Just drive. Keep picking up taxi fares.

Drive sick. Drive while tortured by an infected tooth. Drive exhausted.

Otherwise, Center School District parent Josh McConnaughey feared, he’d lose the last grip he had on a “home” for his three teenaged sons — the weekly-rate hotel room looking out on wheel-roaring Interstate 435.

“I kept hope,” he said. He had to for his sons. “I tried to stay positive.”

But his oldest son, Xavier, knew. He saw how his dad would deliver him and his brothers to school, drive off to pick up fares in his zTrip taxi, dash them home to the hotel after school, then scramble after more fares. Working 12- to 14-hour days. He saw the bare margin just keeping everyone fed and clothed.

“What if the taxi crashed? What if you got sick?” McConnaughey said, remembering his son’s aching anxiety over the spiral they were in. “Were we stuck to the point to not ever get out of this?”

As McConnaughey retraced these hardest times from the winter of 2019, Stephanie Boydston of Impact Center Schools was listening in on the Zoom call.

In the coming weeks, McConnaughey will be one of the first families to graduate from Impact Center Schools — the Center School District’s community coalition that works to empower families, remove barriers and secure dignified housing.

Boydston listened as McConnaughey relived the anguish of his sons who gracefully carried their fear, making sacrifices even now. Because Xavier, McConnaughey said, hid that his shoes had busted and tried to fix them himself. “I saw the glue job,” the dad said.

Boydston made a note to herself: Get the family new shoes. Because some things Impact Center Schools can do are that easy.

But as for the collective work of Impact Center Schools — marshaling resources, raising funds, picking stone by stone at life’s rock pile that buries so many families?

That’s hard.

Soup kitchens not enough

In early 2019, Impact Center Schools began reaching out through the school district to families that were in shelters or did not have safe or secure housing.

The collective of partners, including Serve the World Charities — where Boydston is program director — Colonial Presbyterian Church, Evangel Church and the Center Education Foundation wanted to follow a model achieved in Kansas City, Kan.

Since 2013, a collaboration in the Kansas City, Kan., School District led by Avenue of Life has shown how combining resources, educating parents and providing essential case management and personal attention can put families back on a secure footing.

Support Impact outreach

Impact Center Schools

• Center Education Foundation

• Serve the World Charities

Impact Hickman Mills

• Hickman Mills School District

Impact KCK

• Avenue of Life

Just handing out food in a soup line or passing out coats from a closet wasn’t enough, said Desiree Monize, executive director and CEO of Avenue of Life, who launched Impact KCK.

The cycle went on, Monize said, and that was the enduring frustration of her previous relief work. The same families kept coming back.

“We wanted to find a way to end it.”

Impact Center Schools is taking on the same mission. Another program — Impact Hickman Mills — is trying to do the same for the Hickman Mills School District at Blue Hills Church.

Impact Center Schools works on the big picture of helping families step out of homelessness — providing classes on finances, job training, home management, health and nutrition; connecting them to resources and payment plans to relieve utility debts and sustain housing.

The key is the “navigator,” a professional case manager who guides families through the maze of social services and bureaucracies, getting documents in order, tracking down birth certificates, tax records, debts and utility arrears, negotiating with landlords.

Impact KCK, a larger program, funds a team of five navigators who, working with dozens of partner agencies and services, has secured safe housing for 446 families, cutting the school district’s homelessness in half.

Impact Center Schools has worked with more than 20 families and so far has placed 12 of them in safe, sustainable housing.

In January 2019, Center’s new program was standing on fresh legs when a counselor at Center High School dialed the phone number of a parent she knew was in need: Josh McConnaughey.

What it’s like to be drowning

Here’s how life unravels.

A venture to join a friend in a startup business out of state failed. McConnaughey’s mother suffered with pancreatic cancer and died. It was August 2017 and McConnaughey had landed back in Kansas City with his family’s savings gone, his marriage coming undone, and no one to help him and their sons.

He struggled in vain to save up money to secure a down payment and initial month’s rent to get into a home. For a while his family moved in with relatives of his wife. But it was too crowded and tension became too great.

His earnings were barely enough to pay the weekly rates of inexpensive hotel rooms. The extra hours driving his taxi kept them afloat, but left him no time to be the father he wanted to be.

“I wasn’t able to do anything but work,” McConnaughey said. “I was stuck.”

They had been in hotels for most of a year when the school counselor called to invite him into the new program. There would be expectations including commitments to attend classes, she told him.

“I told her right away I’d be interested,” McConnaughey said. “I was willing to try whatever I could to get out of the situation I was in.”

His ex-wife joined as well, as they continued to work together trying to care for their sons. There were regular classes on finances, finding employment, finding and sustaining housing and healthcare.

There were regular resource fairs — Impact Day — where parents in the Impact program could go table-to-table to talk with social service providers. And they had the support of the navigator case manager.

The barrier of rocks began to tumble away.

The program’s food pantry eased the cost of feeding three grown boys. The program also employed his taxi, paying him to help pick up other parents who had no transportation and help them get to the classes and the food pantry.

He didn’t have to work so many hours. He was saving money again. And then he connected with a friend who let him take over the lease on a house.

McConnaughey became a goodwill ambassador for Impact Center Schools, on his own, as he drove new parents to and from the program, Boydston said.

“We are so thankful for Josh,” she said. “He trusted us enough to get where he is now . . . and the way he took care of those other families . . . was exceptional.”

Weary parents in homeless situations like his own, McConnaughey said, were sometimes fearful of adding the program’s schedule of classes to their stress load — doubtful that this was a way out of the situation they were in.

“We’d be in the car 15 or 20 minutes and we’d talk,” he said. “They’d say they’re not sure about the program and I’d tell them to stick with it. The biggest thing was letting people know it was not hopeless. The program helps.”

The return of the Mandalorian

There are opportunities again with his sons, McConnaughey said, for doing things “just for the fun of it."

He still works his taxi, but a normal number of hours. He can take a day off.

He can build costumes with his sons — the superhero helmets, capes and shields that enthusiasts parade at events like Comic-Con conventions, enthusiasts like the McConnaugheys.

Their new portfolio includes costumes for the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villains, Bebop and Rocksteady, the G.I. Joe Cobra Commander, and now Star Wars’ Mandalorian.

“It can take more than a hundred hours on one costume,” McConnaughey said.

But that’s OK. He has the time.

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer