Teachers help parents with child care as schools remain out

When the air-conditioning unit clicked on at Houston's multi-service center on West Gray Street, Emily Foust shuddered.

"Thunder," she whispered, remembering the sounds that greeted her when she was evacuated from her flooded West Houston home the week before.

Her mother, Gay, said leaving their home after Hurricane Harvey proved especially hard for Emily, who has autism. Most days, the 21-year-old sat in a dark room in a neighbor's house, watching YouTube videos on Gay's phone, making it difficult for Gay to call insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But on Wednesday, Gay caught a break. A group of teachers from across the Houston area set up schools and day camps in shelters and community buildings, including one for special-education students like Emily.

"I don't have to take care of Emily all day," Gay said. "I don't have to go up every hour and check up on her, to make sure she's okay. I don't have to lose my phone. I don't have to worry at 9 tonight that she'll get overloaded from watching YouTube videos and won't be able to go to sleep."

Gay is among more than 600,000 Houston-area parents who have struggled to find child care as schools remained closed for a second straight week at hard-hit districts, such as the Houston ISD. On Thursday, some district parents learned their students may not be able to start the academic year until Sept. 18 or Sept. 25, while crews work to make repairs at damaged schools and officials iron out the logistics of sharing campuses.

For those parents, the weeks-long migraine will continue.

At the Jersey Mike's sub shop in Rice Village, store manager Danny Jew brought his 7-year-old son Eric with him to work on Thursday. Squirming at a corner table, Eric tapped on an iPad screen with another boy his age, who the store manager said also needed a place to go while his parents worked. Although Jew's home and car were spared by Harvey's floodwaters, he's had to work overtime to keep up with an increased demand for quick meals.

"It's so hard with all the mess," Jew said. "There's so much to do just to make sure the store is stocked."

He smiled and let out a long sigh.

"I'm very excited for school to start again," he said.

Others had better luck finding respite from around-the-clock kid care.

The YMCA opened day camps at 10 of its Houston-area campuses Monday, offering them for about $80 for the entire week, or half price. At the University of Houston and Rice University, faculty members set up science and day camps for the children of staff members and others affected by the floods.

Andrew Hamilton, an associate dean with UH's College of Natural Science and Mathematics, said the university's science-based day camp was spontaneously launched after he and others read on an online forum that there was an overwhelming need. It filled up in hours.

"They really posted two kinds of items," Hamilton said. "One was we need a lot of help moving our stuff or taking out drywall. The other most frequent set of comments were, 'What are we going to do with our kids?'"

It's not just parents who are eager for school to start again.

For 12-year-old Samantha Beltran, boredom has become the defining feature of her past week. She's a seventh-grader at Queens Intermediate School in Pasadena ISD, where classes started on Aug. 21 but have been closed since Aug. 25.

"We were learning a lot of new stuff, so I'm worried I'll fall behind," Samantha said.

She's also eager to learn how her friends fared after her own home took on an inch of Harvey's floodwaters. Her family fled and was not able to return home for four days, said Josefina Beltran, Samantha's mother.

"I'm ready to go back," Samantha said. "There's nothing to do, no friends to talk to."

Few efforts to provide child care have reached the scale of one organized by a YES Prep teacher and two Houston ISD teachers.

Simone Kern, the teacher in the YES prep charter system, was laid up after a recent surgery but wanted to be with her students. She asked HISD teachers Kristen McClintock and Sarah Gonzales what educators could do to help students who had lost everything. The handful of certified teachers to volunteer soon grew into a dozen, and then hundreds - and now more than 1,600.

McClintock said she was speechless when she first saw 9,000 people, including some 2,000 children, sheltered at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

She said kids would recognize her school badge and come up to her smiling, asking when they would return to class and if she was their new teacher. Their parents were happy to see her and her colleagues, too.

Gonzales said the nerves of the displaced adults had begun to fray as they worked to get back on their feet while wrangling antsy children.

"Most of the parents who have been impacted by the storm and the flooding don't have a lot of child-care options," Gonzales said. "They're overwhelmed, too, with filling out paperwork, insurance claims, finding clothing for their family if they lost everything. Many are finding temporary housing. Having the opportunity to place their kid with a group of certified teachers who have gone through background checks gives them piece of mind."

On Wednesday, Emily sat at a table in the city multi-service center and stared at a bowlful of sand in front of her.

While four other students at her table were mixing their sand with cornstarch, food coloring and dish soap and kneading it into a gooey, sandy slime-ball, Emily looked lost.

In front of her was a giraffe-print fidget spinner and several emoji plush toys. She had lost all of her other toys and soothing playthings in the flood, McClintock said, and refused to let the new possessions out of her sight.

McClintock bent down and asked Emily why she wasn't participating.

"I can't," she said. "I need to wait for my mom."

Her demeanor changed when it was time for her group to switch crafts and create water bottles filled with glitter that slowly flowed along the edges of the plastic.

"I do want to make a bottle," she said, sitting down at another table.

Gay, Emily's mother, said that without the welcome distractions and calming presence of McClintock and the other teachers, she does not know how she would recover from Harvey.

"People talk about first responders - I would put her in the class of first responder," Gay said. "She's saving the lives of these children and saving lives of families with this class."