Ailene's 11 years and Homeless

It’s a Friday evening on skid row, and the fierce deprivation that clogs the area’s sidewalks during the day has slightly abated. The sidewalks are now just busy with misery, not overwhelmed by it, as if someone cracked the lid on skid row and let some of the pressure out, giving it a little breathing room until morning. Once dawn breaks, of course, the poor and destitute lucky enough to have snagged one of the few beds at a mission for the night will trickle onto the streets again, where they will cluster together with their garbage bags and their grocery carts – indeed, their entire lives – and wait to start the whole cycle again. Most are men, most are single, and most probably won’t make it out of here.

Inside the Union Rescue Mission, however, it’s a different matter entirely. Hope dares to rear its head here and men, women and children are bustling around. A short elevator ride upstairs is the women and children’s wing, where the youngest and most invisible residents of skid row call home.

Down one of the halls is the family entertainment room, and it’s a small but welcome haven from the staleness of the rest of the building. The room, an explosion of bright colors with toys littered all over the floor, bustles with activity. Arlene Olivares and her children are there, and Arlene’s oldest daughter, Ailene Cuenca – 11 years old, quiet but with a maturity beyond her years – is talking about how she has a tough time doing homework at the shelter, where she and her family share a room with three other families.

“There are a lot of kids in my room, and it’s too noisy,” she says. Dressed in a gray hooded sweatshirt and shorts, she had been helping out her mother with her youngest sister when she asked me what my favorite subject is. “English,” I told her.

Ailene’s situation is a lot better than it was two-and-a-half years ago, though, when she and her family were homeless for a year and moved from motel to motel every four months, forcing her to switch schools each time.

“I fell behind … when I go to one school I learn something, and I go to another school I learn the same thing, and when I go to another it’s harder,” she says, fidgeting with her hands.

Her mother, short but carrying an authority around her children only a mother can, agrees, noting that even though it’s loud and difficult for her kids to get work done at the shelter, it’s still better than moving around.

“It’s hard on them, it’s hard,” she says. “They get settled in one school with the schoolwork and all of their friends, and then they have to start all over with another one.”

The statistics on homeless schoolchildren agree. Nationwide, with each change of school a child is set back academically from four to six months. Forty-one percent of homeless children will attend two different schools in a normal year, and 28 percent will attend three or more different schools. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, Ailene is just one of 13,521 homeless students in K-12 who have been identified. In California, she’s just one of 178,014, and in the country she’s one of 907,000 – all of these numbers are drastic undercounts because it’s hard to track and identify the students.

The amount of money doled out by the federal government to help these students is inadequate. Funded through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, in 2007-08 homeless students received only $61.9 million. That works out to less than $70 per identified student, far short of the money they need to overcome the significant obstacles presented by their living situations. Further, the Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program of the McKinney-Vento act – the sub-section that deals with homeless schoolchildren – is not even funded to its full $70 million allotment. In 2008-2009 the funding will be increasing, slightly, to $64 million, an amount still less than the $5 million increase requested by homeless youth advocates.

“The program is woefully, woefully under-funded, and it has been throughout its 20-year-history,” said Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth in Washington. “Just as there is a lack of awareness about homelessness with the public, it’s also an issue with legislators.” 812

The Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program earmarks its funds for a sprawling diversity of purposes, including tutoring and before- and after-school programs, evaluations, professional development, health services, transportation not otherwise provided for through federal, state or local funding, education programs for both parents and schools, school supplies, and a host of others. Advocates for the students worry about the long-term effects of this ongoing crisis.

“If this doesn’t scream No Child Left Behind, I don’t know what does,” said Leslie Croom, who until recently was a member of the United Coalition East Prevention Project in Los Angeles, which does extensive work with homeless students. “If the school is not prepared for … these kids, they’re just going to end up with kids who fall through the cracks.”

Children are falling through the cracks everywhere in the country because school districts – especially poor ones, which often strain under a sizable homeless student population – are faced with an impossible financial situation. The responsibility for this debacle lies primarily with the federal government, which, while spending more than half a trillion dollars a year on its military budget, can only pony up $64 million for nearly one million homeless schoolchildren.

Even with enough money, solving the problems of the country’s homeless students would be a Herculean task. To do so with the budget they are working with now makes the proposition of solving these children’s problems so preposterous as to almost defy belief.

Little School on the Row

Skid row is, by and large, a distinctly monochromatic area, its sidewalks a dull grey, its buildings almost uniformly drenched in drabness, its denizens cloaked in faded second-hand clothes, so any color in the area is bound to draw attention. And so the colorful murals painted on the side of portables at an elementary school are a welcome and jarring sight, joined by the sounds of children running around, shouting, laughing and playing. The school, the only one in skid row, is Ninth Street Elementary School, and approximately half of the 400 children – ranging from grades K-5 – are homeless.

Most of the kids attending Ninth Street come from the area, whether they are from the shelters – two of Arlene Olivares’ children are students here – or the hotels. Many come from all over the county as well, due to an obligation within McKinney-Vento that students be able to stay enrolled at their original school, despite where they may have moved.

While a good idea on balance, as changing schools often unnecessarily and drastically disrupts children’s learning, there are drawbacks as well. Due to the transient nature of homelessness, many students who are constantly moving all over Los Angeles County are forced to travel up to two hours to attend school, making it remarkably difficult for many students to be on time at all.

“You’re between a rock and a hard place,” said Pamela Hughes, the principal at Ninth Street. “You want them to come to school and get that continuity, but the buses don’t always run on time, so the parents bring them in late.”

Soon after, Hughes was interrupted when a young student walked past us with her backpack on at about 11 a.m. “Hi,” said Hughes cheerily, before confiding that the student was just now making her way to school – a few hours late. “They come all the way from way south. But you have to give credit to the mom for getting her here.”

Other examples of students having their education broken up by repeated moves abound. One first grade student, said Hughes, has been to eight different schools already.

The statistics facing homeless schoolchildren are startling. Homeless children are four times more likely to drop out of school and two times more likely to score lower on standardized tests; one in ten homeless students will miss at least one month of school each year, 36 percent have repeated a grade, and 14 percent – double that of other children – are diagnosed with a learning disability. All of these problems are caused, exacerbated and impacted in myriad ways by their troubled environments.

“It affects their learning,” said Hughes. “It would affect an adult’s learning as well. They’re trying to survive, their parents are trying to survive, they’ve got to wonder whether or not they have a place to say. We’re talking about children with such uncertainty. And most of their parents are really trying hard, too, and they’re doing the best that they can do, but sometimes their minds are not always on learning.”

Emotional and physical problems are also rife among homeless children: They get sick twice as much as other children; go hungry twice as often as other children; 25 percent have witnessed acts of violence within their family; more than 20 percent of homeless preschool children have serious enough emotional problems to require professional care; and 47 percent have psychological problems like anxiety, depression, or withdrawal, as compared with 18 percent of other children.

Sleepy students are also a problem, said Hughes, for many students are unable to get enough rest as a result of the turbulence and loudness that frequently characterize their home situations, whether they are living in dormitory settings, doubled up at an apartment, or have a disruptive family situation.

“Many times we have to decide if we’re going to wake up a student when they fall asleep in class because they’re missing their education, or are we going to let them sleep?” she asked. “Sometimes we’ll bring them in and I’ll let them sleep in during recess or lunch time, but I tell the teachers they have to wake them up. Because we have to educate them.”

‘Fuses Are Easily Lit’

The stigma of homelessness affects the children’s self esteem as well, and can lead to discrimination among the students themselves.

“We have children who are here because their parents work in the area, and they’re considered to be in the highest echelon,” said Hughes. “The kids in the hotels are in the middle because they’re not getting free stuff, and the kids in the shelters are at the bottom. It’s a caste system.”

The harsh environment of skid row and the tough domestic situations of many of the kids can also be harmful, said Dan McSweeney, a counselor at Ninth Street who is funded partially through McKinney-Vento dollars, a godsend for the money- and resource-strapped school.

“What are they going home to?” asked McSweeney, his thick Irish brogue belying the fact he has been working in one position or another at Ninth Street for two decades now. “They get on a bus and it drops them off at 6th and San Pedro, and there’s guys down there hanging around and carts and drugs and urine and shouting and screaming around the back … . If you’re a kid you begin by being frightened by it and after a while you become used to it and hardened by it, and you become accepting of it. And then you become sort of a part of it, because you have to survive in there.”

This often leads to discipline problems, which both Hughes and McSweeney cited as one of the most exacting and demanding aspects of their jobs.

“I find there’s more aggravation and more fighting on the part of kids who live in homeless situations and kids who live in hotels down here,” said McSweeney. “They don’t have that same sense of security, they have to fight … . It’s survival of the fittest, it’s almost like the jungle … . The volume is up, the aggravation is higher – fuses are easily lit.”

While discipline problems are common at any school, and especially Ninth Street, further problems arise as parents – mainly mothers – are hard to reach, as many lack phone numbers or a reliable way of getting in touch.

All of these problems have helped land Ninth Street into those most dreaded of bad books – the bad books of No Child Left Behind, the federal education program that applies its standards, and the tests that measure those standards, equally between schools throughout the country – whether they’re located on skid row or in Beverly Hills.

Ninth Street has failed to meet its standards for the English Arts for two straight years, at least partially as a result of their high numbers of English language learners, and the bar will be set even higher this year, virtually guaranteeing that the school will fall short of the standards for a third time.

“[Our students] have the capability to learn, but a lot of the time they don’t have the continuity in their learning because they’re in and out [of school], and it may not be that important to them right now,” she said. “Am I going to have a place [to stay tonight], is my mother going to be there when I get back, and who’s going to be there, my mother or her boyfriend? These are the things our children have to deal with.”

With all of these problems facing Ninth Street students, it is – understandably – sometimes difficult for the adults at the school to remain optimistic in the face of such overwhelming odds.

“I’m sure some will end up in gangs,” said McSweeney, his rough, calloused hands grabbing his head. “I hope that someday, when I’m confronted by some gang or something, that one of the members will be someone who went there, and they’ll remember and they’ll be like ‘Oh, you were at Ninth Street,’ and they won’t shoot me because they’ll remember, and there will be a sense of compassion. And that’s the whole thing – you have to be hardened.”

“How do you maintain your humanity in this context?”

A Sea of Despair

More than most, Los Angeles is a city in crisis as far as dealing with homeless schoolchildren. The Homeless Education Program – the L.A. Unified program in charge of homelessness in the district – employs a meager five counselors, one of whom stays in the office. These counselors are supposed to be identifying homeless students, engaging in broad-based outreach services, and making the necessary linkages between homeless parents and schools. With five, that’s an impossible task – that’s an improvement, though, as up until last May there was only one.

“No, we’re not adequately staffed,” laughed Melissa Schoonmaker, the pupil services and attendance coordinator in charge of the program. “These families need someone who can help them navigate through the system. It’s better than it was, but it’s still a far cry from what we need.”

The program received $796,000 in Title I funding from the district for this academic year, which is a stream of federal funding reserved for school districts with a high percentage of students from low-income families. Unfortunately, all of the money she receives goes toward paying her staff, which, aside from the five counselors, includes another part-time counselor and a few office aides.

As far as money to help out the students in a more tangible way, the program received a meager $128,000 in federal

McKinney-Vento funds for the 2007-2008 school year, or less than $10 per child.

One of the most important uses for the little money that they do receive goes toward identifying and helping homeless parents and their children navigate through the often-complex school bureaucracy.

“The real problem is identifying them,” said L.A. Unified Superintendent David L. Brewer. “We’ve done a lot of development with teachers and administrators to help identify them, because a lot of them don’t self-identify. Once we identify them, then we’re providing them with services that they need.”

Unfortunately, people who work with the homeless students say that there are not nearly enough resources to provide identified students with needed services.

Furthermore, many families are unaware of the right of equal access to education that homeless schoolchildren are guaranteed by McKinney-Vento. Many schools are also ignorant of what obligations they have to fulfill. While some have large populations of homeless schoolchildren, many do not and this can make it difficult for parents trying to enroll their children, mainly because they lack a permanent address and the money to help purchase the necessary school materials that the district must provide.

Arlene Olivares ran into this problem when she and her children were bounced around from motel to motel a couple of years ago.

“The schools were not helpful … .

I told them we were homeless and they didn’t help,” she said, adding that things are much easier now, as her children attend schools that have substantial homeless populations. “They just gave me a hard time in even getting [my children] into schools, because I didn’t have a permanent address. I told them our situation, and they just made things hard.”

A recent change in county policy has made things easier though, with every school now required to designate someone to act as a homeless liaison, to be in charge of contacting the Homeless Education

Program if they have a homeless student.

With little money coming in the future and a crisis that is only worsening, it would seem that pessimism would be the order of the day. For Ninth Street’s Hughes, though, that just isn’t an option.

“I have to be optimistic,” she said. “I can’t give up on children.”

Arlene recently moved out of the Mission with her family, and, as usually happens, she left no forwarding address.

In an interview several months ago, she spoke of the cyclical nature of homelessness, and the effect it was having on her children.

“It’s hard, because we were homeless before, then we got our house, then something happened and we became homeless again,” she said. “I think it’s harder because they’re getting older, and they’re a little older this time.”