Preschool teacher Mary-Anne McMillin has developed a sense of humor about having to pump hand-washing water with her legs for all of her 16 students, one at a time, three or four times every school day.

“I feel like this is an extra workout,” the Holy Family Catholic Academy teacher jokes between pedal pumps on a portable sanitation station outside her classroom. “I have to remember to alternate legs.”

McMillin’s make-do, can-do attitude is typical of the educators not only at Holy Family, a private parochial campus just Ewa of the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, but all of the 13 private and public schools having to work without clean running water since late last year due to the Navy’s water contamination crisis.

Leakage at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility has affected approximately 93,000 people at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam and surrounding neighborhoods, sickening some, compelling thousands to relocate at least until their homes are deemed safe again, and changing how schools and families keep their students’ education going.

McMillin’s preschoolers are too tiny to step on the floor pedal and reach up to the faucet at the same time on the adult-size temporary wash stations the Navy has supplied, so the keiki must climb up one at a time onto a plastic stool while their teacher pushes the water through.

In this third month without clean running taps on campus, McMillin has grown accustomed to this multitasking: simultaneously pumping at the sanitation station, directing her tiny charges to lather up, handing them paper towels, and riding herd on the other keiki restlessly fidgeting while their classmates finish.

“Good job!” McMillin calls cheerily from behind her mask.

But she worries about the precious learning time that this routine is stealing.

About 15 minutes is lost each time her class has to scrub up this way, she said. That adds up to about one hour a day that in normal times would be spent on lessons, crafts or play.

But hand hygiene can’t be skipped, “especially not during the pandemic,” she says.

McMillin’s worry over the water crisis’ impact on students is a familiar refrain.

In an online forum sponsored in January by the Hawaii State Teachers Association, teachers in the seven affected public schools also on the Navy’s contaminated waterlines expressed similar concerns about lost time, learning, staff effort and school money, plus the strain on displaced students and their families.

The affected public schools, according to the state Department of Education, are Red Hill, Nimitz, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor Kai, Iroquois Point, Hickam and Mokulele elementary schools, with a combined 3,200 students and more than 500 employees. Multiple requests by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser to the DOE to visit those campuses have been denied or unanswered.

Other schools the Navy has listed as using its affected waterlines are Montessori Center of Pearl Harbor, Assets School, Kamaaina Kids, Navy Hale Keiki School and Iroquois Point Preschool.

To keep their schools running without running the taps, educators, students and families have had to adapt in myriad ways.

Holy Family, which has 355 students in preschool through grade 8, operates on pallets of bottled water delivered weekly, a 500-gallon water buffalo tank and 15 portable wash stations, all provided by the Navy.

Twice a week, school custodians Noriel Pitpit and Simeon Pascua must cart all 15 stations to the edge of campus, where a contractor drains, sanitizes and refills the stations, and replenishes the soap and paper towels. School staff also clean the portable sinks daily for the school’s COVID-19 protocols.

Kids who bring flasks from home are directed to use the bottled water instead of the refill stations embedded in the hallway walls, which are now wrapped in gray plastic and tape to mark them off limits.

Holy Family’s cafeteria manager, Wesley Ching, has to carefully plan how to prepare 175 meals each day using the least water possible.

His main source of clean water right now is the buffalo tank parked about 15 yards from his kitchen’s back door. The staff draw the water into coolers that they lug into the kitchen and hoist up onto the counter, where Ching attaches a jury-­rigged lever and plastic tubing to create a trickle of water for the sink.

Ching also has had to pull from the menu any sticky or oily foods that require gallons of water to clean from the pots and pans.

That means no mac and cheese, that perpetual children’s favorite. No spaghetti or chili either. Instead, Ching has to opt for foods that can be cooked on disposable foil or require minimal water, such as sandwiches and tater tots.

The school’s Monday tradition of serving Spam musubi also had to go because that starchy type of rice requires too much water to clean up.

On a recent day, as pans of chicken adobo bubbled on a stove, Ching sheepishly explained that against local convention, he has to serve it with Ben’s Original rice, because that loose style of grain is much easier to remove.

“The kids keep asking, ‘When are you bringing back the Japanese rice?’” he said.

Even though the water in the buffalo tank is supposedly tested regularly to be safe for drinking, Ching reserves it for dishwashing.

He trusts only bottled water for cooking.

“It’s a little bit of a hassle,” he said. “But for the kids, I know it’s safe.”

Holy Family Principal Celeste Akiu says it was ‘divine intervention’ that kept her students and staff from drinking contaminated tap water.

In the early morning of Nov. 29, Akiu was listening to her car radio on her way to school, and during that short 10-minute drive she just happened to hear a news report that said there had been a fuel leak stemming from the Red Hill underground fuel storage facility.

“I said, that’s our water,” Akiu recalled.

No one had notified Holy Family staff yet. Akiu phoned ahead to her assistant principal and asked her to turn on a couple of faucets to check.

Taps that had no noticeable problem the day before now had an unmistakable chemical odor.

“Had I not heard that radio station, we would have started the morning, we would have made food, we would have gone on until one of us had smelled it,” Akiu said.

She canceled school for the day. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with, we had too many unknowns, so we had the children go home.”

The next day, Holy Family staff and students, already well versed in remote learning thanks to the pandemic, got online for their lessons while the staff continued emergency planning and pulled together supplies.

By Day Three, the school was welcoming students back to in-person classes.

By the end of that first week, the Navy was bringing bottled water to the Holy Family campus. But it took several more weeks and Akiu getting assertive to get the military to supply the hand-washing stations.

“I call it ‘advocating for the students and staff,’” Akiu said with a wry chuckle. “I said, ‘This is what we need because we are still in a pandemic.’ … I’ve met with all ranks of the (military) in this office. I said, ‘Politics stay outside the campus. We need to focus on the kids.’”

The support of the schools and the reliability of the school day are among the few sources of stability for many of the 3,200 people who have been relocated from their homes due to the water contamination. About 100 families at Holy Family are among them.

But just getting kids to campus each day can be a major challenge. Across the 13 affected schools, some families are driving or putting children on military buses before dawn for the 8- to 10-mile commute in rush-hour traffic, then reversing the process in the afternoon. Some are bunking with friends or family, and some are staying in place at home and subsisting on bottled water and the potable water trucked in by the military.

After months of this, many children and parents are exhausted and frustrated. Teachers in the HSTA forum said they have had students show up in pajamas and “bed head,” hungry, falling asleep at their desks.

“Parents keep asking, ‘When will this end?’” said Julia Hudson, development director at Holy Family, who has a preschooler and first grader in the school. “We just have to be super vigilant, we have to make safety the priority.”

Eric and Marina Castro and their two young sons have been splitting their time between a Waikiki hotel and their home in Earhart Village at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

“Sometimes they just want to be home because they want to sleep in their own beds,” Marina Castro said.

On a typical commuting morning, the Castros get up at 5 a.m. to try to beat the traffic. They may go back to their home on base to eat a quick breakfast cooked with bottled water. Eric heads for his job at Schofield Barracks and Marina takes Everet, 4, to Holy Family, and Trevrick, 8, to Mokulele Elementary, another school affected by the water crisis, where Marina is a para-professional educator working with fourth graders.

The upheaval has been draining for the family, so the steadiness of the schools has been a blessing, Marina Castro said. Both schools have supplied bottled water and moral support, and Holy Family has provided disposable plates and utensils, and gift cards for food and essentials.

“They’ve been so remarkable,” she said.

Akiu says she and the Holy Family team will continue to support their school families however long it takes. She feels cautiously optimistic now that the Navy flushed the school’s pipes Jan. 22 and took water samples Jan. 26. As of Friday, the school still had not received test results.

Akiu says she is deeply proud of how resilient her school community has learned to be in the dual long-haul emergencies of the water crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

On a recent day on campus, as sweaty kids sprinted across the courtyard for P.E. class, chugged water from their flasks and bottles on the bleachers, and washed up at the portable basins, chattering and laughing behind their masks, Akiu was reflective.

“If you watch the kids and you watch the teachers,” she said, “they’re just having to forge forward, you know, business as usual. Because what else can we do? You can’t ‘woe is me.’”