'It's that time of year!' Excitement, joy, fuels Caring Communities mission as LINC preps for new school year
Fired up and ready to go.
“It’s that time of year,” said LINC Caring Communities Director Sean Akridge. “ . . . anticipation, excitement, joy . . . reconnecting boys and girls with their friends, reconnecting parents with their friends . . .”
“They (the kids) are excited about LINC,” said LINC Caring Communities Coordinator Vicki Spain and Red Bridge Elementary in the Center School District, “so we have to be excited and make things exciting.”
And that means building deep and caring relationships to go along with the many programs, partnerships and activities coming this year.
“We’re going to be a consistent force in their lives,” said Damon King, the LINC Caring Communities Coordinator at Grandview Middle School. “So they better be ready.”
One of the partnerships and trainings LINC is using this year comes from a trip King and other LINC staff made to the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Mo., to learn new educational, recreational activities.
These combine with programming that is coming from LINC’s own in-house S.T.E.A.M. Team, which is committed to helping LINC staff across all of its sites make regular, even daily, activities in science, technology, engineering, art and math.
Other partnerships include the Urban Youth Baseball Academy, CodeAlgo coding, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Girls on the Run, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City Young Audiences, Kansas City Community Gardens and more.
LINC will be returning with clubs and sports programming, which will be providing a full menu of opportunities to learn and play sports without fees.
“We’re going to build on the things that they like and their interests and build clubs from there,” Spain said.
And the regular academic support will include special tutoring opportunities, including King Elementary’s collaboration with the A+ Scholarship students at Paseo High School, and Grandview Middle’s “Big Buddy Little Buddy” program that will have middle school students reading to and guiding children at elementary schools.
All of this will be done in close collaboration with the teachers, principals and leadership of the schools in LINC’s partner districts: the Kansas City, Hickman Mills, Grandview, Center, North Kansas City school districts and Lee A. Tolbert Community Academy charter school.
“We partner up with the classroom teachers,” said LINC Caring Communities Coordinator Lisa Stephenson at Carver Dual Language School in Kansas City. “We find what it is they are doing, having them understand that we’re all on the same mission, that it’s all about the kids and the excitement for learning.”
LINC also returns with its partnership with Legal Aid of Western Missouri and the Justice in the Schools program, which provides legal assistance for families in housing crises or other legal situations.
The legal assistance is part of the wider community service that is essential to LINC’s mission.
“So coming back to school gives us a chance to check on families on a daily basis,” Akridge said. “So we have a chance to check on how things are going” and learn where families might need housing assistance, clothing, food assistance” and other support.
“We are a caring community,” Spain said, “so that means we take care of our community, our people, the families, the children. They might have a need for food. Utilities might be cut off. So LINC is there to help provide some of those needs. “
Said Stephenson: “We all take care of each other. Stronger communities and stronger families. That’s our mission. I live and breathe that.”