Every day, the small boy wakes up behind the Safeway grocery store. He packs all of his belongings in a backpack, cleans up at a gym and heads off to school.
His mother and her new boyfriend live in a van parked in front of the store. She doesn’t want her son in the van. She tried to send him away, but the boy doesn’t trust the man not to abuse her. And so the child sleeps nearby.
A girl watched her single dad abuse her older sisters, physically and verbally. She’s 15 now and knows it’ll be her turn soon. She packs a small bag and chooses a classmate’s couch over what awaits her at home.
A teenager rolls out a sleeping bag in a park near his house every night. The house that was once a home is now filled with drugs and fighting. The teen knows how to hide — the neighbors who see him during the day have no idea he’s all alone.
These children are real and these are their stories. They have no home, yet they go to school. School is the one place where they can be children.
They number in the thousands across Oregon, many in suburban and rural districts where resources are scarce.
While unaccompanied minors — children who live without a legal guardian and without stable housing — are reported in nearly every school district in the state, they are surprisingly concentrated in suburban and rural districts.
Several new developments concerning these children have occurred recently: one Portland-area housing program ran into a roadblock, another is bound to export its success to one of the hardest-hit districts, and the state gleaned some surprising insights into the ages of these homeless students.
So young
There were nearly 3,200 unaccompanied minors in Oregon schools in the 2012-13 school year, according to the Department of Education. Or rather, that many children were reported to the department by their school district’s homeless liaison.
The actual number of Oregon students who live without a legal guardian is certainly much higher, experts agree, because kids hide their housing status.
Two years ago, the federal government enacted new rules on how to count homeless students. Rather than just calling in a total number to the state, district officials now had to list every student by his or her identifying number — or SSID — said Dona Bolt, the state coordinator for homeless education programs.
This had two effects: It reduced duplication, because students who moved around frequently no longer were counted multiple times by several districts.
It also identified which grade levels these students were in.
“We saw that there are unaccompanied minors at every grade level, including preschool,” Bolt said.
The state will soon start training district liaisons on what to do for these youngest kids, because the stakes are highest at that age.
“Homelessness is a trauma,” Bolt said.
And research on younger children shows that if any trauma occurs between age 3 and third grade — which is the critical time for brain development — it can inhibit social function and delay learning to read. These two factors alone can set back a child dramatically in school and in life, Bolt said.
A dream, shattered
This summer, a dream came true for a small program in the North Clackamas School District, which reaches from Milwaukie nearly to Damascus, and from Clackamas to Happy Valley.
It wasn’t to last.
The Host Home Project is a collaboration between the school district and a nonprofit called The Inn. The nonprofit is small — it runs a seven-bed facility for homeless youths and transitional housing for nine homeless mothers with children, said Steve Olsen, its director of housing services. It was created four years ago by Kristin Kinnie, the school district’s homeless liaison, who contacted The Inn with an idea and a little seed money from the district.
“Let’s say little Johnny’s mom left and his dad had to go to prison,” Olsen said. “Johnny is friends with Tommy; Tommy asks mom if Johnny can come live with them.”
And let’s say Tommy’s mom agrees, at least for a while. But she’s probably reluctant to commit to a long-term stay for a child she doesn’t know that well. That’s where Host Home comes in.
Teachers or counselors refer children in that situation to Kinnie, who contacts Host Home’s case manager. The nonprofit meets with the family and arrangements are discussed.
After a safety inspection of the house and criminal background checks on the adults, the project agrees to provide support to the youth and his or her new host family. The family gets no money from the program to offset the youth’s living expenses. But Host Home will pay for things such as getting the child a new copy of his birth certificate so he can apply for assistance, Olsen said. And the school can provide a backpack full of supplies, some clothing and food. The child might even get an outfit for job interviews.
Members of the Trinity Lutheran Church donate some household supplies for the host families.
Equally important, the Host Home Project provides a number people can call when there’s trouble at home. It helps mediate any disagreements and provides overall guidance.
“People might be scared to take in (a homeless youth),” Kinnie said. “This program can be a trigger to someone saying yes.”
It’s a low-cost alternative to providing institutional housing, Olsen said. It’s always been a lean operation. The nonprofit has been scraping by on donations and $5,000 annual grants from Clackamas County. In its first year, it helped three students. Last year, it helped six. But there are about 70 known unaccompanied youths in the district’s schools and about 250 throughout Clackamas County.
There is “nothing for them except to go to a youth shelter in downtown Portland,” Kinnie said. “But they want to stay in their community; they don’t want to go downtown.”
More money was needed to expand the program.
In mid-June, The Inn applied for a grant from the state’s Department of Human Services. The grant, available to programs offering shelter services for homeless or runaway youth, would give them $75,000 a year for five years — a huge boost.
The nonprofit planned to expand the Host Home Project across Clackamas County should it win the grant award.
And in early July, DHS sent notice that The Inn had won.
“Our dreams had come true,” Olsen said. “We sent e-mails out to all (school) superintendents and told them we’re moving forward.”
The Inn rented a new office and posted job ads for a full-time case manager to help with the workload of covering the whole county. The first check from the state came in early August. Olsen interviewed potential managers.
“This was a really big deal,” Kinnie said.
And then it all fell apart. In early September, DHS told the nonprofit that it hadn’t won the grant after all, that the department had made an error in scoring the various applications.
Similar grants were awarded in six regions around the state. Most regions had four DHS employees scoring the grant applications according to how well the scorer thought each proposal met the state requirements, said Andrea Cantu-Schomus, a DHS spokeswoman. In the Portland region there were five scorers. But when it came time to average their scores, the computer only considered the first four numbers because it was still set up for the other regions, Cantu-Schomus said. When the error was discovered and all five scores were taken into account, the Portland nonprofit Boys and Girls Aid came out ahead.
The state will send money to The Inn through the end of October, Cantu-Schomus said. Hardly enough time to find new grants of a similar size, which are hard to come by anyway. The nonprofit now missed the window to at least re-apply for the small county grant it had been receiving the past few years, Olsen said. He’s not giving up yet.
“We feel we have a case to file a grievance with the state,” Olsen said.
There is no appeals process for the loss of the grant, Cantu-Schomus said.
“A lot of resources go into Portland,” Kinnie said. “But what about the surrounding counties, especially the rural parts? We’re just trying to do right by these kids who have nowhere else to go.”
Exporting a unique model
The Beaverton School District has more unaccompanied youths in its schools than any other district in the state, almost twice as many as Eugene, the runner-up, according to state records.
No wonder its homeless official has developed a program that appears to be unique in the nation, one that will soon be emulated in other districts around the state.
About five years ago, Lisa Mentesana, Beaverton’s homeless liaison, looked to go beyond school district resources to help the many homeless students she encountered. It was time to ask the whole community for help.
Taking bits and pieces from other programs, a unique model emerged: a collaboration between the school district, the city and an interfaith nonprofit, which matches homeless, unaccompanied students with families.
The result was a nonprofit called Second Home, which is under the umbrella of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, and which finds adults willing to take in homeless youth.
When Mentesana’s office is made aware of a student in need of a home who is without family, she vets the student to see if he or she makes a good fit for the program.
Once host family and student are matched, all parties get together at the dispute-resolution center in the Beaverton mayor’s office. The mediators there put together a rental agreement between the student and the family, said Jenny Pratt, student coordinator for Second Home.
Students have to be 16 years old, which is the minimum age to rent an apartment in Oregon. The rental agreement will include provisions such as expected curfews, house rules and which chores the youth will take on in lieu of rent. In turn, the family agrees to provide a home.
Second Home helps an average of 10 to 12 kids a year, Mentesana said. It runs on about $20,000 per year, none of which is school-district money.
All three participants are crucial to the program, Pratt said. It helps greatly to have trained city mediators put together agreements. The school district refers the kids, can waive fees for sports programs or other activities, and provide supplies, food and clothing to the youth through its donation programs. And the nonprofit does home visits and background checks, and carries crucial insurance for accidents or lawsuits.
Faith-based organizations also contribute donations and mentors.
It’s a formula that is ready to be exported to other parts of the state. It looks like Lincoln County will be first.
The Lincoln County School District ranked ninth in the state in the total number of homeless students in the 2012-13 school year, trailing only districts with at least twice its population.
And now, the school district, the county’s dispute-resolution center and the Newport nonprofit Samaritan House are on board to start up a program modeled after Second Home, Pratt said.
No commitments are in writing yet, but they might be by the end of the year, she said.
Sit down to dinner
Part of the success of these programs is that they enable students to come home to a family, even if it’s not their own family. They’re not living in institutions while trying to finish school and getting over the loss of their family connections.
Yes, the school districts can offer mental-health counseling, which is crucial to these kids after the traumatic loss of their childhood.
But more importantly, the programs make it possible to go to a place after school where people sit down to dinner together, which is a first for some of them. Some learn how to make a bed for the first time. And most see adults who are responsible, who know how to manage anger, who know how to communicate. It’s an invaluable experience, the program coordinators said.
Pratt, of Second Home, asked one student what kind of home she was looking for: one with small children or pets, perhaps?
“I just want a house where there’s love,” the child replied.
