Teacher's work helps kids get through restrictions

WARNING! St. Mary Parish is being overrun by bears — and other exotic animals! Just take a drive down a street in Bayou Vista, Morgan City, Patterson or Berwick, and keep your eyes peeled for animals peeking out of windows or lurking on porches.
How did such a thing happen?
The bears and other animals were let loose by a combined effort started locally by Michele Besse, a Bayou Vista Elementary School first grade teacher, and Kimberly Romero Ruiz of Bayou Vista.
On March 22, Besse asked her Facebook friends to “go around their houses in Bayou Vista and to put bears out.”
Why, you ask?
“When this (the COVID-19 shelter in place order by Gov. John Bel Edwards) all started I heard about a woman reading bedtime stories to her students,” Besse said of how she decided to do the same with a dedicated YouTube channel.
The book she selected for the March 23 bedtime story was, “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury. That’s why on March 22 night she enlisted the help of her Facebook friends. Before she began reading the book, she told her students that there would be a surprise at the end. That surprise was that there were bears placed in windows in Bayou Vista for them to find.
Coincidentally, on March 23 Ruiz saw a Facebook post from Lafayette about the “bear hunt.” A bear hunt that has not only spread across St. Mary Parish but the nation, as well.
“We (her and her daughter Annabelle Ruiz) went Monday (March 23) and saw 10, maybe 15 bears,” Ruiz said.
“There was like no bears,” said Annabelle, 13. “I kind of got upset.”
That’s when she asked her mom, “Do you think we can do something to make more bears come?”
“St. Mary Parish is GOING ON A BEAR HUNT” Facebook Group started on Tuesday as a result.
“I added about 10 people (that first day) and now I think we are up to almost 800,” Kimberly Ruiz said Thursday morning. “When I took A.J. (her 6-year-old son) on Wednesday there were bears everywhere!”
Besse packed up all her books from her classroom on that last day of school with her bedtime story videos in mind.
“I hoped I could read to my babies,” she sighed. “This is the first time I’ve had to leave my students.”
Now every day she makes a bedtime story video for her students and sends it to them via their parents through the Remind app. The app is used by St. Mary Parish Public Schools as a way for teachers to communicate with parents.
“My first video to the students was to just reassure them,” she said. Her positive outlook on life is what she wants to share with her students.
“Find the joy and the positive,” she told her students in that first video. “Be patient and love one another.”
As she fought back tears, she said, “We have students that don’t eat … you can see that they are hurting.
“What scares me the most is that they don’t have us (teachers) right now.”
The hunt does come with precautions … Besse urges her students to “Remember do not come in contact with anyone, do not touch anyone, just wave a good 10-feet away.”
And for one last reassurance each night, Besse ends her bedtime stories with a smile, an American Sign Language “I Love You” sign and the words … “I love and take joy in the journey.”