Here they came — kids in a masked world, seeing their Caring Communities LINC teachers for the first time since everything changed more than six months ago.

“A couple came in full scream,” said Adrian Wilson, LINC’s site coordinator at Grandview’s Meadowmere Elementary School. “Screaming, ‘Mr. Wilson!’”

“We’re a staff full of huggers,” Wilson said. “After not seeing us for so long, they want to give us hugs.”

Stop!

Staff froze the kids and came up with the next best thing on the spot: Greetings in the form of a popular, funny dance.

“Hit the Woah!”

Everyone is learn new ways to enjoy each other and find comfort as LINC opens after-school programs to serve the K-2 grades opening in Grandview. They followed districts with LINC before- and after-school programs that had been open for elementary grades in the North Kansas City School District.

Preparation and practice are paying off, LINC site coordinators said, with so many precautions — from the separation of the staff from parents in safe drop-offs and pickups, to the spacing throughout the school, the cleaning, the masks, and the way the kids and staff know how to do all of this.

The phasing in of a few grade levels at a time is proving to be a good testing ground for both the school teams during the school day and LINC’s teams before and after.

“I have a peace doing this,” said Shaniece Garlington, LINC’s site coordinator at Conn-West Elementary in Grandview. “It’s very doable and safe.”

Garlington thought of one of her parents, a mother who was clearly anxious about her child’s and her family’s safety, when she was picking her up at the end of that first day.

Garlington had been in the school with the Grandview teaching staff in the days preparing for the in-person opening. She had seen the work. She had watched how the school had kept the children safe by day, and had helped LINC kept them safe after school.

She assured the parent, telling her what she’d witnessed, saying she could assure the parent about her daughter — “that she had a very good day.” And the mother exhaled and said, “I’m so relieved,” Garlington said.

“It’s important,” said LINC’s Butcher-Greene Elementary Site Coordinator Grant Wayman, “that we’re here to support our families. We’re doing our best to comfort those very real fears of what to do about Covid.”

LINC’s leadership and staff faced the same anxiety as parents and teachers in going back into the school buildings, said Brett Campbell, the site coordinator at Belvidere Elementary.

But as the teams entered the second week, “I feel 100% more comfortable,” he said. “Now we’re working on building consistency with our new norm.”

It’s a new protocol for schools that can’t let down their guard, said Kevin Foster, executive director at Genesis School, a charter school that has been serving elementary grades in-person since the start of the school year after Labor Day.

LINC doesn’t run after-school programs at Genesis, but site coordinator Keith Brown directs parent and community involvement.

Genesis has stayed safe, Foster said, and that is a testament not only to the work of the staff but also the patience and cooperation of the parents.

There is a deep feeling of everyone being in this together, he said, as parents accept new realities like a curbside drop-off process — once a stop-and-go moment that now can last 15 minutes or more as the parents can’t get out of their cars, and kids are escorted one-by-one through a screening process.

“Parents are amazing,” he said. Everyone tends to the precise safety cautions because it’s understood that “it could all collapse like a house of cards.”

And where old favorite programs can’t happen the way they did before, LINC staff are taking them online.

Genesis’ generational mentoring program, Project Sankofa, in which community leaders and elders set children looking forward with inspired visions of themselves, has been gathering the kids in virtual rooms, Keith Brown said.

“We have to have a sense of urgency,” he said, “to undergird the child’s academic aspirations. LINC becomes a linchpin because of the resources we provide.”

In the Kansas City, Center and Hickman Mills school districts, where all children are still in virtual classrooms, LINC afterschool activities, like Kansas City Young Audiences, gather online, filling computer screens with friends who yearn to be together again.

“There’s Reilyn!” LINC lead staff Jackie Rhodeman at Troost Elementary School said, waving to each child as they popped in for the class. “Hi Quenae!”

You can see teachers, parents, children and LINC getting stronger, said LINC’s Troost Site Coordinator Augustus Zuo.

“It challenges you to be creative to prepare you for the unknown,” he said. “It brings creativity and the opportunity to learn new things and see how the future looks.”

“And our presence is important,” he added. “It reinforces that we are still here.”

Even online, sitting in his house just as he had for his school classes that day, LINC student Shamar felt transported into a familiar, comfortable place in the after-school gathering.

“Is LINC over?” Shamar said as Zuo and Rhodeman in their masks were waving back to the smiling children on their screen.

Yes, Zuo said, but just for now. “See you next time!”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer