School System Still Leaves Many Homeless Children Out in the Cold

For nearly a decade, JoAnn McAllister taught homeless students at the Zoe Christian Center with books discarded by the Oxnard Elementary School District.

The texts generally came not from district officials whom she contacted for help, McAllister said, but from custodians who saved dated books from the dumpster and sent them over to the school at the shelter.

The Zoe school was founded in the early 1980s, when public schools often refused to admit homeless children because they lacked a permanent address. Federal law now discourages such inflexible residency requirements, and at least 150 homeless children are enrolled in county schools.

But despite that progress, social service officials say, the county’s school system is still failing to reach scores of homeless children. While the schools accommodate those who show up at their doors, countless others are chronically truant.

“It’s taking them time to deal with children who don’t have addresses, and yet the state has issued real clear guidelines saying homeless children will be enrolled,” said Nancy Nazario, county Public Social Services Agency ombudsman for the homeless. “The awareness is happening at a time when the schools are struggling to educate the kids who are housed.”

“The public school system is just not relating to these kids,” said Zoe board chairman Fred Judy. “They don’t understand the pressure of living in the street or living in a car, trying to get homework done in the back seat of an automobile or on a rock in the river bottom.”

Congress, in the McKinney Act of 1987, required states to ensure that homeless children have the opportunity to get an education. Not one of the county’s 20 districts has adopted policies since then for enrolling shelterless children.

School employees reportedly refused to register homeless children into Oxnard and Ventura schools at least twice in the last year because the children’s mothers said they had no permanent address.

Evelyn Burge, a county public health nurse, said the Ventura Unified School District turned away one family that was living in a beach park last year. The mother and children stayed in beach campgrounds for nine months before Burge encountered them and helped get the children enrolled, she said.

The Oxnard Union High School District recently began sending a teacher to the Zoe school two hours a day--while planning to bill the state $3,400 a year, which is allowed for full-time pupils. The teacher was provided about a week before the district took its annual student census that determines state funding to the district.

School officials say they have been unable to enroll many homeless children for the very reason that the number of homeless people has been growing: recession-induced impoverishment.

“We are under a financial squeeze,” said Richard Duarte, Oxnard Elementary School District’s administrator of pupil services. “Everything has a dollar figure to it, and districts are really up against the wall.”

Dennis McDermott, 13, lived until recently at Camp Comfort in Ojai, where a school bus stops each day and picks up about a dozen children. He feels sorry for his peers who are not getting to school.

“Those kids are missing out on the whole future of their lives,” said Dennis, whose family has moved to Oxnard. “You can’t live without an education.”

About 2,000 to 6,000 homeless people in Ventura County live in shelters, cars, campgrounds, riverbeds, garages and welfare motels or on the streets. About a third of them are school-age children, an estimated 10% to 40% of whom do not attend school.

The reasons most often cited for chronic absences are family stress, the need to care for younger children while parents work, parents’ resistance to school enrollment, the child’s fatigue and frequent moves.

California law makes school enrollment compulsory to age 18, but many homeless parents cannot maintain stable enough living conditions to get their children to school, Burge said.

“It’s our obligation to let parents know that there are resources available to get their kids educated, and themselves for that matter. I see as much adult illiteracy,” said Burge, who often arranges immunizations because children cannot enroll in school without them. “They have to understand that education is the key to opening doors for their children.”

Sometimes, it is the children who want to stay out of school because of the ridicule that they can face from classmates.

“A couple of years ago, we had two 5-year-olds going to public school who had nervous breakdowns because they were being harassed,” Judy said.

Jaeson Keys, Dennis’ brother, has suffered such scorn, but he dismisses it as ignorance.

“The one kid who made fun of me said poor people live in Camp Comfort in dumpsters that just look like trailers,” said Jaeson, 10. “He probably has a lot of money and lives in a house, and he just thinks like that.”

Last year, County Supt. of Schools James Cowan assigned research analyst Susan Clark to explore the extent of the homeless problem in Ventura County and form a committee to address the issue.

Clark credits the committee’s efforts, which included holding a half-day workshop for educators in April, with helping to heighten awareness among school officials about the needs of homeless children. She recently returned from a state conference on homeless education with a draft policy for school districts that she will ask Cowan to distribute at the monthly meeting of the county’s 20 district superintendents.

Clark said that, given additional funding, she would like to hire a community outreach worker to track down unenrolled homeless children. Santa Barbara County has enrolled more than a dozen such children since September after hiring an outreach worker.

Administrators in 20 Ventura County districts surveyed last November reported enrolling 153 homeless children, far below the estimated 650 to 2,600 living in the county. The districts also estimated that there were only 53 unenrolled homeless children countywide, a figure that Clark said is a gross underestimate.

A few homeless children have taken refuge at the Zoe center school, which offers instruction to homeless children and others living in surrounding low-income neighborhoods.

High school classes are conducted in a low-ceilinged classroom where students take turns reading aloud by the light of two bare bulbs. An unmounted blackboard bearing chalk film from years of use is propped on a broken desk. The newest collection of reference books is a set of 1975 encyclopedias.

“Kids who’ve missed a bunch of school come in and they’re low in skills, (and) feel bad about themselves and their circumstances,” said McAllister, who, with Nazario and Duarte, is a member of the county homeless education advisory committee.

“That’s when they need the most attention and care,” said McAllister, who stopped teaching this year for health reasons. “Just give them a blackboard and a piece of chalk. They’re eager to learn, and we as a society should want them to.”

Under federal anti-poverty programs, schools can provide free breakfast and lunch to homeless children once they are enrolled.

But little money is available to make sure that the children get to school. Unlike migrant education programs, where the state provides extra money for each “special needs” student, Congress imposed demands with the McKinney Act but provided California this year with less than $600,000, $20,000 of which went to Cowan’s office.

Assistance agencies have shouldered much of the burden of getting homeless children into school.

Project Understanding, an 18-bed transitional shelter in Ventura, requires parents to enroll their children in school to gain admission. The Salvation Army plans to do likewise at a 41-bed family shelter that it hopes to open in Ventura within six months.

“We need to make it clear to students and their parents that we will find ways to keep them in the same school,” Project Understanding Executive Director Rick Pearson told educators at the April workshop. “For a lot of these kids, it’s money well spent that will not only make a difference this year, but down the line years in the future.”

McAllister said schools are especially failing to track homeless students who suddenly stop showing up for school. Keeping tabs on transient students is a trying task, but a critical necessity, she said.

Duarte of the Oxnard elementary district agreed that a tracking system would help school officials discover where a departed student lands, inform the local district and forward the child’s records.

But there is also a danger in identifying children as homeless, Duarte said. About 35% of the students in the district moved between, into and out of schools last year.

“Once you enter them in a computer as homeless, what’s the criteria for getting them out?” Duarte asked. “You could be stigmatizing them for a period of years when hopefully they are just in a transitional state.”

Had school officials tracked Donnie Golden’s movements over the last year, they would have found that he and his family moved from campgrounds in the Simi Valley area into a Ventura apartment for six months and then up to Camp Comfort in July.

Although Donnie, 10, is living in the Ojai school district, his mother got approval to keep him and his 9-year-old sister in Lincoln Elementary School in Ventura to avoid having to pull the children out of school again.

“You need a good education so you can grow up and go to college and have a good job,” said Donnie, who attend a Simi Valley school last year. “You don’t want to grow up and be stupid.”

Bonnie Golden, 30, spends nearly $5 each day to drive her two children to school. It is a hefty expense, even when her husband manages to find a few days of work as an auto mechanic, but they can’t afford to move closer to the school, she said.

“The more you keep them out of school, the less they’re going to learn,” Golden said. “I want to make sure they get the education they need.”

There are, however, corners that must be cut. Said Donnie: “Half days we don’t go because it takes a lot of gas.”