Classic Painting owner Jim Nye paints the siding of a home in Old West Lawrence on Friday, June 9, 2017. Nye, who is a retired South Middle School teacher employs a crew of 14, including himself, all of whom are either retired or current teachers and their relatives.

How do teachers keep busy over the summer? We checked in with three Lawrence educators, two active and one retired, to find out.

Jama Mustain

Growing up, Jama Mustain’s summers were spent by the pool. As an adult, they still are.

“Swimming’s been part of my life since I was 8 years old, and so being able to be back in it and helping other kids learn how to do it,” says the part-time swim instructor and coach, “is fantastic.”

Jama Mustain, left, coaches two of her Aquahawks swimmers during practice on June 8, 2017, at the Lawrence Indoor Aquatic Center. Mustain, who teaches second grade at Langston Hughes Elementary School, spends about 30 to 35 hours a week during the summer working as a swim coach and instructor.

If she’s not in the classroom, she’s probably at the pool. Mustain, a second-grade teacher at Langston Hughes Elementary School, truly enjoys working with kids — so much so that the 25-year-old spends her summers, as well as her spare hours during the school year, working as a coach with the Aquahawks, Lawrence’s longtime competitive swim team.

It’s over the summers that Mustain likes to pick up a few extra hours — 7:45 a.m. swim lessons twice a week at the Lawrence Outdoor Aquatic Center, plus five days a week coaching at the Lawrence Indoor Aquatic Center. It’s a part-time job during the school year that morphs into a nearly full-time job (30-plus hours, Mustain estimates) once school lets out for the summer.

The supplemental income is nice, she says, and much needed on her teacher’s salary. But for Mustain, “it’s not just a job.” She’s had to put some personal projects on the back burner, she says, in order to devote time to her Aquahawks, but doesn’t seem to mind much.

“The coaches are my family. We’re all really close,” she says. “It means a lot to me.”

And then there are the kids. Mustain’s swimmers range in age from 7 to 12, just about the age Mustain was when she first discovered competitive swimming.

Lazy summer days at the country club eventually gave way to year-round competitive swimming for Mustain and her brother, who found a “home away from home” at their beloved Wichita Swim Club as kids. It wasn’t until two years ago, after attending one of her students’ swim meets, that Mustain heard about an open coaching position on the Aquahawks.

Mustain, in need of a second job, jumped at the chance. Although some teachers might relish a break from working with kids year-round, Mustain says she enjoys seeing her Langston Hughes students after-hours at the pool.

If anything, she says, coaching has helped to build stronger relationships with her students. Seeing their teacher outside of school, she says, hasn’t been so bad for her kids.

“It’s just kind of fun to extend that connection with them,” Mustain says. “They don’t hate seeing me here, so it’s OK.”

Diana Bailey

For Diana Bailey, a fifth-grade teacher at Deerfield Elementary School, nothing says summer vacation quite like manual labor. Just about every summer for the last 20-plus years has been spent laying floors, remodeling bathrooms, installing decks and building fences.

Deerfield Elementary School fifth-grade teacher Diana Bailey hammers a couple of nails out of some boards while constructing a fence at a home in West Lawrence, Thursday, June 8, 2017.

That’s how Bailey and her four-woman construction crew — all fellow Deerfield teachers — chose to spend last Thursday morning in suburban west Lawrence, as temperatures inched into the uncomfortably sweaty 80-degree range.

Was it difficult recruiting coworkers for the fence-building job? Not really, says Bailey, a straight-talking type who answers such a question with, “Are you kidding?” Apparently the teachers, all newcomers to the construction business, were quick to volunteer.

“It gets me away from my children,” jokes special education teacher Lisa Hodges, referring to her own flesh-and-blood kids.

Bailey, 41, says she’s enjoying this first summer working with her Deerfield friends. As teachers, she says, the physical labor offers a relaxing break from the stress of lesson plans, conferences and “worrying about all our babes in the classroom 24 hours a day.”

As a kid, Bailey helped out with her father’s construction business. The company’s remodeling of several buildings along the 700 block of Massachusetts Street, Bailey says, helped pay for college, in turn allowing her to teach.

She’s taken a few summers off since moving into a more official capacity after graduating high school, but construction work, Bailey says, “has been in my life forever.” She’s even worked while pregnant, handling less strenuous tasks such as laying floors. Nothing deters Bailey from a job — not even the nearly exclusively male nature of the construction business.

Deerfield Elementary School teachers Lisa Hodges, special education, and Carolina Gutierrez, third grade, works to remove supports from recently-set fence posts at a home in West Lawrence, Thursday, June 8, 2017. Diana Bailey, a fifth-grade teacher at the school, has worked summer construction jobs since graduating high school, and helped to recruit her co-workers for this summer's projects.

The first woman she ever saw on the job site, Bailey says, was a Penny’s Concrete truck driver. That was more than 20 years ago, when Bailey was just a kid, but the experience left quite an impression on her.

“I can’t remember her name,” Bailey says, “but she was amazing.”

Now that her own daughters are old enough, Bailey says she and her husband, who took over the family business after her father’s retirement, have made a habit of taking the kids along to jobs. Her youngest, an 8-year-old, remains pretty excited about helping with small tasks — the kind of stuff Bailey used to do as a kid, such as picking up nails around the work site. Her older daughter, at 13, might be approaching teenage indifference, though, Bailey admits.

So, when her girls eventually wandered off and “plugged into” their devices last week at the fence-building site, Bailey says she was grateful to have her co-workers around to keep her company. There’s something “special” about her all-ladies crew of schoolteachers, she says.

“This group of friends of mine are so amazing because, like me, they love that physicality and being outside and that accomplishment of seeing what you’ve done at the end of the day,” Bailey says.

“You know, this whole crew here — we play sports together, we hang out together,” she says. “So, it’s almost natural that now we’re building fences together.”

Jim Nye and the Classic Painting crew

Jim Nye might just have the most educated house-painting crew in all of Lawrence. Between the 14 of them, Nye’s painters — all either retired or active teachers and administrators, plus a few educators’ offspring — boast several master’s degrees, plus at least one doctorate.

Classic Painting owner Jim Nye paints the siding of a home in Old West Lawrence on Friday, June 9, 2017. Nye, who is a retired South Middle School teacher employs a crew of 14, including himself, all of whom are either retired or current teachers and their relatives.

If Nye had to guess, he’d say his painters boast around 400 years of combined experience in the classroom. That’s partially why, he theorizes, the crew hasn’t had much trouble attracting customers –relying entirely on word of mouth — over the last 40 years.

“That gets us in the door for a lot of jobs,” Nye, a retired industrial arts and technology teacher, says of Classic Painting and its team of retired and current Lawrence educators.

When Nye joined the crew back in 1980, he was simply looking for a summer job to supplement his teacher’s salary at South Middle School. At that point, the crew of educators had only been around a few years, launched in 1977 by now-retired teachers Ray Wilbur and Don Racy. The company operated informally as Don Racy Painting before Nye, who retired from teaching in 2008, rebranded the crew officially in 2010: Classic Painting, a reference to Nye’s trusty 1979 Ford pickup and his self-described cohort of “old painters,” he says.

What was once a summer job for Nye has become full-time business. Classic Painting, he says, stays booked year-round, excluding the coldest winter months, and that’s the way he likes it.

“Most people when they join us, they can’t believe how much fun we’re having while we’re working outside in 95-degree heat,” Nye says of working with his tight-knit group of fellow teachers. “I wouldn’t do this if it was just work.”

Back when he was spending more than nine months of the year in the classroom, getting outside every summer was something he’d look forward to. And working with his friends, he says, always made for a fun atmosphere. Customers tend to notice that, Nye says.

Jim Nye, who runs the Classing Painting house-painting crew, says this photo of the team at work, taken by fellow painter Tom Hoisington, brought some attention to the small company after Nye's wife posted it to Facebook.

“People are amazed when we paint their house how much we talk and joke around,” he says, later adding, “There are people that feed us donuts, and there are people who have fixed us complete lunches just because they enjoy having us around.”

That “positive feedback,” Nye says, is partly why he enjoys the gig so much. Co-founder Don Racy has since retired from the painting crew, Nye says, but Racy’s two sons painted with him through their high school and college years. Same with Nye’s two grown kids, Derek and Katie. Fellow painters Mark Robinson and Ron Garvin have also recruited their respective son and granddaughter, both college students, to join the crew over the summer.

And Ray Wilbur, who helped launch the business 40 years ago, is still painting at age 83, Nye says — scaling ladders and “nimble as can be.”

As a teacher, Nye used to avoid the movie theater. The prospect of running into his South Middle School students, he remembers now, was enough to keep him away from the multiplex for a long time.

Same with the kids who would see Nye and his house-painting crew working during the summer, he says. Catching sight of him in his paint-covered T-shirt and shorts, slathered in sunscreen, might’ve been a tad jarring for his students.

Not anymore.

“Now they just hire me to paint for them,” Nye says. “I like ’em more as adults.”

Given Classic Painting’s loyal customer base, there’s a good chance Nye’s students feel the same way about him. The company is booked until next year, he says.