DOVER-FOXCROFT – Childcare needs shifted rapidly in March as first, schools, and then many businesses, shut down due to COVID-19. Parents had to help more with children’s school work while also working from home themselves or putting in long hours at essential workplaces each day. Childcare centers faced shifting guidelines, as well as uncertain client numbers and income. As Maine businesses slowly reopen, guidelines, numbers of clients and amount of income remain in flux.
“I work as an administrative assistant for a company that runs the medical departments of five different county jails,” said Kelly Chabot, a single mother of four from Dover-Foxcroft. Xander, 10, lives with his father, who has underlying medical conditions, “so I am trying to minimize his exposure to keep his father safe,” she said. “I don’t even get to see my son.”
That leaves Xavier, 11; Kaliyah, 6; and Malachai, 1, still in need of childcare on work days, and help with schoolwork for the two oldest. “Life since COVID-19 has been crazy,” Chabot said. “The school shut down first, and then Xavier and Kaliyah’s daycare. I had to scramble to find somewhere for them to go, since I am an essential worker due to the fact that I process payroll and am considered support staff for our healthcare providers. I got lucky and Malachai’s daycare was able to take them on.”
The biggest challenge has been fitting distance learning into an already packed day. “By the time we get home, it’s supper and then baths and bed for the younger two,” said Chabot. “If I don’t stick to our normal schedule, mornings are a train wreck, especially with Kaliyah. Xavier, for the most part, can do his work on his own with little to no help from me. But I am finding it harder and harder to make time to help the kids.”
The saving grace has been her daycare. “I send school work in with Kaliyah and they help her with a couple of pages a day,” Chabot said.
The other way family life has changed is with safety concerns. “I don’t allow the kids into any stores, or honestly, out in public right now,” she said. “We get up, drop off at daycare, I come to work, get off work, pick them up from daycare, and then go back home. If I need anything from the store, I try to make it work before I pick them up, but with all the new rules regarding stores, it’s hard. I have a pickup time that I have to follow [at the daycare] or I am charged a late fee. It’s stressful and exhausting and scary.”
Jaime Lovejoy’s Daycare has been providing childcare in Dover-Foxcroft for 15 years, but none of them has been like 2020. Lovejoy typically tends to six to eight children ages 3 months to 10 or 11 years.
“When this first started and they closed the schools, I had to think about our daily routine. I knew that was going to change because there would be school work to do and that was going to have to be incorporated,” said Lovejoy, who immediately encouraged parents to send packets of school work into the daycare with their kids.
The number of children also shifted. There were more kiddos needing daycare with schools closed and businesses open so that parents had work – and then less in need of childcare when businesses closed and parents could be at home. Lovejoy has had two to four children most days during the shutdown. With businesses slowly starting to reopen, she expects that number will go back up soon.
Always a stickler for cleanliness, she said sanitization routines did not change much at the daycare to comply with state safety guidelines. “We always do handwashing, but we had to make sure the younger ones were taking the full 20 seconds and doing it property, so I found myself helping them more to make sure. And I’ve always made sure, when the kids put something in their mouths, that it gets washed right away.”
Most of Lovejoy’s essential worker families are in the healthcare field, so she trusts them to be aware of and practicing virus safety measures. Still, there have been concessions for safety in her household. Lovejoy’s husband has done all the shopping outside the home to minimize her exposure, and thus that of the children in her care. And recently, when an online order of new toys arrived, “I left it on the porch and got disposable wipes and wiped down the box and what was inside before I brought it into the house,” she said.
Adding school work to the daily routine hasn’t been “too bad,” said Lovejoy. “They do get distracted. You’re not going to sit there for three or four hours with them doing it, because you’ve got littler ones you’ve got to keep occupied while you help the older ones. I carve it out, two or three hours a day. We do some first thing in the morning. Then, if it’s a nice day we go outside for a little while, or if it’s rainy, I let them have free play for a little while. When I’m cooking lunch, I have them go back to the school work, and during naptime while the younger ones are sleeping. So we are not doing it all at once.”
With ages ranging from 1 to 8 these days, keeping everyone entertained can be a challenge, too – thus the online order of toys and games. Lovejoy went over options with the children and let them help pick which items to order.
As more parents return to work and more children arrive at the daycare, “I can definitely tell the kids missed each other,” said Lovejoy. “Watching them come through the door and interact with each other, you can tell they are all happy to see each other and play again. I think that’s been the hardest thing on most of the kids. When you have your routine and it gets changed and you don’t understand why it’s changed, that’s hard.”
Recently, out on a walk with her husband, Lovejoy saw a former daycare kiddo riding her bike. “We were on one sidewalk and she was on the other side and we talked. You could tell it was hard on her, too.”
And Lovejoy, who has stayed home throughout the bulk of the shutdown, has enjoyed starting to go out a bit more, as well. “I’ve been out here and there, for my own sanity,” she said, laughing.
For information about Jaime Lovejoy’s Daycare, call 564-2831.The cemetery tour with local historian Tom Goulette will be held at the Lawn Cemetery on the left side of Route 15 (Elm Street) heading west at 6:30 pm and will include the mystery of the lost cremains.
Thanks to the Red Maple Inn for providing the bounce house and live music and to the town of Guilford for providing the masks and sanitizer.
The Guilford Memorial Library will host a book sale on from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sept. 26 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Masks will be required and social distancing will be observed.
DOVER-FOXCROFT/SEBEC – Like most of us during the stay-safe-at-home closures, Patrick Myers is balancing needs at home with those of his workplace. And in Myers’ case, as executive director of the Center Theatre, that workplace is well known to anyone who enjoys taking in a movie, live music, plays or standup comedy close to home.
The theater stayed open for a time, doing extra disinfection between shows, “but it quickly became obvious we had an obligation to our staff and the public to close even before we absolutely had to by state mandate,” Myers said. “I think it was certainly the right decision, given the situation. I don’t think there’s any reason the Center Theatre should have stayed open at the risk of spreading a virus through the community. For better or worse, while the theater is vital to our wellbeing, it is not essential to our day-to-day lives.”
The first week after closing was spent scrambling to get everyone set up with the technology and a process to work from home. With those issues resolved, “we began to look outward again, at how we could contribute to the community, and what we could realistically do.”
The Center Theatre launched its Keep in Touch campaign to help folks feel more connected while also providing some revenue for the nonprofit during this downtime.
“The first thing we did was make our marquee available,” Myers said. “Folks make a donation and get a message up on the marquee for a day. We’ve had a fairly good response to that.” When sponsored messages don’t appear, the marquee displays humorous reminders to practice social distancing, or shares other community information. “We also are using our ad space in The Eastern Gazette so that folks will know where to get information or additional resources in the community,” he said.
And Keep in Touch Online is a service to create and deliver short video messages. “So folks, for a small donation, tell the theater who they want a video to go to and what they want the video to say, and we’ll connect with some of our talented actors and volunteers to record a short message that will be sent to the recipient,” Myers explained. “It’s just a fun surprise, a way to spread a little bit of joy with a birthday message, an anniversary message or just something silly to make somebody smile. It will be interesting to see what people come up with!”
The theater’s weekly e-blasts have evolved, now including free resources for online entertainment and other items of interest to help everyone beat the extended cabin fever season this spring.
“And while we’re closed, we are also making available for one week at a time videos of past performances at Center Theatre,” Myers said. “We don’t want folks to forget the great work that has gone on and will go on in the future. It’s a nice way for people to look back and see some old shows that they probably haven’t seen in quite a while.”
Work on the second screen in the former Center Coffee space has come to a halt as closures elsewhere have slowed down equipment installation and the arrival of funding. “It was supposed to be finished on Friday, April 10 with a grand opening on the 17th, but I can’t make any predictions now,” said Myers.
And what of the Maine Whoopie Pie Festival, for which the theatre is a presenting organization? “As of right now we are still hoping the festival can go on as scheduled, on June 27, but in the event it does have to be postponed, we will have a new date set shortly,” Myers said. “We definitely don’t want to cancel. It will happen one way or another!”
Myers said that to make a donation or for more information, visit centertheatre.org, call 564-8943 or mail to 20 East Main Street, Dover-Foxcroft, 04426.
Safe on the farm
Having businesses and schools closed has meant big transitions at the Myers homestead, as well. “We have two kids now doing school work from home, and both adults working from home,” Myers said. “None of us had ever had anything like this in our lives, where we now have to juggle not only family chores, but also checking in the morning to see who needs bandwidth for a conference call or school work.
“Out in the sticks there is not always great bandwidth, so we are just figuring out a new schedule and a new rhythm for every day,” he said. “We are trying to give each other space and the benefit of the doubt, knowing that it’s a new experience for everyone and it affects everyone a little bit differently.”
Teresa Myers, conservation specialist with the Maine State Museum, is working from home on projects, policies, guidelines and future exhibits.
Their daughter, Alice, 13, “is adjusting very well, keeping busy with school work, and thrives on being self-motivated,” said Myers. “She’s very good about keeping her own schedule, and is frankly enjoying having more free time to herself these days.”
The household gained a new member when Patrick’s cousin, Sami Bitat, 17, moved from Algeria to “sort of have the quintessential American high school experience – which has changed somewhat,” Myers said. “He really adjusted to school in the states very well, and then, like everyone else, had the rug pulled out from under him. He’s been through multiple transitions over the last eight months.”
Fortunately, there isn’t much livestock on the farm to care for these days, other than chickens cranking out so many eggs that Myers joked the family had a quota to eat four apiece each day. He used to sell eggs, but found it “more trouble than it was worth.” Now, excess eggs are donated to the food cupboard.
With spring in the air, there are culverts to shovel out to avoid flooding, and gardens to prepare. “There’s plenty of that work going around,” he said.
To relax, the family plays games and “tries to sit down for meals every once in a while together, but mainly just get outside to do some work or get out in the woods to just get away and have a change of scenery,” Myers said.
And finally, on the home front, he quipped, “the dog loves that we’re here all the time but I think the cat’s getting a little pissed off that we aren’t giving him half the day to be on his own in the quiet!”
DOVER-FOXCROFT -- Students travel to the U.S.A. from around the globe to experience high school in America and to prepare to attend our colleges. Now, because of COVID-19 and its associated safety guidelines, many students are unable to return to their homes and families while also missing out on that American high school experience.
Dayita Durachman, a junior at Foxcroft Academy, said she is one of the lucky ones because she has been attending the school since her freshman year. Students only here for one year have missed out on the end of winter sports, all of spring sports, prom, and may not get to experience graduation.
“I was born in Indonesia, but we moved to Singapore when I was really young,” said Durachman. “I came to FA mostly because I want to go to college here. I thought coming here through high school would make it easier to apply to colleges, to understand the curriculum and how the system works.”
FA was specifically chosen because of the good student/teacher ratio and the small town setting, she said. “There are no distractions to studying, like there would be in a big city. The teachers are very focused on us, which is very helpful to me because English is not my first language.”
Another thing that made Dover-Foxcroft a good pick was the Center Theatre. Durachman, who plans to study theater in college, has been performing in local productions for the past three years.
“I was going to be in ‘Oliver.’ I already auditioned and I got a really good part, but they had to cancel. It’s really sad,” she said. Durachman has had roles in Center Theatre productions of “Little Women,” “Seussical II” and “Lion King.” “The school is doing a really good job with productions, too. I was a main character in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ last fall.”
Durachman said she will likely attend a college in New England because, “I call this home, and I don’t want to be far from home.”
Still, it is hard to be away from family during a worldwide crisis. “My parents live in an apartment, and apparently someone in that apartment block has it,” said Durachman. “But they’ve been doing work at home. My baby sister is only five months old now, so I’m really worried about her – but I think they are fine. They are just staying home.”
Many of FA’s foreign students went home as the pandemic spread. That wasn’t an option in her case. “I was going to go home, but that Monday it hit. Singapore closed its borders, so I can’t go home. And I would have to go through Germany because it takes two days to go home and Germany is in a really bad situation…so I just couldn’t get home. I don’t know when I’m going home. It’s a day-by-day situation,” she said.
Having her in a small, rural community is some comfort to her family, Durachman said. “But they are still worried. There’s going to be a risk anywhere.”
There are other challenges. Some classes, like music and chorus, cannot be offered online or students may lack the instruments to participate from home, she said. “Or like chemistry. I’m kind of sad we can’t do the labs anymore. Labs are very helpful because you actually see a reaction and how it works.”
Some teachers are better at teaching online and responding promptly to email than others, said Durachman. And preparing for the SATs has also become a challenge. “I paid for it already and got the books, but the tests got cancelled and it is harder for us to study in the summer.”
FA is trying to make the best of the experience for students still living in the dorms. “The school is trying to keep us physically active,” Durachman said. “They open the gym for us, and we can walk on the track when the weather is nice.
“It’s mostly the social interaction that I miss,” she continued. Dorms are not allowed any visitors. Residents, because they are already cohabitating, do not have to social distance, but students have all been given their own room. Activities are organized to try to keep them entertained and cheerful. “We do painting, indoor soccer, and we had an Easter egg hunt around the dorms – I got M&Ms.”
The school is keeping the dorms open and providing meals. “The school is doing a good job,” said Durachman. “I’m glad I’m stuck here, compared to all the kids stuck in their own homes, especially an only child. I’ve been living with these people for a whole year. We are all safe. Here, I have friends and some social interaction.”
Durachman does a lot of reading, online entertainment, and “I’m trying to get some new hobbies. I’m trying to learn to knit, but I’m very impatient,” she said with a laugh.
Her parents call her daily. “I am a little sad I haven’t seen my parents for eight months now, but I kind of want to spend one of my summers here because everyone says Maine is the best in the summer. This might be my chance to do so,” Durachman said. “But the world is sick and everyone is struggling and it’s just really sad.”