Youth on a Mission : Students Get Firsthand Lesson on Homeless at Shelter

Bob Lester lay in his bed at the Orange County Rescue Mission on Wednesday morning nursing an infected foot when Veronica Rogov, a first-grader from Irvine, asked him how it felt to live on the street.

“I kept asking myself, ‘How the heck did I get here?’ ” Lester, 56, told 7-year-old Veronica and other young students gathered in what has been his room for the past seven months. “I was cold, tired and hungry.”

Veronica and 78 other kindergarten and first-grade students from Irvine’s Santiago Hills Elementary school fidgeted as they listened to the former aerospace engineer from Westminstergive an impromptu lesson on homelessness during their morning tour of the rescue mission.

The mission, although just 10 miles from their homes, was worlds away from the clean, middle-class neighborhoods they had left behind 30 minutes before in Irvine. The unusual field trip was part of the school’s new approach this year to teaching civic responsibility. Instead of just listening to abstract lessons about the needy and how they can be helped, classes at the school have been selecting a group of destitute people and getting a firsthand look at their plight.

“These are very pampered kids, and I don’t mean that as an insult,” said Janet Maday, who teaches first grade at Santiago Hills. “This is probably the first time they’ve seen someone who doesn’t have what (the students) have, which is important for them to know.”

Staff at the rescue mission gave the students a tour of the facilities, showing them lunch being prepared in the kitchen, walking them by the communal bathroom and taking them into empty rooms filled with bunk beds. During the tour, a few students strayed into Lester’s room, found him lying in his lower bunk and began quizzing him.

Students formed a semicircle around his bed and began shooting questions at him, ranging from his marital status to why his front teeth are crooked. After teachers stepped in and restored order, 6-year-old Nessa Diab raised her hand and asked why some people live on the street and don’t have food.

“That’s a really good question,” Lester said. “I went on a roller coaster pretty fast from (having a home) to being here and I’m still surprised it happened.”

A few weeks before Wednesday’s trip to downtown Santa Ana, students in the three classes talked about how some people don’t have nice homes and clothing like they do, said Becky Wynn, who teaches a combination kindergarten and first-grade class at Santiago Hills.

The lessons were aimed at showing children community problems that they would not have otherwise seen and addressing solutions to those problems, Wynn said.

The social-responsibility lessons are being conducted schoolwide under a $10,800 grant Santiago Hills received from the California Educational Initiatives Fund, a corporate-sponsored group that funds innovative teaching methods in the state. The grant pays for special teacher training in writing civics lessons, substitutes to replace them during training, and buses to take the children on field trips, said Bobbi Mahler, principal at Santiago Hills.

Classes of fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at the school completed their project last fall. In addition to collecting clothing for the rescue mission, they gathered corn after nearby fields were harvested and donated the food to charitable groups.

Each class will take on a socially beneficial project, Mahler said. The projects are suggested by classroom parents participating in the program and chosen by the teacher. The program has prompted dozens of parents to volunteer. Wednesday, 29 parents traveled with their children to the rescue mission to help supervise.

The rescue mission welcomed their interest.

“It’s wild,” said Joe Furey, the mission’s senior pastor. “I’m glad they have a chance to learn this at a young age. It’s a chance for them to see how the other half of society lives.”

The privately funded mission houses men for short- and long-term stays and provides food and clothing to families.

The morning’s firsthand lesson on homelessness and need won’t be easy for the students to understand completely, Maday said as students ignored the tour guide explaining the homeless problem to gather wide-eyed around a cook chopping bell peppers.

“As first-graders, I think they have trouble understanding that some people don’t have what they have,” she said. “But I think this will affect them. They have a real compassion for other people at this age.”

After being quizzed by curious youngsters all morning, Lester said he wasn’t certain how much of that day’s lesson would sink in. But he said he’s happy the students are being exposed to the reality of homelessness.

“It’s hard for them to relate to something like this when they’ve never seen it,” said Lester, who lived with his wife and four children in a six-bedroom home in Westminster before his divorce. “Even some adults don’t understand how you can get from that point to this.”

Some students may not initially have grasped the lesson. One student, Sarah Kanofsky, 6, declared, “I liked the bunk beds,” when asked what was her favorite part of the tour.

But Carol Kanofsky, 38, who accompanied her daughter to the rescue mission, said she thinks the lesson was absorbed, but on a more basic level.

“We come from a very affluent community. We all have so much and I think that our children think that everybody lives the way we do,” she said. “They don’t see the homelessness. Coming down here and seeing this is a start.”