NORTHAMPTON — The dining room at the Quality Inn and Suites on Conz Street is an unmistakable duplicate of so many other hotel breakfasts in the country: a waffle machine, juice dispensers, containers of popular cereals and piles of scrambled eggs.
The difference in Northampton, however, is that on weekday mornings the room has the feel of a crowded family kitchen. A handful of school-age children in heavy coats and backpacks mingle about with their parents, gulping down juice and bacon before rushing out to their respective bus stops.
For Gesmarie Perez Santiago, this is the best meal she and her two sons will get all day.
“We eat a good breakfast to make sure we get full,” she said.
There’s no kitchen in the motel, so for the rest of the day she and her family will eat snacks or frozen food that they heat in a microwave. “We do get hungry,” she confesses.
Santiago and sons, 19-year-old Jesus and 10-year-old Esteban, are one of as many as 25 Puerto Rican families who have temporarily taken up residence in the motel. As climate refugees displaced by two devastating hurricanes, the families have left behind home and loved ones to escape destruction, lack of electricity and hourslong lines for basic necessities.
Now on the mainland, the families are keenly aware that whatever federal and state aid they are currently receiving won’t last forever. Hotel vouchers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, are set to expire on Jan. 13. What happens next, families and local officials said, remains unclear.
“We’re trying to get answers and understand what are the systems that are going to be in place,” Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz said. “I don’t know how long this FEMA aid will last … what will happen when the aid runs out? We all know the situation in Puerto Rico will take a long time in terms of recovery and restoration of electricity.”
In addition to figuring out meals and housing, the families are working to find a way to get back into a seminormal routine — that includes child care, employment and school.
“I wake up early to eat breakfast, and then I start looking for help,” Francys Perez, 25, said. She is waiting on child care vouchers for her 2-year-old son, Jared Bautista, so she can fully focus on looking for work and housing. Back in her home city of Camuy, her family doesn’t expect to have electricity until February or March, and clean water and food were hard to come by — far from ideal for a mother raising a small child.
While FEMA and state agencies helped these families find temporary housing at the hotel, that doesn’t seem to have been the case for enrolling their children in school. Northampton school officials said they didn’t learn that a “cluster” of families had been settled in the area until one of them showed up at the school.
On a snowy Tuesday morning, Northampton Schools Superintendent John Provost sat in a windowless conference room at the Leeds Elementary School with attendance and outreach social worker Kelley Knight and Associate Director of Student Services David Messing.
The trio had gathered to make themselves available to teachers with questions: How will the schools successfully absorb the students who have arrived from Puerto Rico? How will teachers integrate them into classes? What do we do about the culture shock the students are likely to experience?
The group of administrators did their best to answer the questions the teachers posed but the district doesn’t have access to FEMA or Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency records on the families. Sometimes “I don’t know” was the most honest answer the group had to offer.
“We knew that families would end up doubling up. We didn’t know FEMA was going to award a contract locally, and having a cluster of families is completely different than families dispersed throughout the district,” Knight said. “It presented a different challenge than we were anticipating, but the source of the challenge wasn’t all that different … it was just the volume I think and the cluster of it.”
Because of confidentiality issues, Provost said the school couldn’t simply call the hotel where the families were staying and ask if there were any families with school-aged children. Instead, Kelley and another school employee have spent time camped out in the hotel’s lobby with paperwork and backpacks in an effort to connect with families. Both Knight and Provost said the hotel’s manager has been helpful making the necessary connections.
The Leeds school has been designated to receive the most elementary-aged children, and administrators said it was important for them to keep families together. In addition to looking at the schools’ capacities, the district also had to evaluate what English-language learner resources already existed.
“Prior to Nov. 20 when this process started in earnest, there were 16 English learners at the high school,” Provost said. “Since that time, they’ve added four and we’ve determined that when they get to 24, we need to add another class, and when they get to 30 we need to add two more classes.”
To make that possible, the district froze $17,000 from different “cost centers across the district to prepare for when we hit those certain trigger points,” Provost explained.
While the arrival of fellow U.S. citizens was unexpected, the district had already been planning, together with Catholic Charities, for the arrival of refugee families. The district reached out to members of Circles of Care — groups of volunteers who made a five-year commitment to assist a refugee family — who had been preparing to welcome refugee families, to ask if they would be interested in anonymously sponsoring families from Puerto Rico. So far, there have been 12 families that have been supported in this way, Knight said.
“It’s been eye-opening in a good way to rethink the work that we do and kind of revisit it from another perspective and make sure that it still feels good from that perspective,” Knight said. “It’s been really nice in lots of way. A lot of work but really nice.”
Just as the schools were prepared for the arrival of refugees, so too was the city. With the arrival of President Donald Trump and the creation of numerous travel bans, however, resettlement efforts for international refugees ground to a halt.
“I guess it was fortuitous that we did have these preparations in place,” Narkewicz said.
After finding out through Provost about the families that had been placed at the Quality Inn, Narkewicz said that staff within his office have been in contact with multiple city agencies as well as the hotel’s manager.
“We’re doing what we can to welcome and assist and help families, particularly families with kids, get access to our schools but also trying to understand what is the long-term plan,” Narkewicz said. “It sounds like the state has set up some resource centers and that these families are supposed to be accessing but it is unclear what additional resources these agencies have to assist.”
In addition to helping to find more permanent housing, getting settled into schools and being equipped for the cold weather, Narkewciz said he has been working on an unofficial level to help make sure the kids have a merry Christmas.
Despite the way things ended up working out, however, Narkewicz said the arrival of climate refugees in the city came as a surprise.
“Clearly, there was no notification to us. The first notification we had … was when a family made inquires about school and that is how we knew,” Narkewicz said. “Clearly there was not good communication, and we’re trying to play catch up a little bit, but obviously the first priority now is to figure out how we assist these families.”
There are no official evacuees from Puerto Rico in Massachusetts, according to Dennis Pinkham from FEMA’s external affairs office. Instead, they are self-evacuees, he said, and that means they come under different rules, and coordinating aid efforts for them is more of a state-run operation.
The state, for its part, has put together a guidance list for cities and towns to know what resources are available to evacuees that was first distributed on Nov. 8, according to Sarah Finlaw, communications director for the executive office for administration and finance.
Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, or MEMA, has contracted with the United Way-operated MA 2-1-1. When they receive a call from a family in need, 2-1-1 conducts a needs assessment with that family. From there, if services are needed, the families are sent to a Family Resource Center in the region where they intend to live. The local Family Resource Centers are the Bridge Family Resource Center in Amherst, Holyoke’s Enlace Family Resource Center and The Springfield Family Support Programs Family Resource Center.
The state’s Executive Office for Administration and Finance did not respond when asked about the reported lack of communication between local and state agencies. Pinkham, of FEMA, said that inquiries to his office were passed along to MEMA, who then sent the information to the executive office, as they were the ones handling the efforts.
Several local organizations and residents have filled the void left by federal and state agencies by providing needed essentials to some families. Among those groups are the Circles of Care set up for refugees and churches, including Haydenville Congregational, which all organized a clothing drive for the families.
Like the city and schools, Quality Inn management had no idea that their hotel would become temporary housing for those fleeing the hurricanes’ wreckage. But they too have stepped into the role of assisting their newest residents.
“It was completely out of the blue,” said General Manager Shaun Leahan, who said he and his staff worked extra-long shifts the day many families showed up in early November. Since then, Leahan and his staff have helped organize a winter clothing drive with WEBS yarn store, and Leahan called FEMA to advocate for large families who were only approved for one room.
“It’s emotional, because these people are coming with nothing,” said Jessica Pichette, a bilingual receptionist at the hotel who has been helping translate for the families, many of whom don’t speak English.
For Gesmarie Perez Santiago and her family, the outpouring of support has blown them away.
On Friday morning, she and her family took the bus downtown, where they met city property owner and founder of the Iron Horse, Jordi Herold, in the freezing cold in front of a stately apartment building.
Herold had decided last December to provide the apartment to a refugee family. But the flow of international refugees slowed under the Trump administration, and the apartment sat vacant while Herold and his family still wanted to help someone in need.
Their opportunity came when they heard about Perez Santiago and her family through Johanna Silva, Perez Santiago’s childhood friend from grade school. Silva moved to the Pioneer Valley when she was 9, and her children now go to the Montessori School of Northampton together with Herold’s two daughters.
In addition to the apartment, which Herold is providing rent-free for six months and at a discounted rate for another six, the Montessori School organized a collection effort to provide the family with furniture and other household essentials for the apartment.
“I don’t understand how we’ve had so much luck,” said Perez Santiago, who herself was a Montessori school teacher in Puerto Rico. Living three to one hotel room has been a significant strain, she said. “We don’t have space to breathe.”
Walking around Herold’s spacious apartment on Friday, Perez Santiago had a permanent smile on her face as she peered into the large closets, imagining her family’s life in their new home as her son Jesus excitedly translated for her.
“Their support has been wonderful,” she said of Herold and the larger Northampton community. She does, however, worry about the other families in the hotel who have yet to find housing.
That issue was on many families’ minds when they spoke to the Gazette. With less than a month until transitional housing aid from FEMA runs out, they can feel the clock ticking.
One resident, 67-year-old Maria Ortiz, simply offered a tired shrug when asked what she expects to do after the aid stops.
“And they are still ar riv ing,” she said of other Puerto Ricans leaving the island for the region.
Emily Cutts can be reached at ecutts@gazettenet.com, and Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet .com.
This story has been updated to correctly identify the office that did not respond to questions about the reported lack of communication between local and state agencies. It was the state Executive Office for Administration and Finance.