Homeless but Not Hopeless : The Imagine School House Helps Children Learn That Their Futures Can Be Better

Lunch is ending and children are streaming into class, jostling and sharing whispered secrets, at Los Angeles’ only one-room schoolhouse for homeless children.

As they get down to work learning fractions from teaching assistant Elia Sanchez, one boy brags that he knows all the answers, then promptly gets the first question wrong. This doesn’t discourage another boy from copying the first boy’s answers.

“He’s cheating,” a girl from across the table sings out in the squeaky, time-honored tones of tattletales the world over.

This scene is familiar to anyone who has ever been in an American public school. But what makes it extraordinary is that when these students leave class at 1 p.m., they don’t charge off to yellow buses or parents in station wagons. Instead, they walk only a few steps to the clean but cramped rooms that their families occupy in Los Angeles Family Housing Corp.’s North Hollywood shelter.

The Imagine School House, which occupies a large, split-level room at the rear of the Trudy and Norman Louis Valley Shelter on Lankershim Boulevard, is one of only a handful of shelter-based schools in the state.

If the shelter is a temporary refuge for families forced onto the streets by drugs, unemployment or runaway fathers, Imagine is a place where children are told that the future can be better.

“Children suffer differently than adults from homelessness,” said Nancy Bianconi, director of housing for L. A. Family Housing, which operates the shelter. Bianconi said the school recognizes that much of a child’s world revolves around the classroom and the friends made there.

“Our goal is not only to educate these students but also to build their self-esteem so they feel they can achieve something in this world,” Bianconi said.

The schoolhouse, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, opened Sept. 1 as the centerpiece of the $1.1-million expansion of the shelter.

Bianconi said the school was a dream of hers for years. Children at the shelter had previously gone to a neighborhood school, but had occasionally been made fun of by other students who found out that they were homeless.

“They would say, ‘Ooh, you’re poor,’ ” Bianconi said. “That bothered me.”

The shelter built the facility and feeds the children, while the school district supplies teacher Kathy MacDonald, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles school system.

Bianconi said that when the shelter was looking for a teacher, it wanted somebody who was smart and experienced, but not too idealistic. People with “I can save the world” attitudes, she knew, would fall flat on their faces when confronted with the daunting problems of teaching children who had not been in a classroom for years, if at all.

MacDonald, who is bilingual, was hardheaded enough to understand that the job would be a challenge. It has been.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, to be honest,” she said in an interview last week. “You just get started and they leave.”

Each family is allowed to stay at the shelter no longer than three months, which means that children are continually shuffling in and out of the classroom. MacDonald said as many as 55 students have been enrolled in her class, though she now has 23 children of various races and ages.

Three of those children belong to Sharon Cox, who came to the shelter a month ago after her husband lost his job and she lost her Van Nuys apartment.

Her children like the school, and Cox praised the teachers.

“They spend more time with them to learn more,” she said.

Cox’s unit is small because the shelter is a converted motel. But each child has a bed, and Cox said her children are doing fine. Still, “sometimes they want to know when we’ll get our own place.”

That is a common question among the children. One result of the continual arrival and departure of students from the school is a kind of orphanage mentality among those left behind and wishing for their own homes.

“Sometimes there are hard feelings” after schoolmates depart, MacDonald said. This is especially true among those who remain in the shelter for the entire three months.

“A child will ask, ‘How come they found a house in a few weeks and I’m still here?’ ”

Being without a home has an inevitable affect on the psyches of children. Bianconi said there are two common profiles for homeless children: One is the “acting out” child who cannot pay attention in class and is always misbehaving; the other is the serious, extremely obedient child who carries the weight of family troubles on his or her shoulders.

“In some cases, a third-grader may be the adult figure in the family,” MacDonald said.

But the thing that has surprised her most is how well most of the children have held up in the face of their problems.

“They’re not that depressed,” MacDonald said. As if to confirm this view, half a dozen children frolicked on the small, sand-covered playground outside the classroom, or played checkers and other games inside.

But Bianconi warned that it is not uncommon for children to bury their real feelings behind brave or happy fronts.

“Studies have shown that a homeless child, when asked what he wants to be when he grows up, will answer an astronaut or doctor, just like other children,” Bianconi said. “But when you then ask, ‘What do you think will happen to you?’ they say, hopefully they will have enough money to pay the rent and feed the kids.”

Recognizing that the students could be holding fears and anger inside, MacDonald and her teaching assistant, Sanchez, spend a lot of time bolstering egos to convince the students that they can become the astronaut or doctor.

Stories written by the children, one featuring frogs and witches, as well as cutout forms of each student, are posted prominently on the walls. The low student-teacher ratio, further reduced by parent volunteers, makes it easier than in a regular classroom for MacDonald to take a few moments to listen to a tearful child’s story. Even if it seems petty, it could mask deeper fears.

The split-level design of the classroom has the advantage of allowing MacDonald and Sanchez to divide the class into upstairs and downstairs contingents. That way, MacDonald can supervise the younger group’s subtraction lesson downstairs while the older students wrestle with fractions at a table upstairs.

While presiding over the lessons, the instructors are constantly trying to assess the abilities of the children so that when they move to a new school, the students can be placed in the appropriate grade and classroom setting.

One thing that has surprised MacDonald is the students’ eagerness to learn.

“They are a little bit more eager to learn than children in regular school,” she said.

Despite the problems in these students’ lives, MacDonald has found success stories. For instance, while many students are fighting to reach their proper grade level, MacDonald has discovered three students she thinks might be gifted and has asked the district to do further testing on them.

Sanchez said the school should have been opened long ago.

“Kids in this school deserve a chance,” she said with quiet intensity. “If it wasn’t for this school, they wouldn’t be doing anything.”