BY MATT MACKINDER
Clarkston News Staff Writer

Jaxon Boisclair missed the first part of eighth grade at Clarkston Junior High due to inflammatory bowel disease and ulcerative colitis.
But he didn’t miss any class time thanks to his trusty robot.
“I’d be able to just sit down on my desk around my bed and just with the keyboard on my computer, I could control it and could see everyone, and they could see me, too,” said Boisclair, who used a learning robot provided by Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. “It was very cool. I did do some online courses for my advanced classes. I went to language arts, band and social studies. Band was more like a way to listen to what they’re doing while I would work on my online stuff.”
The wheeled, remote-controlled robot allowed him to take part in school activities even though he physically wasn’t there.
“I think it was great,” said Boisclair, son of Elisabeth and Jonathan Clark, and Bret Boisclair. “You know, there will be kids gone for like a month and then they miss everything. They get a couple worksheets that they had to do but that’s not enough. They come back to school with stacks of homework.”
Now with a clean bill of health, he is back at school and the robot is back at Beaumont.
“I do prefer to be here rather than using the robot, definitely,” said Jaxon , who plays the saxophone in the junior high band. “I like using paper and pencil rather than doing it online on the computer, but it was a lot easier because with the robot, I got a gist of where my classes were and where to go, so it was easier for me just to just come in and go to my classes.”
Laura Anderson, junior high building aide, was Jaxon’s homebound teacher, coordinating what he had to do at school, bringing things home, and acting as a liaison between the school and home.
“Most homebound teachers aren’t actually in the buildings, but I’m also employed here, so it worked out well with my schedule that I could actually coordinate the robot system as well,” Anderson said.
Jaxon said when he was first diagnosed with IBD and had the operations, he could barely walk, was too weak to go to school, and had to use a walker and colostomy bag once he was home from the hospital.
He’s now back living a normal everyday life.
“The nice thing about the robot was that not only was there video, but there’s also audio so you can communicate with teachers and students,” Anderson said. “So even though you’re not physically here, you still have that ability to interact in different groups.”
“Sometimes, the robot would lose connection and I’d get logged out and then the students would log me back in and I’d be somewhere else,” said Jaxon . “Then they would have to carry the robot to my next class.”
“That became normal,” added Anderson.
Jaxon added that he could have dealt with school without the robot, but “it would have been a lot harder.”
“It would have been way, way worse,” he said. “I could have looked at the teachers’ Google classrooms and looked at their websites, but I wouldn’t have got the closest thing to face-to-face interaction.”
Clarkston Junior High Principal Adam Kern loved seeing the benefits of the robot do great things for Boisclair.
“To me, it’s been a great thing to help him get connected, just as an eighth grader coming into the building who hadn’t ever been in the building as a student at that point,” Kern said. “I think that was a good way to help Jaxon get connected to other kids in the school, see his buddies, still have a social aspect of it, meet his teachers. He was able to get a sense of the building and where things are at, so when he came back, he wasn’t coming in blind.”
Jaxon offered advice for other kids that may need the opportunity to use the robot in the future.
“Just do it,” he said. “It can be hard at first and it can be frustrating sometimes because you just want to be there, but I just think it gives you such a head start than just stepping in to school. It was a lot easier coming in and the only classes I missed were the ones I was doing online and a study hall. It was such an easy transition.”