A Study in Hope : School for Homeless Aims to Break Cycle of Poverty

Lisa Sparks teaches in a former storage room at the Long Beach Family Shelter.

Like other classrooms in the Long Beach Unified School District, hers is decorated with the tools of learning: bulletin boards, desks, posters, a computer and a globe. Unlike others, however, it serves students from kindergarten through sixth grade who seldom spend more than a month in class and sometimes no more than a day.

The children are homeless. And while their parents, who reside in the shelter, spend their days looking for jobs and housing, the children spend theirs reading stories, doing math and learning geography.

“Our task is to serve all the children of all the parents and this is a group of children who have been difficult to serve because they’re difficult to reach,” said Charles Carpenter, deputy superintendent of instruction for the school district, which has budgeted $75,000 a year for the shelter classroom. “It provides an extended opportunity for children to receive an education and, we hope, break the cycle of poverty in which so many are trapped.”

The one-room school--which opened three months ago and operates year-round--grew out of a project run by the Junior League of Long Beach in which volunteers spent two afternoons a week teaching the shelter’s children.

“What we found was that they were attending school sporadically,” said Judy Seal, a part-time instructor at Long Beach City College who was one of the volunteers. “Teachers’ expectations were low for them and they weren’t getting any encouragement. Nobody was watching to make sure that these kids went to school.”

Seal completed a 36-page study at Cal State Long Beach where she is a graduate student. It documents the needed educational services for the city’s homeless population. Among other things, the paper estimated the number of homeless children in Long Beach at about 30 at any given time and showed that few were attending school.

Sparks says the average daily attendance in her class is about 15 pupils, mostly residents (with their parents) of the Family Shelter on 14th Street, a nearby shelter called Lydia House or various area motels that serve homeless families. While some students spend only a day or two in class, she said, the average stay is a month. Since the school opened in July, she said, more than 50 pupils have passed through its doors.

The shelter school is one of a handful of its kind in the state, with others operating in San Diego, Sacramento, Los Angeles and Pasadena.

At the Long Beach facility, school begins at 8:30 a.m. Dividing the students into groups according to their ages and abilities, Sparks and an aide give them assignments or direct instruction in such regular elementary-school fare as science, English and math. Unlike other schools where enrollment is fairly constant, however, lessons at the shelter school are designed to be self-contained so that students can drop in and out of them easily.

“You have to be flexible,” said Sparks, who, along with six years of teaching experience, has a master’s degree in social work. “In any other classroom you carry the kids through to the end--here you can’t. I don’t plan more than a day in advance.”

Two afternoons a week, the teacher says, she conducts self-esteem workshops during which the children share their successes and practice giving and receiving praise. Every three weeks they go on a field trip to a library, fire station, hospital or museum. And for recess, she says, they walk down three flights of stairs to play ball or jump rope in the shelter’s outdoor concrete courtyard.

Besides enriching academic skills, Sparks says she has two major goals for her charges. One is to give them a positive school experience, something many have never had. The other is to provide them with a bit of security amid the turbulence that homelessness can cause.

“(I try) to strengthen them before they leave here,” Sparks said. “It gets them feeling good about themselves.”

Most of the children seem to be reacting well to the experience.

“They’re teaching me how to read,” enthused Jermaine Nash, 10, quietly working a puzzle while other children listened to stories, played with the computer or studied their spelling words. “I’m learning handwriting and doing math so that when I go to (another) school I’ll know how to do it.”

Relaxing over lunch downstairs in the shelter cafeteria, Jermaine’s mother, Salenas, echoed his enthusiasm. “He’s doing fine,” she said of her son, who had been in and out of school since the family was evicted from a Pasadena apartment a month before. “He gets the work that he’s been missing because of going place to place. He was behind because he missed so many days; now he can catch up.”

Sitting nearby, Nathalie Craig, who has three children in the shelter school, agreed. “I think it’s real nice,” she said. “If I have a problem with the teacher I can just go upstairs and talk to her. The school has been a blessing.”