It’s a little after 7 p.m. on a Friday night and there’s movement in two directions for J.H. Hines students and their former principal, Elijah Barefield. Barefield moves to a chair on his back porch with a book in hand. Students and their parents are logging online and gravitating to the school’s Facebook page.
At 7:15 p.m., principal and students connect.
It’s storytime. Specificially, “Pete The Cat” night, as it is every Friday when Barefield reads one of James Dean’s “Pete the Cat” books and maybe sings a little, too.
“ ‘Pete the Cat’ is always singing, so I know I’ll be singing, too,” he said.
The Waco educator isn’t alone in what he does online on Friday and other weekday nights as dozens, perhaps scores of Waco-area residents are picking up kids’ books and pitching in as online storytellers while students are at home.
They do it for their young listeners’ benefit, providing a regular, calming dose of comfort during a topsy-turvey coronavirus spring and maybe a touch of education smuggled in. For some, there’s an additional benefit: a return to a happy time in their childhoods when parents and siblings read to them.
“I always love reading to kids,” explained Barefield, with 13 of his 16 years as an educator spent in elementary education. He moves to become the Dean of Students at Carver Middle School this fall, but until then, he’s still the principal for the J.H. Hines students listening to him on weekday nights. More than Hines students are his audience, too: comments on his Facebook Live readings also come from Killeen, Temple and Houston, plus there’s a great-nephew in Dallas that signs on, too.
In addition to “Pete The Cat,” Barefield reads “Clark The Shark,” “The Attack of the 50-Foot Teacher” and other books carried by Scholastic Books, supplier of school book fairs across the country. Scholastic has given teachers permission to read its books online with schools shut down as a pandemic precaution, freeing them of possible copyright violations, Barefield said. Before that, his evening storytime library included E.B. White’s “Stuart Little” and C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.”
Time spent reading and listening is never wasted — Barefield also throws in the occasional life lesson and public service message for the census — and he’s also aware it’s a break that may help parents already juggling work schedules and family duties. When he was a kid, he remembers, his older sisters filled in reading stories to him when his father, a mechanic, and his mother, a night shift nurse, sometimes didn’t have the time.
It also brings back memories of reading to his and his wife Andrea’s sons, Andrew and Jackson — times filled with Disney stories, Dr. Seuss books, “The Brown Bear,” “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” and more. “Reading bedtime stories to them always brought such joy,” he said.
Missing people
The idea of helping kids during the jumble of school closings and keeping their community connections active led the Lacy Lakeview Volunteer Fire Department — specifically, firefighter Jackie Henderson — to read online.
“It was early in this COVID thing and we were trying to do things to make the kids feel a little safer,” explained fire chief Patty Byars-Faulkner. “There was no Easter egg hunt like we usually have and we thought it was important to keep in touch with our community.”
Henderson, a mother of three, read Stacey McCleary’s “I Give You the World.” Byars-Faulkner says she’s ready for the time when it’s safe to reconnect face-to-face with the community and its kids. “We do miss everybody,” she said.
The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum has reopened, so education programs manager Audrey Ladd will do her weekly book reading videos from her workplace, but without one loyal audience member: her black poodle Bolin.
Ladd, 25, reads a history-themed children’s book, preferably with a Texas topic, each week, posting it on the Ranger museum’s website at 10:30 a.m. Fridays. She dresses in period costume — “It helps with the feeling of storytelling,” she explained — and reads such books as Jan Brett’s “Armadillo Rodeo,” “L is for Lone Star” by Carol Crane, Angela Johnson’s “All Different Now: Juneteenth, the First Day of Freedom” and J. Jaye Smith’s “Batty About Texas.”
The book readings were part of online offerings that Ladd created for home-schoolers and parents with kids learning at home, including activity sheets, fingerprinting exercises and lesson plans.
Ladd did her book videos from home when she and other museum personnel were sheltering in place only to find herself joined in the first one by Bolin, who trotted in and curled up in her lap as she read.
She’s had other fans, too, and some families have sent her videos of their kids watching at home. Ladd’s book readings remind her of childhood when her parents and an older sister read to her and one of her favorite books then, Tomie dePaola’s “The Legend of the Bluebonnet,” made her video reading list.
The museum educator started with kids’ books in the museum bookstore, then broadened her scope, checking out books from the Waco-McLennan County Library through its curbside service during the city’s shelter-in-place order. She finds that education is a two-way street, even for a historian.
— WACOTRIB