MINNEAPOLIS — Ten days away, and distance has made hearts grow fonder. It's odd, breaking routine.
"When our babies walk through that door, they're ours," Lucy Laney family and community liaison Melisha Carroll said. "They are ours for 7.5 hours a day, and they belong to us. We teach them, we love them, we make sure they're taken care of, and we send them home and do it all over again the next day."
Carroll said she's been the luckier of the bunch because sometimes her students will come drive down with their parents to say hi at the picket line.
But other than that, she said she knows they're not up to much.
"They're just at home," Carroll said. "They're bored, they're going crazy. They tell us that they miss us."
The feelings are mutual.
"We worry about our kids, and want to know that they're okay, so we pretty much hold each other up out here while we're out here, all day, every day," Carroll said.
"Especially as a Special Ed teacher, it's hard to leave my students because I started to build good relationships with them," Jabari Browne said. "And just not seeing them - I know how hard it is for them at home right now."
"I think about our kids every day, my department especially," Alyssa DeSantis said. "They're probably really confused why they've been out for 10 days, a lot of them come to school for the social aspect, different activities, seeing friends, their teachers. It's the highlights of their days."
The other educators worried that when they finally do get back, progress would have been lost.
"It's going to be like starting all over again, but what can we do? This is overdue for us," Mark Robinson said. "We need better pay, seriously. Smaller sized classrooms, we need respect, and so far they're not showing us any."
However, the students were worried about something else - something bigger.
"I would be more worried if this situation isn't fixed now, because it's not only me that's going to be held back but everybody else," Edison Sophomore Luna Barban said. "Every MPS kid in this district is going to feel hurt. If we don't fix it right now then how will the kids of tomorrow, the kids that will be born, kids that will go into the system be affected?"
"Students should support teachers in what they do because they're always teaching us, so it should be right that we are giving back to them and helping them," Edison Freshman Felix Hunt said.
"It's important the teachers have always been here for us, and we need to be here for them too," Freshman Elise Ashlind said. "And this is like a group effort, we're all just here supporting each other."