The Gutraj family was on spring break in Memphis last year before the pandemic sparked mass shutdowns.

Like many of us, they were in a bit of denial about how dramatically life was about to change. Then, their children’s Missouri school district sent a notice that students wouldn’t be coming back to classrooms.

Within a few weeks, Valerie Gutraj began getting emails that her kids’ various summer camps were also getting canceled -- one by one. She and her husband both work full-time, so she scrambled to find a nanny for the summer. They adhered to safety guidelines, so whenever the nanny had a possible COVID exposure, she would quarantine away from them.

“(The kids) would wind up on the iPad for times that would make me cringe,” Gutraj said.

Ashley Cheatham also remembers the moment when her son’s camps canceled their sessions. Neither she nor her husband could work from home.

“In an act of desperation, I posted on Facebook that I’m basically screwed,” she said. A friend volunteered to babysit her son when she had to go to her retail job.

For working parents, summer camp is about more than their kids swimming, making crafts and hanging out with friends. It’s essential child care for children who have aged out of daycare but are too young to stay unsupervised all day.

While some camps tried to pivot to virtual programming, many were forced to cancel entirely.

The impact was felt nationally. Of the more than 15,000 camps in the U.S., 80% of overnight camps and 40% of day camps shuttered last summer, according to the American Camp Association. About 19.5 million children missed out on camp experiences.

This year, however, camp is back.

Summer camps have had more time and experience to prepare, and many are reopening with safety protocols in place or with hybrid options.

Parents may be just as ready for summer as their kids.

“I tear up thinking about my kids going back to building relationships as opposed to being little screen zombies,” Gutraj said. Cheatham is also looking forward to her son playing outdoors more. She’s keeping an eye out for affordable camp options that also have precautions in place.

Ron Heinz, owner of Code Ninjas in O’Fallon, Missouri, says he’s beginning to see business come back as parents become more comfortable with safety measures, increasing immunization rates and lower caseloads. But he has noticed that there is more hesitation to commit early this year.

“There’s a whole bunch who are waiting until it's closer,” he said. In pre-pandemic times, planning for the summer started far earlier in the year for working parents. Sada Lindsey remembers having an alert set on her calendar for the day registration opened in January last year. She would have a spreadsheet ready with the various dates and locations to cobble together a plan for the summer.

Her family ended up sharing a nanny with another family last summer after the camps shut down. This year, she is hopeful her daughter will get to have a more typical summer experience with her friends.

Jennifer Biermann spent last summer tag-teaming with her spouse while they worked from home and watched their kids, now 7 and 5. They purchased a large inflatable pool and water slides for the backyard. Biermann would sit outside working on her laptop on the patio while the children splashed in the water. She says she feels more comfortable sending her children back to camp this summer but is still nervous about the risk of transmitting infections. She would like to see a higher vaccination rate in the St. Louis area to help tamp down the spread.

But after a year marked with social distance, months of distance learning and missed milestone events, the return to camp feels like a long-anticipated return to normalcy.

Children who were cheated out of a year of their childhoods can ease back into carefree summer days.

“It’s a camp, but it feels like so much more than that,” Biermann said.

Don’t say Gov. Mike Parson never gave Missouri cities anything.

He’s given hundreds of thousands of people in the state’s largest metro areas their own version of the Hunger Games -- a chance to hunt for the COVID vaccine in the reddest parts of the state.

More than 30,000 vaccine seekers in a private Facebook group are sharing stories like this recent post: “Drove with family members to Poplar Bluff for the Butler County mass vaccination event today, hoping for leftovers. Arrived at 3 p.m. (event ended at 4), told them we were Phase 3 and not yet eligible for appointments and just hoping for extras and were vaccinated within five minutes.”

Even when a vaccine hunter’s quest ends in success, these stories highlight the abject failure of state leadership.

Every day, there’s another example. The town of Monett, Missouri, with a population of less than 9,000, recently received another 1,000 Pfizer vaccines. Initially, only 100 people signed up to receive them. If St. Louis-area residents want to get those potentially lifesaving shots, they are invited to make the eight-hour round-trip drive to Monett. Twice.

More than 7,700 doses of vaccine were left over after mass vaccination events across the state in a single week, my colleagues reported. At an event at a high school in Unionville in late February, they had to throw out 143 unused vaccines.

Imagine that: wasting vaccines in rural Missouri, while more than 200,000 eligible people in St. Louis County are still waiting for theirs.

Parson has repeatedly defended the state’s vaccine distribution, which just so happens to heavily favor the areas that voted for him, as fair and equitable.

After seeing Parson’s comments, one reader wrote to me: “Don’t piss on us and tell us it’s raining, Governor.”

Meanwhile, The Missouri Independent reported that a consulting firm (paid for by the taxpayers) has repeatedly found Missouri’s urban centers have the largest “vaccination gap” -- the estimated number of eligible residents who still haven’t received their first dose of the vaccine.

The governor needed Deloitte Consulting to tell him this?

Beginning next week, an additional 550,000 Missourians will be eligible to get the vaccine -- including teachers. Perhaps the most ethical way for educators in big cities to spend their upcoming spring breaks would be to join in these Vaccine Hunger Games: Those who have the time and skills to hunt down a rural vaccine, and the means to drive hundreds of miles to get it, ought to do so. Hopefully, this will free up more doses in urban areas -- making it easier for the disabled, the elderly and the poorest residents, who can’t make an hours-long journey, to get the vaccine closer to home.

In fact, this is the advice that the St. Louis County Department of Public Health is giving residents who call them asking where they can get a shot.

For those who qualify and are able, “drive out and get the vaccine wherever they think they can get it,” said Dr. Faisal Khan, director of St. Louis County Department of Public Health. “The distribution of the vaccine is the major concern. The supply is the root cause, but the allocation piece has been a chronic issue,” he said.

Even as Missouri’s governor slowly realizes there is more “vaccine interest” in the most densely populated areas of the state, the supply is still a trickle.

“On March 15, we will have 130,000 more people eligible in St. Louis County, while the supply is still between 3,000 to 4,000 for our public health department,” Khan said. Hospital systems and pharmacies have their own allotments, but the health department often serves the most vulnerable populations.

Since he isn’t running for reelection, perhaps Parson feels protected from consequences of his pettiness, regardless of how deadly it could be.

But there are Republican legislators in these parts, too.

City-dwellers who have been left in a vaccine desert ought to ask their local GOP representatives to have a word with their guy.

He’s made it clear who he’s willing to hear.

LaMonte Rusan was 19 years old and working minimum-wage jobs when he made a life-changing decision: He and his girlfriend, Kia, decided they would take over raising his brother’s two babies.

Rusan’s brother, DeMarco, and his partner had died in a car crash in 2018, leaving behind a 4-month-old infant and an almost 2-year-old toddler.

“I couldn’t say I was exactly ready for kids, but I felt I was mature enough to take on the responsibility,” he said. He said DeMarco used to joke with him, “If you are thinking about having kids, you can have some of mine.”

Kia also wanted to step up. “I can’t let kids just be out there,” she said.

The kids lived with their maternal grandparents for six months after their parents died, then moved in as foster children with Kia, Rusan and his mom in January 2019. Rusan was 19 -- still too young to formally adopt -- so his mother filed the petition.

Rusan and Kia got married later that year, and when his mother gained custody of the children in January 2020, she handed the reins over to the newlyweds.

Rusan had graduated high school in 2017 and started to work right away, hoping to save enough money to one day attend college or vocational school. He had always had an aptitude for computers and enjoyed working with his hands. Now, with two more mouths to feed, he searched for a better-paying job on Indeed.com. He sent in hundreds of applications, but never got a response.

One day, he saw a post for a 16-week technical training program with a guaranteed seven-week internship. It claimed the training was free. He figured there was probably a catch, but he applied anyway.

Much to his surprise, he received a response and an interview. There wasn’t any catch.

St. Louis is one of just eight cities with the NPower job training program for underserved young adults. There are also programs in New York, New Jersey, California, Michigan, Maryland and Texas, and one in Canada. The nonprofit accepts applications year-round from high school graduates between the ages of 18 and 25, and also from veterans, especially focusing on people whose income is near the poverty level. The courses pivoted to virtual instruction because of the pandemic, and NPower plans to continue with that model.

Rusan, now 21, realized that the opportunity could change his family’s life; now, he had to figure out how to carve out four hours each day for the training. Kia found a job as a teacher’s assistant to help with household expenses, and his mother took over child-care duties during the day. Rusan switched to a part-time retail job and picked up food delivery shifts at night.

The program has provided more than training on IT fundamentals -- it’s also offered mentorship and professional development skills, such as preparing a resume. If Rusan had trouble with the course material, he would do research online or ask the instructors for help.

Even before he graduates next month, he’s landed a job as a help desk technician with Midwest Networking in the St. Louis area.

Wendell Covington, executive director of NPower St. Louis, says he sees success stories like Rusan’s in every class. There have been 338 graduates in the St. Louis region since the program began here in 2017. Nearly 80% of students who begin the training complete it and earn the certification.

“We feel we are a game-changer,” Covington said, in terms of disrupting cycles of poverty and creating pathways to economic prosperity for those lacking access to in-demand skills.

The Rusans’ kids are now 3 and 4 years old. The couple says they are working hard to give the kids better opportunities than they had.

“Even though we were so young, we had to grow up so fast,” Rusan said. “I want to allow them to be kids.”