: At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, they devised a novel solution to solving the problem of hand/mind coordination.  They asked physicians to culture their hands in a Petri dish.

DOCTOR PAUL SILKA (CHIEF OF STAFF): We had to give them a visual example of what their hands would look like if they didn't wash their hands.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And what do they look like?

DOCTOR PAUL SILKA: They look terrible.

JOHN BERMAN: Nasty.

DOCTOR PAUL SILKA : And they looked nasty.

JOHN BERMAN: It was so nasty they put this picture on all the hospital screen savers.  Then, the hand washing rate rose to nearly 100%.  Nothing like the gross out factor.

DOCTOR PAUL SILKA: Most people gasped.  It's pretty astounding.  Physicians usually take a deep breath and they realize that they're putting patients at risk if they're not executing on hand hygiene.

JOHN BERMAN: By the way, what did my hand look like in the petri dish?  Check out that big gray blotch of bacteria.  If that won't get you to the sink, nothing will.  John Berman, ABC News, Los Angeles.

STORY 22. SCHOOL'S OUT

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And there is trouble in another island paradise.  Officials in Hawaii shut all public schools today, launching a plan to have classes just four days a week to save millions of dollars.  Now, there's no question Hawaii faces a budget crisis, but is the state saving teachers' jobs at the expense of students?  David Wright has that story.

DAVID WRIGHT: The prospect of a three-day weekend in Hawaii of all places doesn't bother many school children.

CHILD (HAWAII): Do this homework.  Going to do it, so, you're going to make all the difference.

DAVID WRIGHT: But for parents, it's another matter.

PARENT (HAWAII): As a parent, I'm pretty angry.

DAVID WRIGHT: Angry that, Hawaii is going to a four-day school week, the shortest in the nation.  Even though Hawaii already ranks near the bottom in national test scores.

GARRETT TOGUCHI (CHAIRPERSON): It's not fun, believe me, but you know, we got to face our challenges and not run away from them.

DAVID WRIGHT: The state is so strapped for cash because of the recession, the governor cut 14% from the school budget.

RUSS WHITEHURST (DIRECTOR): One could imagine letting teachers go, reducing staff, and increasing class size, and retaining the best performing teachers.

DAVID WRIGHT: Not Hawaii.  They decided not to lay off any teachers.  Instead, they're saying aloha to "furlough Fridays."

WIL OKABE (PRESIDENT): We felt that by having the furlough days, keeps more people working.

GARRETT TOGUCHI: This is not the best option that I think anybody would want, but it's what we have arrived at.

DAVID WRIGHT: In fact, it's exactly the opposite of what the President wants in terms of improving public schools.  And Hawaii is the President's home state.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (UNITED STATES): I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas.

DAVID WRIGHT: The President often points out that the American school year is among the shortest in the world.  180 days on average.  In Hawaii, it'll now be 163.  Compare that to Japan, 243 days or South Korea, 220 days.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America.

DAVID WRIGHT: Hawaii's budget solution is now the parents' problem.

PARENT: I'll be teacher, mom, homemaker, I'll be doing it all myself.

DAVID WRIGHT: And the students are likely to fall even further behind.  David Wright, ABC News, Washington.