With school reopening during the pandemic, John Castle knew many masks would be in order.
Castle is superintendent of the North Country Supervisory Union in Orleans County, which has more than 750 employees and more than 2,500 students.
He and other superintendents in the Northeast Kingdom met earlier this summer and discussed the need for safety equipment for kids and staff. And they wondered, on the regional level, “could we pull off something?”
They’ve started to.
Helped by Kim Behr — the St. Johnsbury resident behind NEK Operation Face Mask — organizers in the North Country district and elsewhere in the Kingdom have begun putting together cloth masks for schools.
In March, Behr had enlisted hundreds of volunteers to sew masks, gowns and caps for frontline workers and vulnerable people.
“She offered her expertise with pulling that all together,” said Liz Butterfield, North Country executive assistant to the superintendent. “She provided us with the instructions for four different sizes of masks, and she gathered some fabric and elastic.”
“Since then,” said Butterfield, the project’s in-district point person, “it’s really taken on a life of its own.”
The goal is to provide two masks each to about 2,500 students and 750 staff members.
Butterfield said she started advertising the call to action on Facebook on July 20, and right now about 60 people are involved.
“Folks are either doing the whole process from beginning to end — where we get fabric to them, they launder it, cut it, sew it, launder it again and get it back to us,” she said.
Or if they can’t sew, she said, volunteers are cutting fabric and elastic to send to those who can. Others have pitched in donated materials.
The volunteers are a mix of staff members, people in the community and relatives of staff members — especially mothers and grandmothers of staff members, Butterfield said, laughing.
“The response was so good at the beginning, I was kind of having a chicken and egg situation,” she said. Organizers would run out of fabric but have plenty of elastic, or vice versa.
The initiative still has a ways to go, Butterfield said. She figured the school district needs at least another 1,000 masks for the students — meaning so far around 4,000 have been made by volunteers, bought by the district or received via donation.
Butterfield is optimistic about hitting the goal, especially after students’ first day was moved back a week — to Sept. 8 — by Gov. Phil Scott. But the bigger reason for hope has come from the outpouring of support.
“Everybody is looking for something they can do to help — be it (among) friends, family, community — so I think this is something very tangible that people knew that they could lend their skills to and their time,” Butterfield said.
“People are good, and they’re feeling a little helpless right now, and they’re looking for a way to do something that can contribute,” she said.
“And this was something they could jump on.”
