This vision of an oasis for Hickman Mills families comes winging in on generosity, ingenuity and grit.

“This takes so much juice,” district electrician Felix Labrador said. He’s a tool-belted, cap-wearing problem solver surveying the conduits, ducts and drains he engineered to power a newly arrived phalanx of 10 washers and dryers.

“Had to recalculate the electrical load . . . put in four-inch drains . . . the wiring was tough . . .”

But he sees what Hickman Mills Superintendent Yolanda Cargile imagined since she found herself at the lead of this southeast Kansas City school district and its determined community where so many families strive for a foothold for their children.

This laundry room program — “Loads of Love” — is just one service, along with a free attorney’s office, a children’s library, an enrollment center and language services, in a resource center that is coming to life in the district’s old administration building at 9000 Old Santa Fe Road.

Labrador is imagining this room with all five of its dryers humming — and parents with their children watching the tumbling clothes that they will wear clean to class.

“Bullying is a thing,” Labrador said. “Kids are afraid. If we can help curb some of that, the kids will feel more comfortable coming to school.”

So much is coming together, Cargile said.

• The United Way of Greater Kansas City donated the washers and dryers.

• The Local Investment Commission (LINC) collaborated with Legal Aid of Western Missouri to bring the Justice in the Schools program to Hickman Mills to give families a chance at stability that only legal representation can provide in the face of eviction or guardianship issues or debt crises or threats of domestic violence.

• LINC and Turn the Page KC, with grants through First Book, is stocking a library of books that children can take home when their families come to the resource center to enroll in school or visit the language services.

“We are so grateful for the support,” Cargile said. “As the plan began to morph, I saw we were creating the resource center I had been speaking about since 2017.”

“It’s about building trust with our families,” she said. “It’s about access to resources. It’s an honor,” she said, that the district can be “a support for our community.”

Help along a hard road

In Hickman Mills, Missouri records show, 38 percent of the children in its classrooms moved in or out of district classrooms in 2018-2019 — the second highest mobility rate in the region, behind only the Kansas City Public Schools, and well above the state mobility rate of 22 percent.

Principals, teachers and counselors know that many of those moving children are in families scattered by housing stress.

In the state’s latest report, from 2018, 482 of the 5,565 children enrolled in the district were classified homeless — meaning their families lived in shelters or motels or out of their cars or doubled up, sharing the couches and basements of others.

Those children represented 8.6 percent of the district’s enrollment, the highest percentage of Missouri districts in the region, and more than double the state homeless rate of 4.1 percent.

Legal Aid attorney Garrett Christensen has witnessed the strain on families and schools — growing up in Raytown, as a teacher trained by Teach for America and working in the Kansas City Public Schools, as a young attorney in Minnesota’s Children’s Law Center and now in Hickman Mills.

Since the Justice in the Schools office opened in the new center in January, he and legal intern Tamika Ross from Washburn University School of Law are already looking into a dozen requests for help.

“We’re focused on the student mobility crisis,” Christensen said. “It can have a devastating impact on attendance and student achievement.”

LINC worked with the district and Legal Aid of Western Missouri to bring in Justice in the Schools, which leverages court records gathered by the Kansas City Eviction Project with the support of Social Solutions data software to anticipate a family’s impending housing crisis.

Christensen and Ross have become the faces of that effort in Hickman Mills — in the spirit felt throughout the resource center that says we understand, and we want to help.

Christensen looks to his upbringing, his classroom experience and moments like the revelations of an African American Studies course at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

“We are diverse but we are part of this shared history we don’t know much about,” he said.

When Ross receives the families who come for help, part of her understanding lies in a UMKC class experience — ‘Self’ in a Multicultural Society — and the testimony of pain students shared.

“It forces you to think of others,” she said.

They already have a list of families in need of legal help. Legal Aid has income requirements that determine what families qualify for help, and some court issues, like criminal cases, they can’t take on. But many families will get relief that would have been out of their reach.

“It’s exciting to learn what Hickman Mills is trying to do to help their families,” Ross said.

A perfect fit

The district itself was looking for a breath of stability. Financial strains and declining enrollment compelled the closure of some of the district’s schools going into the 2019-2020 school year.

Its enrollment office had moved around the district.

In the shuffle, administrative offices had been consolidated into the district’s Baptiste Center.

That’s when Dan Weakley, the district’s executive director of operations, saw an opportunity.

The vacated administrative building sits in the middle of the district, close to major thoroughfares and connected to public transportation.

“It could be a unified place in the center of the district for all our enrollment services,” he said.

“It just fit our needs, and all our families’ needs.”

The district is adding the cost of providing a security guard, Cargile said, but the bulk of the services are donated to the district or use existing district personnel who have been relocated there.

And she hasn’t stopped looking for ideas of more programs to bring into the center.

“Healthy families yield healthy children,” she said. “We will continue to connect with partners. If we have a chance to offer more resources I will say, ‘Yes!’ until we run out of space.”

“And then we’ll look for more someplace else.”

By Joe Robertson, LINC writer