As of Monday of this week, April 20, it has been 40 days since the Clinton County School District canceled school classes due to COVID-19, and on Monday, it was announced that in-person classes would be canceled for the remainder of the academic school year of 2019-2020.

With social distancing and many businesses closed in Albany, many are finding it hard to continue to interact with the public, but the Clinton County Extension office has found one way of doing that … with Extension at Home Kits.

These kits are full of things every family needs during this pandemic, and each family in Clinton County can receive one kit per household.

Clinton County Extension Agent of Family and Consumer Sciences Christy Nuetzman Guffey has spearheaded this operation and believes it has been a great way for her office to stay in touch with the public during this difficult time.

“We were trying to find a way, during this virus, to meet the needs of youth and families,” Guffey said. “We wanted to think of some of the traditional programs that we would be doing this time of year and to also think about things that we knew we could do as families are spending more time at home.”

Guffey said each week she, along with Extension agents Colby Guffey and Junior Cecil, put together these kits that have multiple items in them for the families in Clinton County.

Many of the items in the kits are based on what families can do at home while the country is basically quarantined.

“Some weeks there is a kind of theme and other weeks it’s just different things we have on hand,” Guffey said. “Unlike other counties, our kits cover all program areas. We try to have something in there for agriculture, 4H, Family and Consumer Sciences, and the extra stuff for nutrition and things like that.”

The kits provided by the Clinton County Extension office are somewhat bigger than other kits found in different counties according to Guffey.

“Those kits in other counties may be broken down into program specific areas,” Guffey said.

The kits are released to the public every week, but the day in which they get released is varied.

“Typically our pattern has been we released on a Thursday or Friday,” Guffey said. “We want there to be hands on activities, but some stuff is reading and other information.”

With the pandemic limiting the ability to go to the grocery store, as well as the availability of some vegetables, Guffey said there has been information in the kits about starting a garden.

“We realize this pandemic, if anything, probably caught a lot of people off guard,” Guffey said. “Maybe not having food access got people to thinking about growing their own food. We also thought about food safety and food storage. I put information in one week about how long can food last.”

Some of the items in the kits include recipes along with some food for those recipes like a couple of apples for example.

“We’ve had a lot of recipes that kids and adults can do together,” Guffey said. “We also did a yeast/dough bread recipe. This week we are going to put in a pretzel activity in there.”

As social distancing continues throughout the state, Guffey said social media has been a key factor in keeping in touch with people in the community.

“We just kind of look for things around the office and go from there,” Guffey said. “The kits have led different people to our office which is great for us. The more people we can involve in our services, that’s what we want to do. I think it really gave us a good outreach to the community.”

Guffey said the extension office isn’t open to foot traffic at the moment, but those kits produced every week can be picked up on the porch of their building.

“Even though our office doesn’t allow foot traffic right now, we are still working, and so we create the kits and sit them out on our front porch at the office,” Guffey said. “We then release kind of a preview on Facebook of what’s in the kits and tell the people the kits are available at a certain time.”

Guffey said they leave some of the kits on the porch after hours and people in the community can pick those up at anytime to make it more convenient.

“Like last week I think we got them out between 12:30 and 1 on Thursday and when I came in on Friday morning there were five or six left,” Guffey said. “The first week we made 50 and had several left over so we backed off. Last week we made somewhere between 25 and 30 kits. Our goal is to bump it up this week and be able to add more each week”

The Clinton County Extension Office has been posting on social media about different activities that can be done as well as a small chat on Saturday mornings.

“Social media has really helped us think more creatively about how we are going to meet the needs of the public,” Guffey said. “I did a social distancing chat on Facebook to talk about what’s going on at the extension office and review other things that have been posted on-line. It seems like people have connected well to us by doing that. We want people to reach out to us. We are still serving the community.”

In the photo at left, Extension Agent of Family and Consumer Sciences Christy Nuetzman Guffey explains different items that will be provided in the Extension at Home kits. Above are several items that were a part of a kit as an example of what the Extension At Home Kits could be comprised of.

Each family can receive one kit as a part of the program.