A Hard Lesson : For Homeless Children, Getting an Education Is a Challenge

The term homeless conjures up many images: disheveled drifters trudging through downtown Ventura, drunken men sleeping it off in Oxnard’s Plaza Park, weather-beaten women panhandling at grocery stores in Simi Valley.

What may not leap to mind are images of children--homeless kids struggling to learn despite frequent absences and moves from school to school; children skipping school to baby-sit while their parents look for work; children who face taunts and snickers when the school bus stops at the campground where they live.

Of the estimated 4,000 homeless people living in Ventura County, about a third are school-age children, according to county social workers. Although many of them attend school, lack of a stable home makes getting an education almost impossible.

“Nobody focuses very well on academics when their lives are in chaos,” said Nancy Nazario, homeless ombudsman for the Ventura County Public Social Services Agency.

Jeff Nelsen, principal of Lincoln Elementary School in Ventura, said that last year he had a pupil from a homeless family who had attended 18 schools. She was only in the third grade.

“She was performing at kindergarten level in reading and math but was obviously average in intelligence,” Nelsen said. He said school officials and social workers helped the girl’s family find a permanent residence in Lincoln’s attendance area so she could stay at the school.

Today she is in fourth grade at Lincoln and is performing almost at the appropriate level for her age, Nelsen said.

But many more homeless children continue to come and go at Lincoln, which has one of the highest transient rates in the county, Nelsen said. Only two-thirds of the students stay for an entire school year, he said. The other one-third turns over 3 1/2 times a year.

Lincoln gets a lot of homeless children because it is near motels on Thompson Boulevard where the county puts up welfare families, Nelsen said. E.P. Foster Elementary, De Anza Middle School and Ventura High School also have significant numbers of homeless students, district officials said. Homeless students also attend schools in Oxnard and Ojai, officials there said.

The term homeless, according to the federal government, applies to anyone who lacks a “fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.” The definition takes in people who live in congregate shelters, welfare motels or anywhere not ordinarily used as a permanent dwelling.

It also includes Lot 37 at Camp Comfort County Park near Ojai, where Dale Schmidt, Shirley Chambers and their four children have eked out an existence since July.

When they arrived, camp manager Barbara Warfield recalls, “it was like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ ” The family, which lives on Schmidt’s $140-a-week disability checks and Chambers’ $86-a-week welfare grants, had been evicted from a house in Ventura. At first, they slept in their two old cars. Then somebody gave them a tent. Finally they acquired a small one-room trailer where all six sleep--Schmidt and Chambers on the floor.

“With four kids, it is very rough,” said Schmidt, a roofer who injured his back three years ago. “I don’t consider myself homeless. It’s better than sleeping in the car.”

In the morning, their son Michael, 7, daughter Renee, 6, and about 10 other children who live at the campground board a school bus for Mira Monte Elementary School just outside Ojai.

For Michael, a second-grader, it’s his second school. He spent first grade at E.P. Foster and liked it better than Mira Monte. “My teacher at Foster was real nice, and I can’t go there any more and visit her. I’m sorry I had to leave there.”

Mira Monte isn’t too bad, he said, but “one kid in my class says Camp Comfort is a stupid place to live.”

The principal at Mira Monte, Larry Hartmann, said the children from the campground are “a good bunch, considering their living conditions, the hubbub of the campground and all. Their parents seem to be supportive.”

One problem, he said, is that the school can’t call the parents if a child from the campground becomes sick or has some other problem at school. Another hindrance is a county rule that forbids staying at the park more than 30 consecutive days. One night a month, each family at the park has to stay somewhere else, and sometimes the kids miss school, Hartmann said.

“There’s probably a higher rate of movement and they’re less likely to finish a school year,” he said.

Nelsen at Lincoln Elementary said homeless schoolchildren have to deal with the stigma of being poor. “It affects their image of themselves,” he said. “Often they only have a couple of outfits of clothing, and they’re wearing the same thing all the time. For some, it’s hard to get showers and clean clothes.”

And it’s harder to feel comfortable in class, he said. “They move so much, it’s difficult for them to develop friendships and feel that they fit in.”

Social workers and education officials say the districts have flexible enrollment policies for homeless children.

“They don’t have to have a home” to enroll, said Michael Sellwood, director of administrative services for Ventura Unified. “We have had homeless families living in the parking lot of the district office. If people move here for a week and want to enroll, we enroll them.”

The Oxnard Union High School District offers independent study programs or alternative school enrollment to homeless students, Assistant Supt. Gary Davis said.

The problem, officials say, is lack of affordable housing.

“Housing is the only way to solve the problem,” said Nazario, the county social worker. “To set up education programs without stable housing, why bother? I think the schools will have a difficult time until these kids are housed stably.”

The parents of homeless families usually want their children to go to school. “They know the value of an education,” Ventura Unified teacher Beverly Thanos said. “They’ve gone without it.”

Thanos has encountered many homeless children in nearly 40 years of teaching.

“Even if they are in class, they often are not functioning,” she said. “The fear of being thrown out of your house, no food--all of these things take just an unbelievable toll on a child’s life.”

Thanos is a “home teacher,” an instructor who normally teaches in the houses of children with broken legs and other physical problems. She has followed families from campground to campground, park to park, even into other school districts.

“There’s never a chance for those cherubs to go through a whole school year,” she said. “I’ve seen several children who started in school, were doing beautifully, then they couldn’t pay the rent so out they went. I never saw them again.

“It just crushes you to see these kids not having a chance.”

It also makes her mad, Thanos said. “All we’re doing is perpetuating this welfare thing. How are they going to get off it without an education?”

At Camp Comfort, Schmidt and Chambers say they expect Lot 37 to be home for several more months, and Michael and Renee will probably finish out the school year at Mira Monte.

It will take at least that long before they can come up with the first and last month’s rent, a deposit and utility fees needed to move into a house that will accommodate a family of six, Schmidt said. “It’s going to be tough to get out of here.”

That suits Michael just fine.

“There’s mountains to climb and stuff,” he said, as he pedaled a bicycle with a flat tire along a dusty trail.

But Renee, who was watching television in a neighbor’s trailer the other day, said she misses the house they had in Ventura. “The kids on TV with houses and stuff, that’s what I want,” she said.