The path to this moment — when tears slipped from a grandmother’s eyes — had wound its way door by door through neighborhoods that are hurting.

Like many of LINC’s Caring Communities site coordinators, Danisha Clarkson was out in the field helping her partner school reach families of children who were unaccounted for or needed help in the new school year.

She carried a list of names of a dozen Banneker Elementary School children who had not logged on during the opening days of online classes for the Kansas City Public Schools and whose families were proving unreachable by phone.

She knocked on the doors of houses “that didn’t look lived-in, or livable,” Clarkson said. Children’s voices sounded furtively behind the door of one house, where there were no adult voices or anyone to answer her knocks.

One family's name was among six listed on a handwritten note taped to the mailbox of one housing unit that said do not leave mail for these people who do not live here anymore.

But here now was one of the children on her list — a fifth-grade girl — meeting her in the yard with a smile. The girl led the way to the porch and called out for her grandmother, who stepped out to see Clarkson dressed in her LINC blue, ID badge, and mask.

Who are you? She wanted to know. And her granddaughter answered:

“It’s Ms D! The LINC principal!”

LINC’s mission, playing out in 52 school sites across six school districts, was about to connect another family to its Caring Community.

The child’s guardian said she had diabetes and had to abandon her place in the line of people waiting to get their children’s computers before the start of the school year. Clarkson could help her with that by arranging to get her directly to the district’s tech team without waiting, she said.

But then, after a meaningful moment of silence, Clarkson asked, “Is there anything else you need?”

The woman’s eyes watered, Clarkson said, and she told of how she needed food. She knew the school district had buses delivering meals, but without a phone or internet she did not know where or when the buses came.

Clarkson could help her with that too. It was “humbling” to be out among the families, Clarkson says, and she was “so glad” to help.

Gettin’ jiggy with it

The pandemic school season has been hard, even on many families with effective computers and Internet access, said Hale Cook Elementary School’s LINC site coordinator, Qiana McGee.

McGee meets daily with the school principal to gather the names of parents or guardians who have called with problems or whose children are not appearing in the online classrooms.

Like many of LINC’s program leaders, McGee is a parent engaged in the same struggle. She has five kids at home who she makes sure are logged in and working before she sets off, and she knows it’s hard.

McGee said she paces when she’s on the phone, and she could sense the mother on the other end of a call this week pacing as well as she vented her “utter frustration” in making the virtual education work.

McGee shared ideas: Get her children headphones, they didn’t need to be expensive; and she told her an idea she had deployed in her own home of getting poster board to erect cubicle-like walls on the table to help keep her children undistracted from each other. Each child can decorate their own space. LINC could help her get the materials if needed.

“You could hear how happy and joyful she was,” McGee said. A couple of the parents in her LINC program are social workers — professional problem solvers — and McGee has engaged them in helping gather and share ideas.

In Hickman Mills, Millennium at Santa Fe Elementary School’s LINC site coordinator Jene Counts has been helping get children’s books into homes. She is planning a drive-through book giveaway with materials LINC gets from First Book. She’s working with Kansas City Community Gardens to design a vertical garden for the school and the community.

But it is her experience helping with the schooling of her nieces that is fostering the same enthusiasm for sharing ideas with her LINC families, including online education and exercise programs. One of her favorites? Phil Wright’s Parent Jam, “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.”

Behold the masked children

Wherever LINC’s partner districts bring children back into their school buildings, LINC is there with its before- and after-school programs — not without some initial nervousness for those charged with making it happen.

“I was apprehensive,” said Site Coordinator Lindsay Bosse, remembering the intense preparation to open at Topping Elementary School in the North Kansas City School District.

But two weeks in, staff and more than 50 enrolled children have quickly adapted to a regimen that includes dot-marked spacing in the halls, temperature checks, distancing in spread-out classrooms, lots of hand-washing, disinfectant spray, surface wash-downs — and masks.

“The kids are doing really well,” Bosse said. “The masks don’t even seem to bother them.”

And the parents have been flexible and understanding, Bosse said.

“The kids are resilient,” she said. “The parents are resilient. The staff are resilient.”

In Grandview, LINC’s sites are preparing for lower elementary grades to begin in-person classes Sept. 28, and that also means expanding LINC’s afternoon/evening meal program with Harvesters to serve the wider community, said LINC’s site coordinator at Meadowmere Elementary, Adrian Wilson.

LINC will be providing “grab-and-go” meals that children in the program can eat in their classrooms or take with them if they are picked up early. And between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. every day the meals will also be ready curbside for any children up to age 18 in the community.

Plus, a partnership with nearby Trinity Lutheran Church has volunteers ready to deliver meals to families that don’t have transportation to the school.

Wilson knows the burden of feeding a house full of children. He has four of his own, he said, “and they eat.”

A lot of families have suffered job losses or furloughs, he said, and many that haven’t received or qualified for food stamps are facing difficulties. So “any kid in the neighborhood can drive up, walk up or ride their bike up . . . and if they can’t get here, we’ll take it to them curbside.”

‘Hey, LINC Caring Communities?’

Whatever the call, LINC tries to help. Helping distribute food in the Center School District. Hickman Mills, too. Helping schools pass out computers and hot spots. Creating a summer virtual chess program and tournament. Pushing a citywide voter registration effort.

“I am very thankful,” LINC’s Fort Osage Elm Grove Elementary School Site Coordinator Raul Lopez Gomez said about the opportunities for community-boosting partnerships.

As Fort Osage prepared to open its schools for elementary students, LINC helped Elm Grove set up new garden troughs ready to be turned into a community garden by the school and its children. LINC provided food and garden tools.

While the demand for help might be higher during the pandemic, the work itself is not new, said Steve McClellan, LINC’s site coordinator at Cler-Mont Elementary in Fort Osage.

LINC all along had a knack for accumulating food, clothing and other supplies for children, as well as school supplies so teachers “don’t have to go into their own pocket,” McClellan said.

But it is different now, with so many families that had to rely on multiple part-time jobs to sustain their families having lost one or both.

The generosity works both ways through LINC, he said. LINC is helping partners like Susquehanna Baptist Church connect with families in need. Families not only know they can look to LINC for help, but they also know they can look to LINC when they want to give.

“I was doing bus duty out front of the school,” McClellan said, “and a parent came up to me and asked, ‘Hey, are you LINC Caring Communities? Can I donate a bag of clothes?’”

Yes, of course. Yes.

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer