Oksana Parfilko maintains the laboratory rooms and plans and leads lab activities for science students at New Dorp HS on Staten Island.
What are your responsibilities?
Our school has 19 science classes, five lab rooms and two lab prep rooms. I prepare and assemble the labs and demonstrations for all the science classes, implement safety procedures and protocols, control safe removal of chemical waste, oversee the inventory of supplies, equipment, books and other science materials, and maintain equipment and supplies, including making minor repairs. I also lead lab activities and oversee a student science squad that works with me after school to do maintenance work.
What kinds of experiments do you lead for students?
Many of our labs involve dissection. We dissect rats, sheep brains, fetal pigs, and pig and cow eyes for our biology and anatomy classes. We do physics labs working with magnetism and density. One experiment that gets an excited reaction is called Who Has the Red Disease? Each student receives two cups, one full of water and one empty. One student’s cup has a clear base called sodium hydroxide in the water, but no one knows whose. The sodium hydroxide represents a communicable illness. Students pair up and mix the water from their first cups before pouring it into their second cup, then they repeat, mixing three or four times with different students. At the end, the teacher puts a drop of phenolphthalein into every cup in the classroom. If the water contains the base, it will turn red! From only one original “sick” cup of water, it’s now spread to a third of the class. It’s quick, it’s visual, there’s an element of mystery, and it prompts conversations about how invisible pathogens spread.
How do lab experiments change things for students?
Students can’t learn well without hands-on experience. They can read and learn theoretically, but when they try it with their own hands and see it with their own eyes, they better understand it and it stays in their memories forever.
What do schools lose when they don’t have a lab specialist?
Teachers are extremely busy, and all these experiments require a lot of planning and preparation. Even super-enthusiastic teachers who love experiments have little time to prepare them. Schools that don’t have lab specialists run maybe half as many experiments, and they’re losing out on the more high-effort ones, many of which are the most exciting for students.
How does one become a lab specialist?
You must take exams and get a license. The Department of Education is supposed to offer those exams. Twenty years ago, I took them and became a lab specialist. At that time, our UFT functional chapter had 300 lab specialists. Now, the DOE no longer offers these exams, and we have only 39 lab specialists. The union is working to bring back those exams.
How do lab specialists ensure safety?
Every lab has safety rules, and every year our first lesson is about safety. The students learn about when to wear gloves and safety goggles and how to work with hot liquids and open flames. During lab activities, I’m checking to make sure students are wearing the right protective equipment, tying their hair back, taking off jewelry, wearing appropriate clothing and keeping food out of labs with chemicals.
What’s your favorite part of the job?
I love to see the sparkles in my students’ eyes when they see a demonstration or complete an experiment. I love to see my teachers smiling as they watch their students do cool stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do with their heavy teachers’ workloads. I’ve had students move on to become doctors, criminologists and research scientists. These experiences make them start to think about a scientific profession.
—As told to Hannah Brown