Early Thursday, before Operation Breakthrough would fill with little kids hanging up their coats and scampering to their seats, teacher Vanshay Purnell learned that her mother had died that morning.
Purnell didn’t go home, but went back to class and spent the day with her Pre-K kids inside the childcare center at 31st and Troost that her adoptive mother, Sister Berta Sailer, co-founded more than five decades ago.
“I didn’t want to go home,” said Purnell, 22, who was adopted by Sailer and Sister Corita Bussanmas, when she was six months old. “I didn’t want to sit in my thoughts.”
Being at Operation Breakthrough, where Sailer believed that every child could be whatever they wanted to be, made Purnell feel close to Sister Berta. And to Sister Corita who died in 2021.
Sailer, 87, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eight years ago, shortly after she broke her hip and was no longer able to work at the childcare center where she spent 365 days a year for more than four decades.
Once called “The Mother Teresa of Kansas City” by former Senator Claire McCaskill, Sailer had been a strong presence along Troost since 1971 and throughout Kansas City since she joined Bussanmas here in the late 1960s.
As word spread inside child advocacy circles of her passing Thursday, many said they were “humbled” by what Sailer had done for the community and for low income children and their families.
“She was absolutely unstoppable,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a Kansas City attorney and accredited child welfare law specialist, who met Sailer in the late 1980s. “She was a force of nature. She never gave up. She knew how to ask for things from the right people where they couldn’t say no.”
And she always put the needs of children first, said Lori Ross, founder and CEO of FosterAdopt Connect.
“She was the social conscience and heart of our community,” said Ross, who was one of the people who trained Sister Berta and Sister Corita when they got their foster care license decades ago. “And she forced us all to be better, to do better as human beings and use our voice to do the right thing.”
The two nuns would go on to adopt four children, including Purnell, and foster many more.
Born Judith Felice on Dec. 10, 1936, in Chicago, she was the only child of Cecelia Sailer. Raised by her grandmother, Bertha Sailer, according to her obituary “young Judy spent time in the convent where her grandmother worked as a cook.”
Sailer graduated high school in the mid 1950s and dreamed of serving the poor in Africa. Because money was tight, becoming a nun “looked like the most feasible route to the life of service she envisioned,” her obit said.
At Mount Carmel Convent in Dubuque, Iowa, she took the name “Sister Berta,” to honor her grandmother. In 1957, she became a professed member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly known as “the BVMs.”
Sailer, who completed degrees in education and history at Mundelein College in Chicago, taught in Chicago Catholic schools.
“It was there that she encountered the forces that defined her life’s work,” according to her obituary.
Sailer followed her friend Sister Corita, who was also a member of “the BVMs,” to Kansas City in 1968 and taught at St. Vincent’s School. Four years later, she and Bussanmas founded Operation Breakthrough, a nonprofit childcare center that provides social services to children and families in need inside Kansas City’s urban core.
Through the decades, Bussanmas became the operational leader who Sailer would say knew how to run things. Sailer, she was more of the talker, the one who could connect with members of the community and help get resources for the center’s children and families.
Operation Breakthrough grew to serve more than 700 children each weekday, offering onsite medical and dental care, occupational, speech and play therapy, and a host of family services, in addition to educational enrichment.
If Sailer knew there was a need, she’d do whatever she could to address it, said Jennifer Heinemann, director of stewardship and planned giving at Operation Breakthrough.
“She was just the first phone call for so many people when something would go wrong,” Heinemann said. “I would include myself there. She was always the person who would drop everything she was doing and help you. And when half the city has your phone number, that’s a lot of people calling you all the time.”
More than 20 years ago, Sailer created the “City You Never See” bus tour, a trip through the urban core. Those continue today.
“Her vision was, ‘I’m going to put people of influence onto a bus together,’” Heinemann said. “And she would take them through the neighborhoods where our children live and have their parents get on the bus and talk about their life. Just tell their story.”
The goal was to educate people in the community of the challenges of families in need.
“She’s a reminder that normal people can do extraordinary things,” said Mary Esselman, CEO of Operation Breakthrough.
Esselman said she walked around the child care center Thursday morning to tell the staff — some who had worked at Operation Breakthrough for 40 years — about Sailer’s passing.
“You could see the connection,” Esselman said, “and everyone had a story on how Sister Berta changed their lives.”
Just hours after she found out her mother had died, Purnell said that when she walks through the doors of the center she feels the presence of Sister Corita and Sister Berta. And as she skimmed through social media Thursday afternoon, she could feel the admiration so many people had for Sailer.
“She loved the city and she did want us to continue this mission,” Purnell said. “To help children and their families.”
Memorial contributions can be sent to The Sister Corita and Sister Berta Irrevocable Trust (for the care of the family) at Country Club Bank, One Ward Parkway, Kansas City MO 64112 or to a gift to the children of Operation Breakthrough in memory of Sister Berta at P.O. Box 412482, Kansas City MO 64141.
