These heroes have always been all around us. Sometimes, it just takes a crisis to see them.

Before 8:30 a.m. they gathered, standing 6 feet apart outside a massive warehouse owned by Fayette County Public Schools.

Some 40 family resource center coordinators make a weekly pickup for their students’ families, many of them the things that are so precious these days: Toilet paper, detergent, paper towels.

Sandra Ballew-Barnes works at Breckinridge Elementary, and she adds these supplies to the weekend food backpacks — donated by Southland Christian Church — that she hands out to 80 different families, already struggling and laid lower by the coronavirus.

The weekend backpack program in Fayette County will serve more than 3,200 people this school year, up 1,000 from the year before.

“We have always been called into action, it’s a job of service,” Ballew-Barnes said. “I look at it as what I’m supposed to be doing — you have to have a heart for people and passion for the disenfranchised or those who need an extra hand without making them feel like they don’t matter.”

There’s a lot of talk about “heroes” thrown around these days, but for the most part people like Ballew-Barnes have been there all the time, doing their jobs without fanfare or thanks. Family resource coordinators try to break down barriers to learning, so they spend long weeks finding clothes or therapists or food. They do this all school year, every school year. Like the cafeteria workers who feed students during the week, the sanitation workers who pick up our trash or grocery workers who keep us nourished, they’ve been there all along. It’s just taken a crisis to reveal how important they are.

That’s true for many of the heroes you’ll meet in a special section in Sunday’s Herald-Leader. Mark Dougherty has made national headlines for battling to save COVID-19 patients’ lives, but he’s been working in infectious disease in Lexington for 32 years. As he told me in a previous interview, the COVID battle is exhausting but it’s “why we went into infectious diseases.”

Or Katie Rahenkamp, an ICU nurse who hasn’t seen her 2-year-old since March. Or Kim Barton, who has been planning UK’s response since January. They get up every morning and go to work, just as they’ve always done because people need them. As tennis great Arthur Ashe once said: “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”

Certainly, Sandra Ballew-Barnes and her co-workers don’t see themselves as heroes, but their boss, Doug Adams does.

“Our (resource center) coordinators are on the ground every week,” said Adams, who oversees family and student support services for the district. Most of them are still going into their offices because families in need will contact the schools directly for help.

Carmen Cotto is the coordinator at Cardinal Valley Elementary, which serves much of Lexington’s Hispanic community, along with refugees from Africa and elsewhere.

“I’ve been going in every day because people call me,” she said. “Many people are so anxious because they have lost their jobs and don’t qualify for government help. Single moms are really suffering. We try to help as much as we can.”

T.C. Johnson of Winburn Middle School said requests for help have tripled. One mother broke down to her because she’s the only income in a family of five and she lost her job. “It’s a matter of compassion.”

It’s often said that crisis brings out the best in people, and that’s true, but it also creates more empathy so we can imagine what it might be like to face that sobbing mother who just lost her job or someone widowed by the virus. Our heroes face hard work every day; let’s hope that when the COVID-19 crisis has finally passed, we will continue to appreciate them.

This story was originally published May 2, 2020 at 3:40 PM.

Linda Blackford

Lexington Herald-Leader

Linda Blackford is a former journalist for the Herald-Leader Support my work with a digital subscription