At This School, Homeless Isn’t Hopeless

First Melinda Holquin noticed how new students would appear in her classroom one week and disappear the next. Then she noticed how several unrelated students gave the same home address. Some came to school without shoes.

Holquin is a first-grade teacher, not a detective. But it did not take Sherlock Holmes to ferret out the facts: A homeless shelter had opened near Coeur d’Alene Elementary.

Once the Venice school realized that the offspring of the down-and-out were knocking at its door, however, it resisted the temptation to merely brace itself for the worst. Instead, it embraced the new students as an opportunity to show what it could do.

An energetic new principal hired a nurse, a psychologist and a tutor. She also named Holquin homeless coordinator, a job that included scrounging up donations of shoes, school supplies and even food.

Eventually, a local private school started sending over art teachers. An advertising firm adopted the school, IBM donated $150,000 worth of computers and author Judith Krantz began paying for a librarian.

A decade after the first transient students showed up in Holquin’s class, Coeur d’Alene has become a national model of how to teach homeless youths. On Monday, the school will be recognized by the Los Angeles Board of Education for recording the district’s most dramatic increase in students scoring above the national average on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills in reading and language. Math scores also rose.

Coeur d’Alene’s academic improvement partly reflects demographic changes. Though the school continues to attract a greater proportion of homeless children than any other district school--about one-fifth of the 300-student enrollment--the number is lower than in years past because the nearest shelter now limits its admissions. In addition, busing to the school from the inner city is on the decline, cutting by half the number of Spanish-speaking students struggling to learn English, who typically fare poorly on standardized tests.

But those changes alone hardly explain the achievement of one of the smallest public schools in Los Angeles. Visitors invariably sense what makes the place special--the nurturing attitude from top to bottom. Instead of whining about the arrival of a few more homeless students in the middle of the term, teachers and administrators mourn such youngsters’ inevitable departure.

“The hardest part for me is they just disappear . . . and after we’ve gotten so close to them,” Holquin said of the fragile students who live in shelters or cars or who bounce from one temporary quarters to the next.

There are an estimated 137,000 homeless children statewide. Not all are school-age, of course, and many who are do not enroll in school. Los Angeles school officials say they can only estimate the number enrolled here--about 1,300.

Ezekiel Dear is one. On Nov. 8, he showed up for second grade at Coeur d’Alene, the fifth school he has attended since kindergarten. Asked to recite his teachers’ names, neither he nor his mother can remember any of them, not even his current one.

Over a creamed chipped beef breakfast at the Bible Tabernacle shelter a few blocks from the school, Lavern Dear talks of how welcoming the school was “from day one.” She came to California with Ezekiel a year ago, she said, fleeing a drug-addicted boyfriend. A promised job never materialized and Dear found herself first staying with friends, then landing in a series of shelters, moving Ezekiel from school to school.

Like most mothers, she worries about her son. While proud that he is learning to read, she is concerned that he gets into trouble for fighting at school--so much trouble that he was barred from the Christmas party. This morning, the 7-year-old scuffled with a classmate walking from the shelter to school. His mother separated them, then made them hug.

“You’re going to be good today, right?” she prodded Ezekiel as they walked on to school, hand in hand.

Violence was one of the first obstacles Principal Beth Ojena sought to clear when she took the helm 10 years ago. Though it was her first principal’s post, Ojena had worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District since 1967.

“Initially, the kids we got in were mad and angry and for very good reasons,” she recalled. “Before I could begin to educate them, I had to make them safe.”

She began by suspending everyone caught fighting--up to nine a day at the problem’s height. She also sent all of the teachers to assertive discipline training, where they learned how to punish the negative behavior and reward the positive.

And Ojena became a regular visitor at the shelter, talking to parents and to the minister who ran it about the importance of good comportment at school.

Now, shelter children view Coeur d’Alene as a place where people care about them, where every improvement is rewarded--with a comment, hug or sticker. Each Monday, the school week begins with a “good deed assembly” during which everything from a top grade to a good try is noted.

“They like me there,” said 5-year-old Meagen Briones, who arrived at Coeur d’Alene two weeks ago when her mother turned to Bible Tabernacle after months of ricocheting among motels and shelters.

The size of the school makes a family atmosphere possible. At 300 students, it is one of the district’s smallest, enabling teachers and administrators to know every student, even the homeless short-timers. Ask a staff member about a girl standing nearby and they probably know her name, her life story and maybe even her academic strengths and weaknesses. A newcomer is hard to miss.

Sometimes that awareness is crucial. One day last week, Ojena asked tutor Agnes Stevens to try to draw out a troubled boy whose mother had given various addresses. In a school hallway, the fourth-grader confided that he had been “hit a lot lately.” School officials prepared a child abuse report.

In 1990, Ojena hired Stevens--a retired teacher--as the school’s part-time homeless tutor, paying her with a grant from a nonprofit homeless assistance organization. When homeless students appeared, Stevens would assess their academic abilities, then pull them out of class for remedial work if needed. Typically, Stevens said, the homeless children have missed an entire semester or year, leaving them behind in an important skill--multiplication, for instance.

Although Stevens left the job several years ago to start a roving tutorial program called School on Wheels, she still visits Coeur d’Alene often. Her 200 volunteers provide after-school help to children at the Bible Tabernacle shelter along with dozens of other shelters and motels around Los Angeles.

Adults abound at Coeur d’Alene, some paid, some volunteers. A foundation run by the nearby Crossroads School--a private school in Santa Monica known for its emphasis on the arts--furnishes teachers and supplies for music, drawing, drama and dance classes. In the afternoons, Crossroads high school students come on campus as tutors.

Computer consultant Peter Silton tunes up terminals and circulates among classrooms to introduce students and teachers to new software.

Silton said he never knows for sure which students are homeless, but occasionally observes with dismay “that the light has gone out of their eyes. . . . When they learn to use a software program for the first time, sometimes that light starts to come back.”

Such empathy is tangible on a campus where teachers freely hug their students or hold their hands. When Meagen Briones tells teacher Susy Bradner that she has no snack, but a quarter instead, Bradner touches the kindergartner’s shoulder and tells her to put the coin away. There are plenty of snacks to share.

“At this school, there’s caring from the top down,” said Richard Geere, one of the music instructors with the Crossroads Community Foundation.

Teachers agree--and it prompts them to stay. Many have been there as long as Ojena, who they say deserves the credit for bringing a school with many troubled students slightly above national averages and well above district averages.

“Beth is a wonderful principal. . . . She really listens to us and from there we make lots of changes,” said second-grade teacher Jeanette Hanciles, who has worked at the school for 10 years and, in the ultimate act of confidence, recently enrolled her own son there.

Ojena has fostered an environment free of rigidity. A child without a home address is enrolled anyway, in violation of district policy, with investigations left for later. When Meagen’s brother showed up for fifth grade, his teacher quickly saw something in the boy and put him in the gifted program. That had never happened at other schools, his mother said. Officials would talk of tests to confirm his talents, but the family would move on before they could be completed.

The principal believes that administrative work should be handled by administrators, freeing teachers to teach. When Ojena decided that the school needed extra support staff, she took on the job of raising $120,000 annually in grants to pay for the nurse, the psychologist and the tutor. The librarian came later when novelist Krantz, whose sister works at the school, realized that the school did not have one.

At teachers’ urging, the school emphasizes writing, asking students to keep daily journals and giving them access to computers during the day.

Coeur d’Alene was ahead of the trend to install computers in classrooms as an everyday learning tool, rather than segregating them in a computer room. But it is also one of the 90 Los Angeles Unified campuses provided a “Writing to Read” lab by Mayor Richard Riordan’s foundation, where students are greeted by banks of computers loaded with writing software.

The self-paced computerized lessons work well at a school where a middle-class student from Marina del Rey may be ready to compose essays in first grade while 6-year-old Warnervee Walton Jr.--who has lived at the Bible Tabernacle shelter since April--struggles to type more than his name.

Assigned to compose a holiday story one day last week, Warnervee stared at his screen for five long minutes, then dropped his head to his keyboard in frustration. But with the other students busy on their own terminals, teacher Barbara Brown had the time to work one on one with him.

Sitting close, Brown sounded out the words Warnervee wanted to write, sometimes helping him spell or type, sometimes letting him make errors that they later corrected together on a printout. The result, which would be glued to a holiday card the next day: “Christmas eve snow snowball fight I gat pracnts (presents) frm Sinto (Santa).”

“If they are so busy worrying about how to spell and how to punctuate, they can’t get their ideas out,” Brown said, reaching over to hug Warnervee.

Turnover of students is down some at Coeur d’Alene, toppling it from its past rank as No. 1 for transience among the district’s 418 elementary schools. Still, about half the students who started in the fall will be gone by June.

Room 9 is gaily decorated with the students’ handiwork--their drawings, stories and math work--but none of it belongs to Ezekiel, who has been at the school little more than a month. An attendance roster on one wall shows he has missed two of the last three days. His teacher, Jeanette Hanciles, does her best not to dwell on the comings and goings of the homeless students.

“I just put them in the group, observe where they are and help where they need it,” she said.

Yet Hanciles loses her calm for an instant when told how many schools Ezekiel has attended in his short life. She opens her eyes wide, then sighs and says, “Let’s hope he’ll stay at this one a while.”

* BASIC SKILLS EXAM RESULTS: The Los Angeles Unified School District has released last spring’s results for grades four, seven and nine. B3