Learning Matters: The reality of having hope tempered by experience

In the early morning and premidnight hours on Wednesday next week, local volunteers will join with city staff, outreach workers from the city’s homeless shelter and officers of the Glendale Police Department to conduct the annual count of our homeless population.

It’s an exercise that will be occurring simultaneously throughout Los Angeles and urban areas across the country, following a format prescribed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, of HUD, through which federal dollars flow to counties.

In Los Angeles County and other counties along our coast, where homelessness has become more visible than ever, the exercise comes with stronger-than-usual hope that the information gleaned will result in better programs and services to get individuals off the streets and into supportive services. The data will be used to support grant applications for funding needed to provide those services.

I’ll be volunteering for the count this year, a new experience for me after more than two decades of involvement with homeless services provided through faith communities and local nonprofits such as Ascencia and Salvation Army.

I know it’s important that we gain a clear perspective on the scope of the homeless problem here, and I appreciate the value of such data in developing public policy.

But I also know a count won’t end homelessness any more than a new approach to teaching math or some other well-founded education reform will ensure college and career readiness for all our students. Hope and realism have come together for me in homeless services as in public education: hope tempered by experience.

In programs to reduce homelessness, I’ve seen the roll-out of “continuum-of-care” service models, and then watched as those models gave way to a “housing-first” approach, followed by the current blended “permanent supportive housing.” All the while, the number of homeless has grown, so some observers understandably think all these approaches have failed.

Public education has similarly varied its approaches without ever fully realizing the goals to which it has aspired. Focus has shifted from educational inputs, such as teacher training, to educational outcomes, such as student performance measured against grade-level standards.

Attention is now moving from over-reliance on grade-point averages and test scores to measures of college and career readiness that might be recognized by employers. But even as educators and parents converge in their opinions of what’s important, and even as student achievement continues to climb, the public clamors for new ways to get education right for all students.

It should be no surprise that school districts keep looking for new superintendents to step in and fix things, when plans intended to benefit every student don’t quite meet their mark.

I have come to the point where I count a little less on statewide or other broad efforts to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. That’s not to say I discount the work of individuals undertaking those efforts or the many successes they have along the way. Big efforts — from state and national education standards to HUD requirements for homeless counts — drive incremental improvement and engage new support for important causes. I’m just less excited about putting my energy into them.

I’m in a mood for smaller causes and efforts, in line with but not necessarily governed by the bigger, officially adopted causes. I’m interested in looking at what individuals and small groups do to address the challenges of homelessness and the persistent gaps in educational achievement.

I think of “Pop” Ken Scott (who celebrated his 100th birthday on Jan. 19) and Don Galleher (still active in his 80s as an assistant basketball coach at Hoover High), both of whom spent so many of their retirement years reading to the children at John Muir, Horace Mann, and Edison elementary schools as “Grandparent Readers” for the Glendale Library.

I think of two relatively new and small-scale nonprofits, Family Promise of the Verdugos and Communitas Initiative. Both organizations work with a few families at a time to get them out of homelessness and out of poverty. Both work collaboratively with the cities of Glendale and Burbank and with other nonprofits to help families help themselves.

And other new efforts are afoot. The Sunday Lunch Program, which serves meals to the hungry every Sunday at one of seven area churches, will soon be adding more fruits, vegetables and protein to its menus, thanks to a grant from Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital, in partnership with the Glendale Community Free Health Clinic.

I support the big causes, but it’s in the smaller, local efforts where I feel I can make a difference.

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JOYLENE WAGNER is a past member of the Glendale Unified School Board. Email her at jkate4400@aol.com.