Community volunteers help sew 300 art supply bags for Windsor students

The community rallied around Alyssa Long, 29, and her family after they lost their Coffey Lane home in the Tubbs fire in 2017. So, in the years since, paying that kindness forward has been important to the Santa Rosa native.

Long will continue that mission over the next few weeks and help sew art supply bags from recycled theater department costumes and zippers donated by Los Angeles-based UCAN Zippers USA for 300 art students at Windsor High School.

Her goal is ambitious. Long wants to sew 100 bags, but that will depend partly on the amount of chronic pain that flares up daily as someone who lives with cerebral palsy.

Long and her roommate, Kaitlin Pederson, have begun working in the restored train car on her parents’ property that houses Long’s studio. They are driven by a sense of resiliency and togetherness ingrained deep in Sonoma County’s core after almost yearly cycles of disaster, loss and recovery.

Schools have relied on community support more than ever during the distance learning era, the now-prevailing method of education for areas that haven’t contained the coronavirus. While much of at-home instruction has been fraught with challenges for families, teachers and administrators, it has also led to extraordinary collaboration.

For Long, a two-term president of the local chapter of the American Sewing Guild, sewing for others is a source of joy, so that makes sewing for students navigating high school during a pandemic an easy sell.

“My community rallied around me when I lost everything, and now there are other people in need,” said Long, who has degrees from Sonoma State University and Santa Rosa Junior College in environmental studies and fashion design.

“I have time,” she said. “I can’t sew all day, but I’m going to sew what I can.”

The effort to make supply kits out of unused drama costumes has been orchestrated by David Beal, Windsor High arts teacher for the last 17 years. He said he was inspired by Jeffrey Whiting, a New York City theater director who earlier this year converted his rehearsal studio into a manufacturing hub and helped sew 55,000 surgical gowns during a nationwide shortage of protective equipment.

Like many classes, teaching art was difficult in the spring given how varied every student’s situation was at home. Teachers were told to hold students harmless, so lessons were limited since most homes aren’t stocked with the proper supplies to take a college preparatory course.

If Windsor’s art teachers wanted to provide a more rigorous lesson plan, the equity aspect needed to be addressed, Beal said.

When the school distributes the art supply kits in a drive-thru pickup Sept. 9, students will go home with a brand new watercolor set, colored pencils, a ruler, scissor, pencils and basic paper for drawing, Beal said. Students will complete lessons in a sketchbook included in the bag, and do projects on a pad with higher-quality paper, he said.

Beal has been working long hours over the last week to cut capes, curtains and any unused fabric he could find before volunteers start coming to the school this week to grab supplies. The school plans to make a wider call for volunteers on Tuesday.

“It’s a form of making the community stronger,” Beal said. “I’m always pleasantly surprised when I ask for anything how willing people are to make it happen.”

As volunteers work on the bags, school administrators are tracking down supplies. Amy Zigler, assistant principal of Windsor High, said they wanted the students to have quality art supplies rather than “basic dime store” options, so orders are expected to arrive over the next few weeks.

She credited her teachers for finding creative ways to innovate and help tie the community together at a time when anxieties around school are so high.

“Windsor is an amazing community,” Zigler said. “People offer to help in so many ways. We thought we’d tap into that.”

You can reach Staff Writer Yousef Baig at 707-521-5390 or yousef.baig@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @YousefBaig.