When coronavirus hit, homeless students lost their safe haven: school
Butte Falls is written in fine print on the Jackson County map, about 30 miles uphill northeast of Medford. It’s a small community of about 450 people, one gas station, one grocery store and a lot of poverty — above 16%. One out of five students in the Butte Falls School District experienced homelessness in the previous school year.
“It was a logging town a long time ago, and that never got replaced with anything family-waged,” said Bridget McGonagle, homeless liaison for Butte Falls School District. “The forest service had a pretty big headquarters there, and then they closed that down years ago, too. The main employer is probably the school district, which is a small school. So if people are working, they are having to go down the hill, so that can be challenging because Jackson County has a housing shortage just in general. I think that’s also why we have a lot of doubled up families. … In places like Butte Falls, we don’t have apartment complexes or trailer parks, so where are you going to go?”
Like other communities, as the coronavirus took hold, the Butte Falls School District shifted to outreach, meals, education and well-being for the 200-plus students in the district. McGonagle is also the program director for the Family Resource Center in Butte Falls, which provides a food pantry, senior services, preschool and teen programs, and other services for families in need.
“Between the school district and the other organizations, we try to fill all the holes that we can,” McGonagle said.
There are more than 22,000 students recognized as homeless across Oregon, with rural communities like Butte Falls experiencing the highest percentages among their student bodies.
From the moment the coronavirus shut down schools, school districts across the state transformed their daily routines into outreach. Schools partnered with community members and other organizations to deliver meals to students and connect families with services.
In Lincoln County, the school is providing breakfast, lunch and dinner to every child in the county ages 1 to 18. Meals are available at five pickup sites around the county and are being delivered by school bus.
“We’re all in the same boat, but we’re not all in the same storm.” That’s how Lincoln County School District’s Katie Townsend describes the disparity amplified during the pandemic crisis. “We all have different levels of storms in our life right now. Some might have just a little mist, and others might have a full-on hurricane.”
Townsend’s focus is on the hurricane. She’s the director of the district’s Homeless Education and Literacy Project, ensuring that students without homes have the same access to education and school resources as housed students.
Last year, the Lincoln County School District had more than 1,100 youths who experienced at least some form of homelessness, either one night a year or the whole school year. That’s the highest the district has had in its history and the highest per-capita rate of homelessness among children of all counties in Oregon.
And that rate is on target to reach similar numbers again this year.
“I imagine that with the crisis that we’re going through in our state and our county and our world, that unfortunately, those numbers will go higher,” she said. “We’re hearing people who are staying at other people’s houses and not able to stay there any longer, and so they’re trying to scramble and find another place to go to. People who were staying at state parks are now looking for other private campgrounds or county campgrounds that are still open.”
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So as the buses go out to deliver meals, they’re also delivering resources and education packets to implement distance learning, along with the ubiquitous Chromebook laptops for every student who needs one. The county is also connecting rural areas to the internet through hotspot networks and pooling resources with other services to locate people and deliver what they need, Townsend said.
This accelerated outreach work is the new normal for Oregon school districts, which have been ordered closed by Gov. Kate Brown for the duration of the 2019-20 school year.
As soon as the crisis hit, Townsend said, she received a massive wave of calls and emails from people wanting to help. People donated gift cards and offered to collect supplies for the kids and other items families might need. She said she’s very proud of her school district for the work it’s doing, delivering meals and supplies, staying in touch with students, and working together to overcome obstacles such as internet access.
“Sometimes we send messages out to families and we don’t hear back, and we do our best to try to figure out if someone else has been in contact with them,” Townsend said. “I know that there will probably be some that get missed in the process, but we’re trying to keep up with all.”
For Dona Bolt, state coordinator for McKinney-Vento homeless liaison program with the Oregon Department of Education, the disruption amplifies the already daily challenges of homeless students.
“You can’t come up with a more frightening scenario than what we’re facing right now,” Bolt said. “Just the unimaginable circumstances for kids that don’t have housing. The stress on the family is already very high. It’s very traumatic.”
Butte Falls is a small town, and like small towns, McGonagle said, it’s hard to fall through the cracks.
“There’s not a lot of secrets in a small town,” she said. “Everybody kind of knows everybody else’s business. So it’s a lot easier to identify when we see needs.”
It’s also a community that knows poverty, McGonagle said, and times are expected to get much worse in the economic aftermath of the pandemic.
With industry in decline, the county’s economy relies on tourism, and summer tourism such as rafting and fishing has been severely hurt in recent years because of the smoke from forest fires.
“A lot of businesses were just saying, ‘OK. We just got to get through this winter and we’ll get back in the game this summer.’ And now they have this,” McGonagle said. “I do know of some places that have closed and have said they’re not going to reopen.”
The state has issued revised graduation standards to honor seniors’ time in school despite the days lost to the closure. The challenge remains getting those graduating students to think about continuing education, an avenue to escaping the cycle of poverty.
“It takes a different mindset to get out of survival and into more forward thinking like wanting to do something different and change the direction of your life,” she said. “Getting them to jump from one point to the other, that has probably been my biggest challenge. To get them to realize that their value is more than today.”
Internet and computer access is a priority for Torres, who knows that many in the district don’t have either. For some, old-fashioned paperwork is being delivered to students’ homes.
Melinda Torres is both a homeless student liaison for the Coos Bay School District and runs the ARK Project, which works with homeless families in Coos Bay and nearby North Bend to procure vital needs, find housing and navigate a world without a stable home. Since August, ARK has served 76 families; nearly half of them were new families coming for assistance for the first time, Torres said.
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In the Coos Bay School District, 14% of K-12 students are homeless.
“A majority of our families that we work with in this area are doubled up — two families living together because they can’t afford rent,” Torres said. “There were 308 kids doubled up last school year.”
Others are living in mobile RVs, motel rooms, cars or camps. Like all school districts, the upheaval from the pandemic and school closures put everyone into action to help community members, Torres said.
“These places where these kids live, for example, the ones that are unsheltered who are living in a motel room, you can’t stockpile stuff from the freezer,” she said. “All you’re able to buy is processed food that has a long shelf life.”
In the absence of a social school environment, Townsend has noticed that students have found a replacement rendezvous: the bus stop.
“That can be really a highlight of the day for the kids, to run out to the bus stop. And they’re getting food, and they’re excited about that, but also getting to see a familiar face, someone who maybe they recognize from school,” Townsend said. “That connection, I think, is really critical.”
But emotionally, it’s still a challenge. Home is a haven for people in these times. For people and children without a stable home, school was that safe place.
“We have had students reach out to share that they were kind of struggling,” Townsend said. “We’ve been really trying to make it clear that our staff can be resource people for the kids. We want to make sure that they don’t feel isolated and cut off from the relationships they did build.”
In Coos County, Melinda Torres said the mental well-being of students is paramount.
“It’s very scary to me because usually schools are the consistency in these kids’ lives,” Torres said. “That is a top priority right there, especially if you’re living in that travel RV with your three siblings and your parents in that cramp little area,” Torres said. “They can’t even go to the parks. I just couldn’t imagine in their situation.”
Torres encourages everyone to be mindful and patient of people who are facing more hurricane than mist in this pandemic.
“We’re going through a crisis, and we’re all trying to acclimate and just be more understanding to these kids and these families who have it a lot harder that other people with consistent housing, especially during this time when this is going to affect the homeless population so much more than any other community,” she said.
The Oregon Department of Education is expecting to receive an estimated $121 million in funding through the federal coronavirus relief bill, of which at least 90% will pass through to the districts. The eligible use of the funding leaves broad discretion to each local district.
Bolt said some of that money can be used on lodging for families in need of housing and housing assistance. Because when asked what communities need most, without hesitation, Bolt said, “shelter.”
“There aren’t enough shelters or housing programs to address the need,” Bolt said. “And the amount of unsheltered homelessness in this state is pretty overwhelming, compared to some other states.”
Townsend said the crisis families are facing is very familiar to people working on the front lines of services, for social workers and school staff. It is less obvious to people who don’t always know all the challenges people in a community face. With coronavirus, "the challenge is to go outside of ourselves and see how it’s impacting people around us,” she said.
“Everyone talks about student homelessness as being very hidden, and I can see how unless people are looking for it, it’s going to become even more hidden.”
Email Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl at joanne@streetroots.org ; follow her on Twitter @jozuhl The Next Generation is a Street Roots series that focuses on the well-being and housing stability of children and young adults, locally and nationally, and explores the work being done to prevent another generation from becoming homeless. Street Roots received funding from Meyer Memorial Trust's Housing Advocacy Portfolio to develop dedicated reporting for The Next Generation series.
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