At 8 a.m. sharp every weekday, Katrina Clark sits down in front of a computer, puts on her headset, types in a username and password, and settles in for eight and a half hours of phone calls.

Ten weeks ago, 55-year-old Clark, a Washington, D.C., public school nurse for 11 years, would have driven about 15 minutes on backroads to get to school by 7:55 a.m. By 8:30 a.m., she’d have medicated about three kids, typically with anticonvulsants, inhalers, ADHD medications or Tylenol. The rest of the day would be spent attending to stomach pains, fevers and scraped knees.

“I miss my babies,” she said of her pre-K to fifth-graders at Ketcham Elementary School in lower-income Ward 8, southeast of the U.S. Capitol. “I would visit each class every morning, say, ‘Good morning.’ … I wanted my children in my school to know me.”

It’s been more than two months since schools closed as the coronavirus crisis unfolded, taking Clark from her students and turning her job on its head.

To pay the bills, Clark now works for a call center from her home in nearby Anacostia, taking information from first responders who are exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms as part of the D.C. Department of Health’s contact-tracing efforts. She records callers’ symptoms, their underlying medical conditions and whether anyone in their home has tested positive for coronavirus.

The work becomes stressful when callers’ anxieties and fear are especially palpable, Clark said. One woman she connected with had a son with disabilities who had tested positive but “had nowhere else to go but home,” so the woman “was concerned about herself, her daughter and her grandbaby, they all lived in the same house,” Clark recalled.

This role wasn’t one Clark had voluntarily signed up for when schools shuttered on March 16. Nurses received notice in late March that they could either join the D.C. Department of Health’s effort to fight coronavirus or face layoffs until schools eventually reopened.

Clark, who’s also president of the DC Nurses Association, struggled with the decision along with many of the district’s more than 100 school nurses. She has diabetes, which compromises her immune system, and said it was not clear early on if nurses would be expected to serve on the front lines at testing sites.

But like others, she couldn’t afford to lose her paycheck or shoulder the health insurance costs that would build up without an employer contribution.

“Knowing that I am diabetic and I need my medication, and if I was to get sick I have to be taken to the hospital — I did not want to make matters worse for myself,” she said. “I went on faith.”

On Monday, April 6, Clark accepted the reassignment offer — which maintains her current income — three days after the deadline to respond. She was teleworking by that Wednesday.

She doesn’t complain about the transition. “Whatever [nurses] need to do to help our patients out, we’ll do it,” as she put it. Nursing, especially now, demands a selflessness and compassion that Clark said she learned from her grandmother.

Two things about her grandmother stood out to Clark as a child: one, that the elder was beloved by “everybody, from the bank teller to the doctor to the grocery store clerk,” Clark said. Second, that she always left the house in a white uniform. Clark learned later that her grandmother was a domestic maid, but she grew up thinking she was a nurse. So Clark dreamed of being one, too.

Although Clark doesn’t necessarily mind the call center work, her mind is still on those days as a school nurse.

“I wish and I hope that I will be going back to work with my children,” Clark said. She catches only glimpses of a few of them nowadays, out in the community or at the pharmacy.

Clark was the only nurse at Ketcham Elementary, where about 300 kids are enrolled — 100 percent of whom the district considers “economically disadvantaged.”

She’s still unsure when she’ll be back in school — or how her job might look different moving forward. For now, she’s taking things in stride.

“I live day to day now,” she said. “I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. None of us know.”

Most D.C. Public Schools buildings have stood vacant since the coronavirus sent teachers, students and staff home. The district’s warehouse is a rare exception.

Warehouse director Roger Asterilla and his 10 full-time employees still report to the behemoth 120,000-square-foot building in northeast D.C. every morning by 7:30 a.m. Asterilla says his team is one of only three DCPS departments — alongside food services and school security — still “in the trenches” and fully operating in person after the pandemic shuttered schools in March.

The 47-year-old director of 11 years wasn’t surprised that his team was deemed essential. He calls them the “unsung heroes of DCPS,” handling logistics that keep the system running, from daily mail delivery and textbook orders to — in non-coronavirus years — chair and table counts for graduation ceremonies.

The pandemic, however, has vastly redefined their work. The department’s most critical new role in the past two months, Asterilla said, has been to thousands of laptop devices to school sites — the district puts the count at about 9,100 devices — to help bridge through a period of remote learning.

“We’re coming to work every single day despite what’s going on, and supporting any and every initiative that [DCPS] can think of,” he said.

His team has also helped disseminate four rounds of homework packets — the district has printed about 272,000 in total — to either school sites or students’ homes, depending on whether schools were able to distribute them to families. And they were bulky; Asterilla said sending just one cost a hefty $8 to $9 in postage, versus 50 cents or so for a thin letter.

The biggest challenge through all of this, he added, has been ensuring his staff’s safety.

“All of us were a little nervous and apprehensive [coming to work at the start of the shutdown] because we just didn’t know” much about COVID-19, Asterilla said. He continually reminds his staff to keep their face masks and gloves on and to wash their hands.

And as they’ve had a head start on clearing out some school buildings that have been pegged for closure or renovations, they’re exercising caution.

“We’re scrubbing this furniture completely down” before taking it back to the warehouse, he said.

The slowed, methodical pace is a 180-degree turn from the “100 miles a minute” they usually move at this time of year, Asterilla said. In February, he and his team were already bogged down in frenzied graduation ceremony prep, figuring out the number of chairs, tables and PA sound systems each of DCPS’s 117 school sites would need. They were also beginning to tally the number of computers and textbooks necessary for summer school.

That was on top of the day-to-day tasks. Mondays to Fridays, his team ferried mail, such as student transcripts and mass mailers, between the district’s school sites — typically around 10,000 letters a month. If a school lost water, they’d get backup water to the school. If a school ran out of toilet paper or custodial supplies, it would call Asterilla’s department.

Asterilla admits he’s getting a bit more sleep now that the schools are empty. He leaves his home in Suitland, Maryland, at 6:45 a.m. every day for a 15-minute commute. He used to depart before the sun rose, at 5:30 a.m., to avoid the bottleneck traffic on the Suitland Parkway and Pennsylvania Avenue that could make the same drive 45 minutes.

D.C. schools are scheduled to close May 29. Even with details hazy as to what DCPS’s reopening will look like, Asterilla is determined to think ahead.

“I’m going to plan as if this pandemic wasn’t here,” he said. “I’m training my staff to think the same way.”

Before COVID-19 closed schools, kindergarten teacher Valeria Cox kept a grueling schedule. With five children of her own, an hour commute each way, and a houseful of pets and laundry, she was up every morning at 4:45 a.m. and often went to bed after midnight.

“I got three, four, maybe five hours of sleep at most,” Cox said, adding that the lack of sleep didn’t slow her down.

Now, amid the pandemic, she is keeping her buoyant outlook, though life is moving just as fast, and she has had some frightening moments along the way.

Like many of the teachers at Mark Twain Dual Language Academy in San Antonio Independent School District, she was born and educated abroad. Cox, whose first degree is in psychology, came to the U.S. from Guayaquil, Ecuador, in 2009, and earned a teaching degree in 2013. The school administration encourages the teachers to bring their home culture into the classroom. For Cox, that means Ecuadorian energy, environmental stewardship and expression. She was regularly on the floor or the playground equipment with her students, looking at bugs and admiring trees. She adds “-ita” and “-ito” to their names, a Spanish diminutive to convey affection. Her classroom was always full of hugs and excited conversation. The students, she explained, amplified the vitality of the classroom.

“I’m that kind of teacher,” Cox said, “You come home richer in emotions and knowledge than the day before.”

But now it’s difficult to simulate that energy over the daily 4 p.m. Zoom video call.

Like all teachers, Cox misses her students. Kindergarten, she says, is almost impossible to recreate virtually, because that year is about igniting a love of learning. She can hear the strain, almost a world-weariness, in her students’ voices. Sometimes, she said, it makes her cry.

“I realize how [the pandemic] has made them mature in many ways,” she said.

The magnitude of the crisis has been inescapable, even for young people. For Cox, the global nature of the outbreak has actually brought it closer to home.

Cox’s hometown of Guayaquil is a hot spot for the coronavirus in South America. With hospitals and burial systems unable to keep up, as the death rate surpassed that of New York City in early April.

Cox’s parents, brothers and sisters-in-law and the caretakers who live with her parents all contracted the coronavirus. “My mom almost died,” she said.

That has put social distancing and stay-at-home orders in perspective, Cox said, even with all that has been lost.

She has tried to give her students’ families the grace and flexibility they need. Zoom calls are not required. Assignments can be turned in at any time. Cox has had to show that grace to herself as well. Her husband is in the medical profession and has worked throughout the pandemic. She’s been balancing distance learning for four of her five children, along with her own teaching duties.

“I felt horrible with my own kids,” Cox said, noting that she regularly fails to join her children’s video calls with their classes because she is working with her students.

One of her children is on the autism spectrum, and monitoring his schoolwork requires extra time, she explained, but he is also a teenager and she wants to preserve their relationship. It can’t just be about completing online schoolwork. Without a two-hour commute, she uses the extra time to do fun activities with him, like yoga or games. That extra time together has actually been one of the good things about being homebound, she said.

The younger children, between ages 7 and 12, are “in and out” all day between computers and the backyard. It’s chaotic at times, Cox said, but they quickly realized that sitting in front of a computer all day was not going to work.

“There’s a lot of play involved,” she said.

As they enter the third month of school closures, she’s started hearing the gate to the backyard swinging open more often. A couple of neighborhood kids show up to jump on the trampoline. At first, Cox was vigilant about maintaining strict social distance, as her youngest child has a heart condition that could make him more vulnerable to complications from COVID-19. But as time has gone on, she said, their neighborhood has found a sustainable balance of distance and community. She, too, has found personal balance — in her own vegetable garden, cooking and exercising.

“It’s been a learning path for us,” Cox said. “We’re just trying to do the most we can.”

Her main concerns are the rumors that next school year will start as this one has ended — online.

She was able to capitalize on strong relationships and classroom culture to make it through the end of this year, but establishing that rapport via video calls may be impossible, especially for kindergartners, many of whom have never been in school.

“The one thing I fear,” she said, “is not going back to schools on August 10.”

Every morning as the sun rose, Rosie Guadarrama walked laps around the parking lot full of yellow school buses at the San Antonio Independent School District transportation hub. In the three weeks since COVID-19 had shuttered schools, she had used that time to pray, listen to worship music and prepare herself for the intense day ahead.

She also prayed for her 80-year-old father, who had developed a persistent cough and low-grade fever in late March. It was now the second week of April, and the cough had grown worse, said Guadarrama, 54. “I thought it was COVID.”

With that on her mind, she boarded a bus and began her work day. Only she wasn’t shuttling kids to and from school, as she had been for six years. She was delivering food to families at six East Side apartment complexes.

The delivery program, SAISD Eats, had been partially her idea. When the district , the local news reported that not every family could get to the sites. The bus drivers, accustomed to being part of the district’s transportation solutions, were anxious to help in some way, she said. She proposed the bus delivery idea to the district after her daughter saw something similar on social media.

She didn’t think the district would go for it, but her supervisor, Chief Transportation Officer Nathan Graf, loved the idea. He asked Guadarrama if she wanted to be part of the delivery team.

“I’m ready to go, let’s go,” she told him. “Tell me what to do.”

Between March 23 and April 8, Guadarrama delivered 250 meals per day, passing them through the bus windows to families lined up below. She got to know her “regulars,” she said: the family with six kids who wore matching outfits every day; the man she called “Red Hat”; and the kids she called “The Fearsome Four.”

One day a toddler, accompanied only by his sister, approached the bus and insisted on collecting his own food bundle. The sister tried to help him, Guadarrama said. “He was not having it. He was going to be a big boy.”

With interactions limited by social distancing, Guadarrama and her fellow bus drivers began to look for the regulars as a benchmark for the health of the community. They parked their buses, honked their horns and waited to see who showed up, hoping to see increased turnouts full of familiar faces.

People found ways to express appreciation, not only for the meals but for the buses that delivered them as well. One day, a child approached one of the buses holding a poster. It read, in handwritten letters: “Gracias por tomar un poco de tu tiempo, para que yo puedo todos los días tener algo de comida en mi mesa.” (“Thank you for taking a little of your time so that I can have some food on my table every day.”)

At 2:30 p.m. on April 8, with deliveries completed, Guadarrama did what she did every other day. She raced to her parents’ house to check on her dad, help her mom and assess whether it was time to go to the hospital — it was. She could tell her father wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

“I practically carried my dad from the car to the wheelchair,” she said. “I made the sign of the cross on his forehead and said, ‘I’ll see you later, Daddy.’” Because of COVID-19 protocols, she was not allowed to go into triage with her father.

After five anxious hours, the hospital called to tell Guadarrama that scans of her father’s body revealed not COVID-19 but cancer. Lymphoma had spread throughout, and they would have to begin chemotherapy immediately if there was any hope of effective treatment.

With her father in the hospital, she assumed care of her mother. The next day, Guadarrama called Graf to tell him she would not be able to work. Their conversations were usually upbeat, she said — “I’m one of his crazy bus drivers.”

Whenever costumes, decorations or other silly or celebratory extras are called for, Guadarrama is usually among the most enthusiastic. Graf, himself, is a chipper, hopeful person, but that day she could not match his tone. He knew something was wrong.

“I told him, ‘I’m not going to go back to work till we get daddy home,’” she said. “That never happened.”

The next 21 days were agonizing. Guadarrama brought plastic bags full of cards from well-wishers to the hospital parking lot, where she handed them off to gracious nurses who took them inside to her father. Although hospitals in San Antonio have not been overrun by COVID-19 care, social distancing protocols have limited the number of people who can be inside. And because Guadarrama’s father was receiving chemotherapy, he was considered immunocompromised and therefore could not see visitors. One nurse used her phone to help the family FaceTime, a humanitarian bending of hospital rules.

Guadarrama missed her early morning prayer walks around the bus park. She missed interactions with the “regulars” on the meal delivery route. She missed her dad.

“I was a daddy’s girl,” she said.

His body ultimately could not withstand the chemotherapy treatments. On April 28, the family was allowed to join their husband and father one last time as staff took him off of the ventilator. Guadarrama and her family sat with him through his final hours, and then they turned to the business of grieving, a process made lonelier and more complicated by COVID-19.

Only 10 people, including the priest, could attend the Mass in her father’s honor because of coronavirus distancing measures. But Guadarrama could see friends gathered at the church’s windows, ears pressed to the panes to hear the family’s commemorations inside. At the May 13 burial, attendees stood six feet apart wearing masks.

Guadarrama realized almost immediately that she wanted to get back to work. “I need to be busy,” she said.

On Tuesday, May 19, what would have been her parents’ 57th anniversary, Guadarrama climbed back onto her bus, now cheerfully decorated in the colors of one San Antonio high school. Her East Side meal route had been covered in her absence, so she wouldn’t be seeing Red Hat and The Fearsome Four anymore.

Now she will be serving another group affected by COVID-19: graduating seniors. With most formal festivities stripped from the teens’ monumental accomplishment, the district arranged a series of celebratory parades with school buses bedecked in streamers and banners. Wearing a commemorative button with her father’s smiling face, Guadarrama is again behind the wheel of her school bus, serving her students the best way she knows how.

Caillou Allen will miss walking the stage for his diploma at his high school graduation next month.

He’ll miss taking the stage more.

For the past three years, the senior at Cleveland’s Early College High School has been part of , a troupe of African-American teens who perform dramatic interpretations of poetry and inspirational essays, and who have become a core cultural component of the Cleveland community. The Gentlemen have a tradition of performing at the graduations of each member, with the graduate giving a short speech or solo performance between group acts of poems by writers like Langston Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar.

“I am not going to be able to do none of that,” said Allen, 17, who’s headed to Morehouse College in the fall.

That can’t happen this year because COVID-19 shut down more than 20 Distinguished Gentlemen performances this spring and has forced the Cleveland school district to skip traditional graduations for a “drive-through” ceremony.

Just graduating at all is an accomplishment for Allen, whose disciplinary record during his elementary school years had him bouncing from school to school. He was even expelled in the fourth grade, he said, for making a bomb threat, which forced him to repeat the year.

Being bored in class, he said, made him act out, which made teachers write him off as a lost cause. The cycle of bad behavior repeated, he said, and had his family seeking new schools for him over and over. But by sixth grade, he was placed in accelerated classes that appealed to him and his high test scores let him jump ahead to eighth grade.

He was now a year ahead of schedule after repeating one year and leaping forward by two.

Allen then landed at Cleveland Early College High School, which pushed him academically — just not too hard, he said — and let him start accumulating college credit. Finishing classes during the pandemic was easy, he said, since seniors at his high school take courses at Cleveland State University, which moved its classes online after it had to cancel in-person gatherings.

He now wants to be a criminal defense lawyer to help the black community escape persecution.

He remembers clearly when he first saw the Distinguished Gentlemen perform at his school three years ago.

“At the time, I ain’t heard nothing like it,” he remembers. “They was all in sync and performing. It was like the Temptations. You know how they used to perform? It was together. They were all sharp. Dressed up.”

He was hooked and decided to join. Quickly welcomed, he loved the group’s performances and its focus on brotherhood and leadership. Founded in 2003 by Honey Bell-Bey, , the Distinguished Gentlemen have also performed at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and at

Bell-Bey — or “Miss Honey,” as members call her — also gave them essays and articles to read about social justice and the black experience.

“The Distinguished Gentlemen is a real tightly knit brotherhood. Everybody is for each other. I just loved it,” Allen said. “And we embraced our blackness.”

The pandemic has limited the group, shutting down performances for several weeks including through National Poetry Month in April, which Bell-Bey said is “our month, our holiday.”

Group practices have been moved to Zoom twice a week.

“You aren’t never going to get the same effect with technology that you do in person,” Allen said.

With graduation plans altered, Bell-Bey staged her own graduation ceremony for Allen on May 16 and , along with video of a drive-by salute from a motorcycle club and congratulations from executives from the Cleveland Clinic and the Cleveland Cavaliers.

After Bell-Bey opened with Marianne Williamson’s one of the Distinguished Gentlemen’s standby performances, she let Allen, wearing a blue cap and gown, and his mother speak, before closing with a performance of Dunbar’s with Bell-Bey and another member.

While not the same as performing at a traditional graduation, Allen said, the gesture mattered to him. In his speech, he said he hopes his Class of 2020 won’t be an afterthought because of the pandemic.

“It is important that we celebrate our graduates as much as possible, for they’ve done a great thing, only to have its acknowledgment cut away,” he said in the speech. “Let us say that we filled the gap. We gave them something better; a People’s Graduation, where a man is recognized for his merit by his entire village.”

Originally from the Dominican Republic, Mercedes wakes up earlier now than she did before the pandemic to help her kids get set up for virtual learning. Then, a few days a week, the 47-year-old mother of three heads out to buy necessities, all while coping with being away from her eldest son and daughter-in-law, both of whom contracted the coronavirus.

Mercedes, an undocumented immigrant living in New York City’s East Harlem, shares a small apartment with her husband and their two younger children, Maria, 16, and Christopher, 9. Her oldest son, José, 24, lives in the Bronx with his wife. Although they have since recovered from COVID-19, not being able to see them has been difficult, Mercedes said.

Mercedes makes her trips for errands as quick as possible, both to avoid getting the virus and because she’s leaving her children at home. She said she feels like a “zombie” running out to get as much as she can and rushing back home.

(����Ӱ�� agreed to withhold the family’s last name because both Mercedes and her husband are undocumented immigrants. Mercedes spoke to ����Ӱ�� in Spanish through a translator.)

The family keep their shoes outside the apartment door now, and Mercedes cleans with Clorox as much as she can throughout the day. If she goes out, she puts the clothes she wore into a laundry bag as soon as she gets home so she can wash them later at a laundromat.

Emerging data show just how damaging and deadly the coronavirus has been for Latino families. The latest New York City health department statistics show that Latinos are dying at of their white city counterparts, when adjusted for age, and in a recent , nearly 50 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. reported that someone in their household had their paycheck cut or their job eliminated because of the virus.

Before the coronavirus hit New York, Mercedes took her children to their schools in the neighborhood each morning and then worked for three to four hours cleaning for an elderly woman, making $80 a day, she said. She has since lost that job, and she’s not sure whether she will be able to return to it when the pandemic eases.

Her husband’s janitorial job has been reduced to just two days a week and his pay dropped 40 percent — to $150 from $250 a week, now the family’s only source of income — and the work puts her husband, also named José, at risk of exposure to the coronavirus.

“That scares me, especially because he has to leave and then come back, and what if he brings something that may lead to me or the kids getting sick?” Mercedes said.

On top of having a tighter budget, Mercedes said she’s noticed an increase in the prices at her local grocery store, City Fresh Market, and long lines for free food distribution.

“Now I only buy basic necessities and basic food every one or two days,” she said.

Whereas $50 used to cover the family’s food for three days, now it can only get them through two days. To help, Mercedes has received two $1,000 stipends from , a nonprofit focused on helping K-12 immigrant students and their families. Federal relief payments and their families, and so far has created a state program to offer them any financial help.

“I wouldn’t know what to do if ImmSchools wasn’t there, because now I’m able to at least pay some of my bills,” she said.

The organization uses a WhatsApp group to facilitate communication among families and share resources. With help from ImmSchools, Mercedes requested and received two internet-connected iPads from the New York City Department of Education for her children to use for remote learning.

For the first few weeks after New York City schools closed , the family had one laptop and spotty internet service, so the iPads were a big help. Mercedes’s daughter, Maria, an 11th-grader, was spending the entire day on virtual learning.

At first, Maria said, she was logged on from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., but the workload has lightened a bit in the weeks since her district high school first moved online. Still, Maria wishes her teachers were a bit more empathetic, given the circumstances, she said. She only has two live video classes a week, one on Monday and one on Thursday, but she has many independent assignments.

“It’s very stressful, especially because I’m not talking to [my teachers] every day, so learning by myself is a little harder,” Maria said. Her teachers respond to emails, but “it’s not really the same,” she added. She also spends an hour or two each day helping her younger brother Christopher, who’s in fourth grade, with his assignments and making sure he gets his work done.

Maria works from her bed even though she admits “they do say that you shouldn’t do homework where you sleep,” because the crowded apartment can be loud with four people at home. For her AP Spanish class, she has to record herself speaking, which is tough when there’s background noise, Maria said.

“It’s overwhelming for everybody, I just kind of wish teachers were a little more understanding,” Maria said. “They are understanding, but at the same time, everyone has different situations and not everyone is able to do the work.”

Not being able to help her children with their schoolwork has been frustrating for Mercedes.

“After going through their day of virtual learning, they also get homework, and so that’s been the most challenging for me, because with the language barrier, I’m unable to help them the way I wish I could,” she said.

Despite the hardships of the moment, Mercedes is dreaming of the day she can see her friends and family without fear.

“The first thing I’m going to do is get together with my friends, go get some coffee, give them a big hug,” Mercedes said. “And hug my son really tight.”

For Shawnell Ware, a social worker at McDonogh 35 High School in New Orleans, the work day used to be from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Now, with school shut down and her city hit hard by the coronavirus, she’s available to her students, their families and her colleagues anytime, day or night.

On a typical school day before the pandemic, she checked in with students as they arrived at school, monitored attendance, observed classrooms, met with students individually, visited families at home and helped coordinate mental health care and other services for students.

Now Ware, 51, does all that virtually, in addition to checking in with parents regarding their own mental health, working with teachers to modify assignments for students overwhelmed by online schooling, and tuning in to Zoom classes with students and meetings with her colleagues throughout the day.

“I feel like I’m working 24 hours around the clock. Literally, I receive phone calls at 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock, 10 o’clock [at night]. I even had a student [who was experiencing] anxiety one morning call at 5 a.m.,” she said.

She answers every call. “That’s what we have to do to make sure that our students are cared for emotionally, socially and academically — to provide that support,” said Ware, who was just named “Support of the Year” at McDonogh 35 by her principal, Lee Green.

The first challenge when the school moved online was getting McDonogh’s roughly 400 students connected with internet service and devices. Next, Ware had to get used to seeing her students through a screen and communicating via text message, which many of her high schoolers prefer to phone or video calls.

“I miss being face to face because I like to do physical assessments where I can lay eyes on my students … I’m now reading body language via Zoom calls. That’s been a challenge for me,” she said. Still, she’s watching students carefully to make sure they’re OK and looking for “any signs and symptoms of depression, if they look in distress, if they’re looking distraught.”

Ware’s school is part of the charter network, and her students are 99 percent black and 85 percent economically disadvantaged.

Ware said she also noticed that many parents were struggling, especially when the shutdown first started, so she talked to them about their own mental health and coached them through setting up routines to help their families adjust to online learning and manage the stress of the pandemic.

The coronavirus has infected in the New Orleans metro region, and it hasn’t spared the McDonogh 35 community. When the pandemic began, Ware was overwhelmed by the losses, which included some of her close friends and 74-year-old , a legendary football coach and beloved physical education teacher at McDonogh 35.

The school had a socially distanced procession in McDonogh 35’s hallways for Reese and has set up a memorial in his parking spot. The staff is also planning to remember him again when regular school resumes, possibly naming an athletic facility after him.

“That was a trying time for us. [Reese] was a very big giant — we called him a gentle giant in our lives,” she said. “That was a challenge, and that was a challenge for me as well, with trying to care mentally for everyone else and still having to deal with my own feelings.”

Ware also reached out individually to all of the students who were in Reese’s classes and their families. For many, the coach’s death triggered memories of others who have died or increased anxiety about relatives who are sick or hospitalized with COVID-19.

Persisting through tough times is “just part of the ball game” of being a social worker, Ware said. One of the systems she set up to help her community is an emoji code, whereby anyone can text her a heart and the color indicates what they need that day.

“I find my kids communicate better via text, which is crazy and kind of different for me to talk about therapeutic things in a text message, but they seem to be expressing their feelings more via text than actually face to face with the Zoom,” Ware said.

Even with all that she does for her community, Ware takes time to care for herself, too.

“Through this pandemic, I found myself eating and ordering a lot of , so I had to do some self-care things as far as just increasing exercising for myself,” she said. (Her favorite popcorn flavor is cashew caramel crisp, and she’s sent some to her colleagues in care packages as well.)

Ware, who lives with her husband, also reads, journals, meditates, takes breaks from the news and social media and avoids looking at screens in the hour before bedtime — and recommends that her colleagues do the same.

The school year ended for Ware’s students May 15, but that doesn’t mean the social worker is on vacation.

“My cellphone number doesn’t change. In our Zoom calls I let my students know if they need me, don’t hesitate to reach out, call, text, email, so they still will have access to me,” she said. “The number won’t change and I’ll respond, whether they are in school or out of school.”

No two experiences of this pandemic are the same, particularly when it comes to school communities.

It’s been months since COVID-19 shuttered districts across the country. In what would have been the final months of the 2019-20 academic year, tens of millions of students, educators and parents saw their lives upended overnight. Parents and siblings have been delegated as formal educators, teachers have become caretakers and saviors, and many students are still struggling to adapt as their homes have now been declared their new place of learning.

Still half of American school employees aren’t teachers. When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, millions of other workers integral to the American education system were similarly uprooted.

Now, as the country (and its school communities) continues to navigate its way through a disaster for which it was grossly unprepared, ����Ӱ��’s Pandemic Reporting Initiative is setting out to track how life and work has changed for the diverse universe of characters who make our classrooms work.

From parents to teachers, counselors and even district warehouse managers, the pandemic has been a time of unprecedented hardships and challenges. Here are eight faces and stories from across the country that begin to capture the real story:

Still ‘in the trenches’

Most D.C. Public Schools buildings have stood vacant since the coronavirus sent teachers, students and staff home. The district’s warehouse is a rare exception.

Warehouse director Roger Asterilla and his 10 full-time employees still report to the behemoth 120,000-square-foot building in northeast D.C. every morning by 7:30 a.m. Asterilla says his team is one of only three DCPS departments — alongside food services and school security — still “in the trenches” and fully operating in person after the pandemic shuttered schools in March. The 47-year-old director of 11 years wasn’t surprised that his team was deemed essential. He calls them the “unsung heroes of DCPS.”

“We’re coming to work every single day despite what’s going on, and supporting any and every initiative that [DCPS] can think of,” Asterilla says.

Read Asterilla’s story here. 

Overwhelmed and ‘unable to help’ 

Originally from the Dominican Republic, Mercedes wakes up earlier now than she did before the pandemic to help her kids get set up for virtual learning. Then, a few days a week, the 47-year-old mother of three heads out to buy necessities, all while coping with being away from her eldest son and daughter-in-law, both of whom contracted the coronavirus.

Mercedes, an undocumented immigrant living in New York City’s East Harlem, shares a small apartment with her husband and their two younger children, Maria, 16, and Christopher, 9. Her oldest son, José, 24, lives in the Bronx with his wife. Although they have since recovered from COVID-19, not being able to see them has been difficult, Mercedes said, speaking through a Spanish translator.

“After going through their day of virtual learning, they also get homework, and so that’s been the most challenging for me, because with the language barrier, I’m unable to help them the way I wish I could,” Mercedes said.

Read Mercedes’s story here.

Grieving a loss, continuing to serve from behind the wheel

Every morning as the sun rose, Rosie Guadarrama walked laps around the parking lot full of yellow school buses at the San Antonio Independent School District transportation hub. In the three weeks since COVID-19 had shuttered schools, she had used that time to pray, listen to worship music and prepare herself for the intense day ahead.

With that on her mind, she boarded a bus and began her work day. Only she wasn’t shuttling kids to and from school, as she had been for six years. She was delivering food to families at six East Side apartment complexes.

She also prayed for her 80-year-old father, who had developed a persistent cough and low-grade fever in late March. It was now the second week of April, and the cough had grown worse, said Guadarrama, 54. “I thought it was COVID.”

Read Guadarrama’s story here.

Missing out on the biggest day of his life

Caillou Allen will miss walking the stage for his diploma at his high school graduation next month. He’ll miss taking the stage more.

For the past three years, the senior at Cleveland’s Early College High School has been part of The Distinguished Gentlemen of Spoken Word, a troupe of African-American teens who perform dramatic interpretations of poetry and inspirational essays, and who have become a core cultural component of the Cleveland community. The Gentlemen have a tradition of performing at the graduations of each member, with the graduate giving a short speech or solo performance between group acts of poems by writers like Langston Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar.

“I am not going to be able to do none of that,” said Allen, 17, who’s headed to Morehouse College in the fall.

Just graduating at all is an accomplishment for Allen, whose disciplinary record during his elementary school years had him bouncing from school to school. He was even expelled in the fourth grade, he said, for making a bomb threat, which forced him to repeat the year.

Read Allen’s story here.

Doing the most she can

Before COVID-19 closed schools, kindergarten teacher Valeria Cox kept a grueling schedule. With five children of her own, an hour commute each way, and a houseful of pets and laundry, she was up every morning at 4:45 a.m. and often went to bed after midnight. Now, amid the pandemic, she is keeping her buoyant outlook, though life is moving just as fast, and she has had some frightening moments along the way.

Like many of the teachers at Mark Twain Dual Language Academy in San Antonio Independent School District, she was born and educated abroad. She was regularly on the floor or the playground equipment with her students, looking at bugs and admiring trees. She adds “-ita” and “-ito” to their names, a Spanish diminutive to convey affection. Her classroom was always full of hugs and excited conversation. The students, she explained, amplified the vitality of the classroom.

But now it’s difficult to simulate that energy over the daily 4 p.m. Zoom video call. Kindergarten, she says, is almost impossible to recreate virtually, because that year is about igniting a love of learning. She can hear the strain, almost a world-weariness, in her students’ voices. Sometimes, she said, it makes her cry.

“I realize how [the pandemic] has made them mature in many ways,” she said.

Read Cox’s story here.

‘Working 24 hours around the clock’

For Shawnell Ware, a social worker at McDonogh 35 High School in New Orleans, the work day used to be from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Now, with school shut down and her city hit hard by the coronavirus, she’s available to her students, their families and her colleagues anytime, day or night.

On a typical school day before the pandemic, she checked in with students as they arrived at school, monitored attendance, observed classrooms, met with students individually, visited families at home and helped coordinate mental health care and other services for students. Now Ware, 51, does all that virtually, in addition to checking in with parents regarding their own mental health, working with teachers to modify assignments for students overwhelmed by online schooling, and tuning in to Zoom classes with students and meetings with her colleagues throughout the day.

“I feel like I’m working 24 hours around the clock. Literally, I receive phone calls at 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock, 10 o’clock [at night]. I even had a student [who was experiencing] anxiety one morning call at 5 a.m.,” Ware said.

Read Ware’s story here.

Doing whatever needs to be done ‘to help our patients’

At 8 a.m. sharp every weekday, Katrina Clark sits down in front of a computer, puts on her headset, types in a username and password, and settles in for eight and a half hours of phone calls.

Ten weeks ago, 55-year-old Clark, a Washington, D.C., public school nurse for 11 years, would have driven about 15 minutes on backroads to get to school by 7:55 a.m. By 8:30 a.m., she’d have medicated about three kids, typically with anticonvulsants, inhalers, ADHD medications or Tylenol. The rest of the day would be spent attending to stomach pains, fevers and scraped knees. To pay the bills, Clark now works for a call center from her home in nearby Anacostia, taking information from first responders who are exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms as part of the D.C. Department of Health’s contact-tracing efforts.

“Whatever [nurses] need to do to help our patients out, we’ll do it,” Clark says.

Read Clark’s story here.

Delivering laptops, making sure ‘these kids got what they needed’

For several days in April, Principal Shaunamichelle Leonard packed dozens of computers into her Kia Sorrento, donned a mask and gloves, grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer and plotted out a path to student homes on her GPS to deliver them.

The coronavirus forced the Cleveland school district to shutter schools March 13, and Leonard’s school passed out laptops April 8 to keep students connected through distance learning. As a product of that very district and as the first in her family to graduate from high school and college, Leonard, 48, is all too familiar with the challenges her students face.

She knew work and child care schedules or lack of transportation could keep families from picking up the laptops that the school was handing out. So she was not surprised when a stack of nearly 30 laptops, set aside for individual students, were still unclaimed.

“I was just trying to do what was right,” the New Tech West High School principal said. “I was armed with everything I needed and I just wanted to make sure these kids got what they needed.”

Read Leonard’s story here.

PANDEMIC: Our latest coverage from across the country of cities, schools and students in crisis amid the shutdown. . 

For several days in April, Shaunamichelle Leonard packed dozens of computers into her Kia Sorrento, donned a mask and gloves, grabbed a bottle of hand sanitizer and plotted out a path to student homes on her GPS to deliver them.

“I was just trying to do what was right,” the principal said. “I was armed with everything I needed, and I just wanted to make sure these kids got what they needed.”

The coronavirus forced the Cleveland school district to shutter schools March 13, and Leonard’s school passed out laptops April 8 to keep students connected through distance learning. As a product of that very district and as the first in her family to graduate from high school and college, Leonard, 48, is all too familiar with the challenges her students face.

She knew work and child care schedules or lack of transportation could keep families from picking up the laptops that the school was handing out. So she was not surprised when a stack of nearly 30 laptops, set aside for individual students, were still unclaimed.

That wouldn’t do.

She wanted to show her students in the small close-knit school that she cared and wanted them to succeed.

“It was beautiful to see them,” Leonard said. “They were like, ‘Oh my God, Ms. Leonard, thank you so much,’ and it just put a smile on their face and a smile on my face.”

And she had a reminder for them: “Now you have what you need to be successful,” she told her students, “there are no excuses and I need you to do what you need to do, which is finish your work.”

Her students are like family, Leonard said, which is what made it easy for her to risk infection by visiting homes to deliver laptops. It also led her to go a step further and deliver about $100 worth of groceries to each of two immigrant families struggling in the first days of Ohio’s shutdown, to last until she could connect them with other services.

“It’s just about … humanity … doing what’s right,” she said. “You can’t leave these kids that come to your school hungry. You know, some kids come to school and they get two meals a day and that’s all they get. To have these kids at home for an indefinite amount of time, I wanted them to have enough to at least [hold] them over.”

The closeness at the school is affected by the separation, Leonard said, though she emails her 57 graduating seniors every day or every other day to keep in touch and make sure they complete everything they need to receive their diploma.

That’s partly because the district made sure that the chance for seniors to graduate was a top priority during the closure and partly because she feels closer to the graduating class because they each joined the school at the same time, her as principal and them as freshmen. Their inability to have a regular graduation ceremony this year — graduation is now a drive-through in which students pick up diplomas in family cars — also hurts her.

“I have grown to love them and they are good kids,” Leonard said. “They have worked so hard for their special moment and they feel cheated.”

Leonard said she wants to repay all the guidance and kindness she found as a child at school in Cleveland and at high school in East Cleveland, a suburb on Cleveland’s border with even more concentrated poverty than the city of Cleveland.

“No matter what you’re born into, you have the ability to determine what your future will be,” Leonard said. “That is what I got from my teachers at Cleveland, East Cleveland and principals in both. They inspired me.”

Loenard joined New Tech West three years ago, a small, specialized high school of 275 students that uses , combining work on computers with student projects. Rather than teaching students through lectures, New Tech schools have students complete multidisciplinary projects that make them learn skills needed for the task.

Student test scores have improved under Leonard, and the school’s sense of community has grown.

“Because we are small, everyone knows everyone,” she said. “I know every student by name, and kids know that.”

The sense of community and her efforts caused parents and students to fight for the school when the district considered shutting it down late last year because of its size.

That passion convinced the school board to keep the school going. The students and staff celebrated with a cake that read, “Congratulations Scholars. We did it together.”

Like most everyone now, Leonard wants to return to classes at the school as soon as possible, while also knowing that safety might force separation again.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” she said. “No one does. I’m just hopeful. I know either way, whether we’re in person together or doing distance learning, we will be a family.”