Dec 8, 2005 2:23 PM
Watching the utter horror of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on CNN and other news programs, Susan McGuire-Crenny couldn’t sit still.
“All I could think about was how were the children going to be able to start school?” she recalled.
So the New York City teacher of 12 years, who works at PS 19 in Corona, started her own relief drive.
What began as a thought quickly spread like gossip. Not only did this teacher with a big heart get people’s attention in several corners of the Northeast, she single-handedly collected two truckloads of items for children affected by Katrina and personally delivered them in October to schools in Moss Point, a small coastal city in Mississippi, where she comforted kids in the wake of their frightening, painful experience.
“I guess I just wanted to go sing to them,” said McGuire-Crenny, an advocate of the inspirational “child-honoring” songs of family entertainer Raffi Cavoukian and folk singer Tom Chapin.
McGuire-Crenny started by posting fliers in her school, in the shops at the mall in her neighborhood, anywhere she could. “Katrina Kids Gearing Up for School,” the fliers read. “We need your help!” At the time, she was seeking basic school supplies, like backpacks, books and pencils.
She next sent the fliers as attachments via e-mail to all her friends and to all her friends’ friends.
“People started coming out of the woodwork to help,” McGuire-Crenny said. Her cell phone, listed as the contact number on the fliers, started ringing at all hours of the day.
Her enthusiasm caught on with a friend in Congers, New York, who got her church involved and collected close to 400 backpacks.
Then her college-aged son started e-mailing the “Katrina Kids” fliers to his friends. One of them, Cindy Cario, offered to design a Web site (www.angelfire.com/oz2/katrina_kids) to support her effort.
Cario and McGuire-Crenny began to get creative, tailoring the relief drive to collect particular items they thought would be useful for the kids.
The Snack-and-Nap drive sought items for break time: small snacks of pretzels, raisins and M&Ms coupled with a mat to lie down on for a short nap.
“I must have wrapped enough snack-and-nap packets for 200 kids for a week,” the teacher sighed.
The music therapy drive brought in a sizable collection of guitars, boom-boxes and CDs.
Through the Web site, McGuire-Crenny connected with administrators in the Moss Point, Miss., school district, which was preparing to re-open schools in patched-up buildings. They were interested in getting some of the supplies pouring into the New York teacher’s apartment and into her neighbor’s next door.
McGuire-Crenny gave what she collected to schools in Moss Point but, she said, it was just a “drop in the bucket,” compared to all the things the children need.
She spent a week in October visiting schools in the town, which had a population of 15,000 before Katrina. Nearly a third of the 9,300 workers at nearby Ingalls Shipyard, a division of the navy contractor Northrup Grumman, could not be located in the weeks following the storm, according to the AFL-CIO. Many families, however, remain.
When she arrived, she said, people in the Moss Point schools rolled out the red carpet for her as if she were “president of the United States.”
She sang songs with the children like “Shake Your Sillies Out,” and “Down by the Bay.” “Singing opens up the emotions,” she said. “These people need to speak.”
McGuire-Crenny talked to teachers who had no clothing, no homes. Many, she said, are living with relatives, awaiting money from FEMA to build anew. Local stores are also having difficulty getting items in and keeping their shelves stocked.
“These people are suffering and it looks like nobody is doing anything for them,” McGuire-Crenny said.
Approximately 1,000 teachers in Mississippi, 600 on the Gulf Coast, have been directly affected by Hurricane Katrina, according to the state American Federation of Teachers, which is providing financial assistance and is also collecting school supplies for educators and students.
All the kids wanted to know when McGuire-Crenny would be back. She has promised to write and to get pen-pals for all of them.
In one classroom where McGuire-Crenny sang and danced with students, one little girl kept to herself. But when the visiting teacher got up to leave, the little girl ran over and threw her arms around her and begged her to stay.