The Portland school, now in its third decade educating students experiencing homelessness, is working to keep students connected
It was a cool, rainy Portland morning when Trisha Olson boarded the small school bus she drives every morning. It’s decorated with cheerful signs and thank-you notes children have made for her. Above each seat there are two names — the names of kids who under normal circumstances take the bus to school every morning.
But on the November day a Street Roots reporter accompanied Olson on her bus route, the seats were empty.
Instead of taking children to and from school, Olson drove around the edges of East Portland, stopping at hotels and apartment complexes to drop off breakfasts in brown bags — and school work.
When Olson meets families at the door, she picks up kids’ schoolwork from the day before. At midday, she’ll repeat the routine, taking bagged lunches, graded papers and a new set of worksheets for kids to work on in the afternoon — and picking up the morning’s work for teachers to grade.
Olson is one of three bus drivers for Community Transitional School in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood. The school is private, though in the past it has employed teachers whose salaries are paid by federal Title I funds. It started in 1990 as a program of the YWCA where it was originally housed. It later moved to the basement of Mt. Tabor Presbyterian Church, then built a physical school at Northeast 66th Avenue and Killingsworth Street in 2007.
PROFILE: Making sure homeless students get to school every day (from 2016)
From the beginning, CTS’ mission has remained consistent: Educate children experiencing houselessness. The school serves preschoolers through eighth graders. Some stay for short stints — a few weeks — and some stay for years. According to outreach director Kimberly Smith, even if students’ families find stable housing, they can continue attending the school through eighth grade, and some do.
As schools across the country have grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, most have opted either to go fully online — as Portland Public Schools has done since April — or for a hybrid model where kids spent part of the week attending school online and part of the week in classrooms.
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That’s created particular challenges for students experiencing homelessness: While PPS has distributed laptops and paid for hotspots to expand Internet access, getting online — and finding a quiet place to study or participate in classroom meetings — is still a challenge for many kids.
CTS has responded to the pandemic with an analog solution: written worksheets, delivered daily with food.
“We just want to be able to keep them engaged,” said Kate Truelove, who teaches pre-K and kindergarten.
Truelove is one of the school’s four teachers, all of whom teach a combination of grades. The school’s principal, Cheryl Bickle, also teaches third, fourth and fifth grade, and the school also employs three full-time teachers’ aides.
The school’s teachers are state-certified, but as a private institution it’s not held to the same standardized testing requirements as those in public schools.
That, and the school’s small size — there are about 15 kids in each class, and 75 kids total — offers teachers some flexibility to meet students where they’re at academically.
“I never introduce a new student (as a new student). I say ‘keep your eyes and ears open,’ and I give them easy work,” Bickle told Street Roots, adding that on their first few days students are absorbing more basic information, like where the bathrooms are and what time lunch is.
And students will often overstate what they know during informal assessments — someone who’s been briefly exposed to multiplication tables might claim to have mastered them — so it’s best to give them basic work and go from there, Bickle said.
Academically, the school focuses on reading, writing and math — “so you teach science, but there’s writing and math components,” Bickle said — and on interpersonal skills and values like perseverance and kindness.
“We’re a lot different from a public school in that we pull from a lot of different curricula,” said Akina Kawauchi, who teaches first and second grade.
But the flexible curriculum doesn’t mean kids are coddled, said Bickle. Students are held to high expectations, and they meet them. This year, the overwhelming majority of students are returning at least one completed worksheet per day, Bickle said.
And enrollment numbers are comparable to this time last year: Bickle said as of early November there were 77 children enrolled in the school, which is similar to November of last year. Often, she noted, enrollment will swell to more than 100 in the winter, then decrease as the weather improves.
The number of houseless children in Portland Public Schools, by contrast, is down this year: According to school district spokesperson Karen Werstein, there were 772 PPS students identified as homeless in November of last year, and 419 this year.
Some of the reasons for that, Werstein said, are overall positive for students: The state’s and city’s moratoriums on evicting renters for non-payment of rent have kept many families in stable housing even as they’ve struggled.
But Werstein also noted that high school students aren’t meeting with counselors one-on-one, so critical information about their home lives and housing status may be underreported. And, she said, the lack of in-person instruction “can create gaps in the flow of information.”
Though CTS’ numbers have remained steady through the pandemic, Bickle is worried that kids are falling through the cracks.
“I think children are a lot harder to find during the pandemic,” Bickle said.
Kimberly Smith, the school’s outreach coordinator, said her job is to find kids who are eligible to attend the school. She does outreach to shelters and the 211 referral program, as well as motels and food pantries. Any parent interested in enrolling their child simply has to call the school and give an address the school can use as a drop site.
Across Oregon, there are more than 22,000 students classified as homeless, including those doubled-up in insufficient housing.
While the basis for instruction is paper worksheets and craft projects assembled by teachers, and the school communicates with parents primarily over the phone, the school has taken advantage of online tools — namely ClassDojo, a free smartphone app teachers can use to communicate with parents, but also to upload materials.
Truelove uploads daily videos of herself reading stories accompanied by the class “pet” — a stuffed lion. She told Street Roots she’s gotten a lot of positive feedback about the story videos, which she hopes offer a few minutes of calm and structure.
Teachers are also looking to create community in other, low-tech ways: When Street Roots visited her classroom, Kawauchi said she was working to organize an in-class pen pal exchange so kids could get to know each other through letters.
Bickle, who has been with CTS since its inception, started her teaching career at a grade school in New Orleans’ French Quarter, then worked for a preschool program for homeless children in Seattle.
That was a pilot project, which gave teachers the ability to experiment and change things if they determined they weren’t working. For example, Bickle said, the school was downhill near a homeless shelter, and initially coordinators thought children could just walk down the hill to school in the morning.
But attendance was poor. So the school started sending staff to the shelter to come get children instead.
When Bickle helped start CTS, she knew transportation that worked for each kid would be imperative. Initially, the school rented a van from the YWCA, and later contracted with PPS for one bus route. It has since purchased buses that travel all over Multnomah County.
The school is using one fewer bus this year than it did last year, but the bus drivers are as critical to the school’s operation as they’ve ever been. Drivers visit homeless shelters through the area, but many stops are apartments where families are staying with friends or relatives in the absence of permanent housing.
In addition to bringing breakfast and lunch to children on weekdays, bus drivers deliver a box of food on Fridays from Sunshine Division, a nonprofit partner of the Portland Police Bureau, and once a month, families get a box of donated fresh produce.
Bickle is pessimistic about the prospects of getting to do any in-person teaching this school year — and said if it does become possible, she plans to extend the school year by a month to help make up for learning losses due to the pandemic.
She expects the pandemic to have a detrimental effect on all children — her own grandchildren are struggling with virtual schooling, she said — but especially on kids experiencing houselessness.
“It’s so normal to be in school, to have your friends, to have the Halloween parties,” Bickle said. “There’s so many uncertainties in their lives and this is just another one.”
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