On Tuesday, Issac Benson crouched down to help his 2-year-old son, Silas, take off his tiny purple rubber boots. Then he picked Silas up and carried him through the door of a classroom at Juneau’s former Floyd Dryden Middle School.
“I’m back,” Silas Benson said as he entered a room full of other toddlers. But as he looked around, he seemed shy and confused. Silas has been coming to this daycare since he was a child, but the room, with its soft carpets and boxes full of toys, was unfamiliar to him.
“Let’s go back in slowly, it’s okay,” said Issac Benson. “I know it’s a big transition and a big change, right?”
The Bensons’ day care center, Glacier Valley Kids, was flooded during last week’s record-breaking glacier outburst, and floodwaters reached their home.
“We stayed up all night watching it happen. Luckily we were just high enough to avoid being completely submerged,” said Issac Benson. “It was still really scary.”
Their garage and crawl space were flooded. The family spent the week drying everything out and helping their neighbors who were less fortunate, all while managing other obligations. Issac Benson said it was nice to spend time with Silas at home, but seeing the Glacier Valley Kids staff on Tuesday morning was a relief.
“My wife and I were trying to continue working full-time and being parents full-time, and I mean, those things don’t fit together, do they?” he said. “Without daycare, without it, our lives don’t really function.”
The opening day of this emergency care facility marks a return to normality for Benson and the other parents. It’s also a big day for child care worker Carolina Sekona, who has been running Glacier Valley Kids, a state-approved daycare for children under five, from her home in Emily Way for years.
Last week, more than two feet of water poured in, soaking wooden furniture, blankets, carpets, toys and stuffed animals. At least half of the items had to be thrown away, and it was clear that the house itself was uninhabitable.
“I was crying, I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know what we were going to do,” Sekona said. “I just saw that my home was destroyed and that my child care was destroyed. And I knew it would take months to rebuild everything.”
It looked like Glacier Valley Kids was out of commission. But that wasn’t an option, said Blue Shibler, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit focused on supporting preschool teachers and caregivers.
“Basically, we cannot afford to lose childcare places. There are no free places in the childcare programs,” she said.
Parents who depend on Sekona have nowhere else to go. Child care in Juneau is overwhelmed under normal circumstances, and even before the flood, Sekona was turning parents away. She cares for 12 children from Juneau, and had at least 12 other families on her waiting list.
“If it couldn’t reopen, that would mean 12 families would have to give up their jobs,” Shibler said. “That’s all.”
So Shibler’s agency chipped in some emergency funds to replace the toys and other items. Sekona picked out a new plush campfire and a miniature wooden play kitchen, among other things. Other daycare centers and schools in the city donated cubbies, bookshelves, books and leftover toys.
And the City and County of Juneau made the former Floyd Dryden Middle School building available, which just last week was used as an emergency shelter for people forced to evacuate their flooded homes. Then the Alaska Department of Health and Human Services granted Sekona a temporary license to set up shop there.
She was grateful that everything worked out so quickly.
“I have to go back to work. I have a family to support,” Sekona said.
Sekona is a single mother of four children. Fortunately, she and her family were able to move into a new house this summer that was spared from the rising waters. However, the flooded house secured Sekona’s livelihood and that of her three employees.
Over the weekend, they transformed two of the school’s empty classrooms. One is for meals and games. The other is for movies and naps. Since the school building was vacated this spring, the city has had its eye on it as a child care facility, so Glacier Valley Kids will be a trial run.
From one side of the room, Sekona watched the children explore and rediscover some of the familiar things she had managed to salvage.
Some favorite toys were spared thanks to high shelves. The plastic tables and chairs that were actually intended for small children also held up pretty well in the flood. And on one wall hangs a painting of a smiling lion with a rainbow-colored mane. Sekona came to her burned-out house on Emily Way to get it.
“The kids are so visual,” Sekona said. “They’ll see it. They’ll remember: This is us.”
