Imagine you’re a single mother trying to support two school-aged children on low wages earned working two jobs. You’ve just paid your car insurance and utility bills, when the transmission on your 1997 sedan gives out, and with it goes your only means of transportation to your graveyard shift cleaning offices. Public transportation in your neighborhood doesn’t run at night.
With no money for repairs, you miss work, you get fired, you don’t make rent, and the downward spiral begins. You spend the last of your cash taking the bus to job interviews and social-service agencies, looking for any way to keep a roof over your kids’ heads. Just when you think things can’t possibly get worse, your teenage daughter tells you she’s pregnant.
For those who grew up in poverty, going through the motions of a simulation such as this can be triggering, said Steve Roe. He owns and manages a car dealership in Grants Pass and conducts these simulations across Oregon, free of charge. He said it’s important for people who, like himself, have never lived in severe poverty, to have the powerful experience the simulation affords.
It was after going through one himself two years ago at a Ford Family Foundation retreat in Bend that Roe decided he wanted to become a facilitator.
He flew to St. Louis, Mo., for a two-day training and bought a $2,150 kit from the Missouri Association for Community Action. Since then, he has taken groups, typically of 100 or more, through the simulation in various towns across Oregon, paying for his own travel, room and board along the way.
A district in poverty
When Lisa DeSalvio, a program director at Coos Bay School District, experienced a poverty simulation at The Mill Casino in North Bend, it immediately struck her as something that would be beneficial to educators working in her district.
In last week’s edition of Street Roots, we reported on how generational poverty following an economic collapse in the 1980s has fed an increasingly severe housing crisis in Coos County.
Up and down the Oregon Coast, each community is struggling with housing and poverty issues of its own, where demand for housing outweighs supply and costs outpace incomes. A side effect is that many children are either experiencing homelessness, or their parents are heavily rent burdened.
In Coos County, 30 percent of children live in poverty and nearly half qualify for free or reduced lunch, according Children First for Oregon’s 2017 County Data Book.
The Coos Bay School District has been hit particularly hard. As of April, 390 of the 3,100 children in the district had experienced homelessness this school year, said Melinda Torres, who works as both the ARK Program manager and the homeless liaison and for the district.
Torres fulfills her two roles – both aimed at serving impoverished families – out of the same office located at Harding Learning Center, an alternative high school where 70 percent of the student body is considered homeless.
It’s also where the ARK Program offers a food pantry, free clothing closet with most child and teen sizes, hygiene items and other essentials that have been collected as donations and are provided to struggling families with kids enrolled in the district.
Torres said the majority of her homeless students are either couch surfing or doubled up in a relative or friend’s home after their family lost their own. She said many students falling into the homeless category are living in substandard housing, such as a camper or RV, and others are living in motels.
Thankfully, she said, she doesn’t currently have any families camping in tents, but that situation typically arises in the summer.
“I remember one family had a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, and I’m just calling everywhere, because I am like you have to be somewhere before winter comes. I cannot handle you being in that tent with those babies,” she said. “And that’s what really kills me.”
Until Coos Cares’ Harmony House opened in December, there was no homeless shelter for families in the entire county. However, Harmony House only has space for two families and is running a wait list.
There’s also no shelter for unaccompanied youths in Coos County – or anywhere else along the coast.
In Lincoln County, where 1 in 8 students are homeless, the school district typically has one or two students who are bused to school from the nearest homeless youth shelters, in Salem and Corvallis – at least an hour each way. If the kids can’t find people who will house them locally, it’s the only way to prevent them from falling behind academically, explained Katey Townsend, the homeless liaison for Lincoln County School District.
During the 2016-17 school year, 215 homeless students in Lincoln County School District were unsheltered – finding refuge in campers, tents, barns and storage units, said Townsend. That same year, 84 stayed in shelters and motels, and nearly 500 found shelter in the homes of family or friends.
Townsend said the numbers are up from when she moved back to Newport to work for the school district in 2010. Back then, there were about 400 homeless youths across the entire county. Two years ago, the number peaked at close to 1,000. While the increase may be partially due to better tracking, she said, “the problem has definitely gotten worse.”
With no youth shelters, homeless youths living on Oregon’s coast can often find themselves in less-than-ideal living situations, such as staying with a coworker they recently met at a new job or with a relative who has a substance abuse issues.
“I remember some of them last year, were staying with random people, and there was nothing I could do about it besides give them a tent,” Torres said.
FURTHER READING: Restoring pride: Coos County residents want to make a better first impression
Barbara Green, education assistant at the Coos Bay School District’s ARK Program, added, “It happened this year for a couple kids. They just moved here and don’t have anywhere to stay, so they ask their classmates, ‘Hey, can I stay with you, would your parents be OK with it?’”
In the two years she has been with the district, Torres said unaccompanied teenagers have made up a large part of her caseload. She said in some cases, they moved to the coast with a significant other who has family in the area, and then a break-up leaves them homeless. Many are simply at odds with their family.
Green said families and youth are often drawn to Coos Bay because they have “an awesome childhood memory” of the place and decided to move there without a solid plan for housing or work.
“That is always a major one,” said Torres, “for why families move here. Or they were promised a job. And then that didn’t go through. We hear that all the time.”
Erin Skaar, director of Community Action Resource Enterprises in Tillamook County, said she can name three families in her area who have a teenager who is not their own living with them right now.
“I think that this goes back to that we have a friendly, small community, where we have a lot of amazingly wonderful, loving households that will allow those youths to stay for a window of time,” Skaar said.
For homeless students, accessing the internet or finding a quiet place to do homework can be barriers to succeeding in school. Objectives like finding shelter and acquiring money can become priorities, while schoolwork and grades fall to the wayside.
It can be tough on teachers, too. In both Lincoln County and Coos Bay school districts, it’s likely a teacher will have multiple homeless students in his or her classroom.
“Sometimes, it’s probably hard when juggling 30 students, and maybe one of the homeless students is sleeping that morning, in their class,” said Townsend. “That can be frustrating, but I think when a teacher learns the underlying issue of what’s going on – they didn’t have stable housing or they stayed up half the night because they were in a tent and it was raining outside, they really switch into figuring out how to support the student.”
Teachers can point their students to their school’s homeless liaison and other resources for students who are struggling with housing or food insecurity.
In Coos Bay, the ARK program offers a computer lab, along with transportation home, help with GED and drivers license courses and fees, and instruction on resume writing and interview preparation. Torres said it even pays graduation costs for housing-insecure students who, despite all odds, make it successfully through their senior year. “They deserve to not be stressed about their cap and gown,” she said.
Torres and Green both said they worry that life after high school will be a “harsh wake-up call” for many of the teenagers they assist. They said a lot of their students simply don’t have the soft or technical skills needed to be competitive in the workforce.
“If kids really want it, they can graduate,” said Torres. “But if they drop out, we always ask, ‘When will you come back?’ We’re here for them if they come back. If not, then they have higher needs than getting their education.”
Acquiring empathy
While staff at the Coos Bay School District’s ARK Program and homeless liaison’s office see the effects of poverty on students every day, it’s less obvious to many of the district’s teachers who work in more typical classroom settings.
“I felt like more people within our district, who have contact with kids, need to understand that this is not their fault,” said Torres. “How can we build more empathy and understanding of these children who are homeless, in foster care, almost homeless?”
With most of the families she serves, Torres said drugs and alcohol aren’t the issue – it’s typically a major life event, such as a job loss, that pushes people out of their home.
After going through the poverty simulation at the casino, DeSalvio asked Torres to incorporate the program into their district’s McKinney-Vento grant, a federal assistance program established in 1987.
Hygiene kits funded by the Cow Creek Umpqua Indian Foundation, are ready for students. This past winter, Torres said her program distributed 120 such kits.Photo by Emily Green
As of April, 100 teachers in the district had gone through a poverty simulation that Roe traveled from Grants Pass to facilitate. The remainder of the district’s teachers will go through a simulation within the next two years.
In Lincoln County, Townsend said several school district staff have also attended poverty simulations, and the district has hosted school-wide trainings on working with students in poverty.
Poverty simulations typically take place in a large space, like a high school gymnasium. Roe said the kit he purchased contains more than 20,000 pieces, which are used to give participants identities, resources and situations to work through.
About 25 people surround the perimeter of the room acting as service providers, such as a food bank, hospital, grocery store, jail and pawn shop. Torres said in future simulations, she’ll likely bring in actual providers to fulfill those roles and answer questions.
Across the interior of the room, about 80 other people are assigned into families or defined as individuals, all experiencing different stages of poverty. A participant might be the parent of a pregnant teenager, an elderly person struggling to pay for both food and medication, or a person in a homeless shelter who’s trying to find a job.
Then the simulation begins, with each 15-minute segment representing a week of making tough choices about how to allocate money and transportation passes while navigating among work, accessing services and solving situational problems that arise along the way.
Meanwhile, participants playing the role of service providers have to figure out how to divvy out the limited resources they have available. In all, four segments representing a month in poverty are played out. The only goal is survival.
At the end of the simulation, Torres said teachers wanted to know more about the different resources they could point families toward. They also reported feeling as though they’d acquired a better understanding of the day-to-day struggles of their students living in poverty.
When Roe first went through the simulation, he said what surprised him most was the sheer amount of “humanity wasted” while waiting in line, only to get pushed along to the next service provider.
“In the meantime, you have to work, you have child care,” said Roe. “It’s just the spiraling nature of what poverty brings about – and the time that’s wasted in poverty.”
During the exercise, some participants achieve their goals while most end-up worse off than they were in the beginning. They might lose their housing, health care or vehicle. Roe said the experience can bring out intense emotions – he’s seen people become overwhelmed, angry and take actions they wouldn’t normally consider.
“Somebody might leave some money laying on a chair,” said Roe, “and people will run over and grab the money off the chair, and they say, ‘I never thought I would steal, because I know I’m not that kind of person, but my child was sick and I needed to get medicine.’”
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.