There’s a serious side to summer after-school programs now. There’s increased attention to academic skills coming out of the pandemic. And an awareness of children’s social and emotional well-being after so much separation and so many families still hurting.

But this is still summer.

And LINC’s not going to let kids down now.

So here we go, with the pent-up energy of LINC students unleashed in the Fitness 4 Ever team-racing program in the gym at Millennium at Santa Fe Elementary in Hickman Mills.

“We want it to feel like camp,” said Millennium LINC Caring Communities Coordinator Jene Counts, who’s planning tie-dye T-shirt fun and crafts in the days ahead. “We want to do those things kids like . . . but we still want to get those academics in there.”

In many ways, summer has come like a wave of freedom with all the in-person games and gatherings back in play. But like the masks that continue to be worn, the pandemic’s effects linger.

LINC’s Topping Elementary Caring Communities summer program in the North Kansas City School District and the school’s daytime summer school had to move to Maplewood Elementary while Topping’s roof gets repairs.

It was important that Topping’s students and their families got to keep their community together at the alternate site, said LINC Topping Site Coordinator Lindsay Bosse.

“Our goal is to continue building those relationships, helping families however we can in the summertime,” she said. “It’s important Topping came over to Maplewood because otherwise these families wouldn’t have care for the summer.”

Summer school was in full swing in the Center, Hickman Mills, and North Kansas City school districts and Lee A. Tolbert charter school the week of June 7 — and LINC was ready. Grandview begans its summer school the week of June 14, and Kansas City Public Schools began June 21. In all, LINC is running programs at 15 sites.

On this recent hot June afternoon, the Topping kids played inside, decorating raw potatoes with markers, pipe cleaners and stick-on eyeballs to create characters for their own "Tater Family.”

It was fun, but the kids even caught on to the lesson plan of examining pros and cons of different personality traits.

Some “social-emotional learning,” Bosse said.

Eight-year-old Gregory’s potato — a mustachioed, yellow-pipe-cleaner-head-band-wearing creation that Gregory called “Evil Tater” — represented a personality “that someone could choose to be ,” he said, “. . . but I would not choose to be that.”

He noted the many somewhat-sketchy “Tater” personalities under construction in the room, recognizing a lot of “things you don’t have to be.”

Ariah, 9, seemed to capture the complexity of personalities, creating a version of a “Dic-tater” potato “because of the way I’m bossy,” she said. “But it’s also a nice tater.”

“We’re learning how people are different, and they think different, they look different and they sound different,” she said. “It means to me everybody is different in special ways.”

A lot of the work this summer will be giving children, and all their differences, chances to explore that big common experience they shared in living through the pandemic.

At Lee A. Tolbert Community Academy charter school, LINC’s Caring Communities team spent part of the first week of summer school preparing their students to be writers.

It will be one of the ways LINC intends to help the students open up their thoughts and feelings of the past year, said Lee A. Tolbert LINC Caring Communities Coordinator Kelley Harden.

“We are going to do a lot of self-care,” Harden said. And the writing — “focusing on journaling” — will be part of that.

“With the kids coming back from the pandemic, they’re getting into the routine and we are noticing that the children have a lot to say,” Harden said. “So we are allowing them to talk, journal, write and express what is going on with them while we’re supporting them.”

Eight-year-old Perris is up for it.

“We have to write 10 sentences every day,” he said, listing that daily expectation matter-of-factly in the middle of a list of after-school summer experiences at Tolbert.

“We do activities, math, lots of fun stuff,” he said. “We go on trips. We get to see our friends . . . we get to draw. We learn . . .”

This is what the summer of Covid recovery looks like.

“We are happy to have all the kids back,” Harden said. “They’re busier than ever. So that means we’re busier than ever.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer