60 Minutes

No matter what else is going on in her sometimes chaotic life, 8-year-old Stephanie Gonzalez knows she can count on spending at least one fun-filled hour a week with Becky Newman, her 51-year-old mentor, tutor and friend.

Both Newman and Stephanie covet their weekly get-togethers, when they bake cookies, read books, needlepoint, make crafts and enjoy other simple pursuits. It’s the kind of one-on-one interaction between an adult and child, when there’s no real agenda other than to talk and have fun, that Newman finds missing in today’s world.

“Kids in contemporary society are suffering from a lack of steady, one-on-one contact with adults who care about them,” said Newman, an Irvine resident who volunteers as a tutor and mentor for children living in shelters for the homeless.

“I’ve taught a lot of kids who are highly mobile,” said Newman, who taught kindergarten and first grade for 17 years and now works two jobs as an educator specializing in after-school care. “Sometimes adults go in and out of their lives pretty fast.”

Such mentor relationships are vital for homeless children, who are considered most at risk of having too few long-term, nurturing relationships with adults because they move around among shelters, motels and apartments.

Newman first met Stephanie in 1996, when the girl and her mother were staying at the Thomas House Shelter for homeless families in Garden Grove. Newman had signed up as a volunteer with the Bridge Learning Center for Homeless Children, a Laguna Beach-based agency that finds adult tutors to befriend children staying temporarily in shelters.

Howard Levin, executive director of Bridge, asked Newman if she would tutor Stephanie because Newman was one of the few of his 100 volunteers who was bilingual. She was so busy at the time that she almost turned him down; today, she says, she’s glad she didn’t.

“I ended up falling in love with the little girl,” Newman said.

Tutors and their charges form strong bonds, which Newman sees as proof that children are hungry for real conversation with an adult who will give them full attention.

“You can see it in the kids’ faces when their tutors don’t show up,” she said.

It’s also evident in their faces when they do meet with their tutors. Stephanie’s brown eyes shone when she walked into the Thomas House on a recent afternoon and spotted Newman.

It has been nearly three years since Stephanie stayed at the shelter. She now lives with her mother in an apartment two blocks away. But through it all, she has continued to meet Newman almost every Thursday.

At their most recent meeting, Newman toted a crate of supplies for baking chocolate chip cookies. The two donned aprons and began assembling the ingredients on a kitchen table.

Stephanie read aloud the directions, with Newman pitching in on words such as “alternately” (“it means to take turns,” Newman told her). Baking cookies gives Newman a chance to deliver a low-key lesson on fractions and reading, but it’s primarily something fun they can do together.

She showed Stephanie how to mix the cookie dough with a potato masher.

“You’re like Laura, churning butter, right?” Newman teased her. The two have been reading to each other out of the “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder about a country girl and the occasional hardships she experiences growing up on a prairie.

Working side by side in the kitchen, with their aprons doused with flour, Newman and Stephanie resembled characters in one of Wilder’s books. But Stephanie is a modern girl.

“Did you know we got cable?” she told Newman.

While the cookies baked, Newman and Stephanie took turns reading a chapter from Wilder’s “On the Banks of Plum Creek.”

Midway through their reading, Newman told Stephanie she was surprised by something she’d heard from a volunteer who leads a book club at Thomas House: “Stephanie, [the book club leader] said that you told her you don’t like to read,” Newman said. “I was very surprised, because I thought you were someone who likes to read a lot.”

“I didn’t, but now I do,” Stephanie said.

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While students improve academically when adults take an interest in them, boosting their grades isn’t the goal of the Bridge program, according to Thomas House’s Levin.

Bridge began six years ago, not long after the death of Sue Shaw, Levin’s wife, a schoolteacher who first had the idea of tutoring homeless children. Bridge now provides volunteer mentors to about 65 children living in shelters and motel rooms throughout Orange County.

“The idea is to work more on their self-esteem than academics,” Levin said. “A child realizes that an adult is coming back every week just to be with them.” Students can be earning straight A’s or they can be failing in school. The tutors try to motivate them all to study.

Stephanie was never a problem student. In fact, she had been recommended for GATE (Gifted and Talented Education), the public school program for gifted students. Newman said the girl didn’t pass the screening because “they didn’t appreciate that English was her second language.”

Not many children entering fourth grade can read “On the Banks of Plum Creek” as well as Stephanie does, Newman said, conceding that perhaps her tutoring has helped.

Besides reading, Newman has helped Stephanie embroider towels for her mother, illustrate a book of poems, paint watercolors and lots of other “art things.”

The longtime teacher’s involvement with Thomas House has grown since she became Stephanie’s tutor. Newman serves on the shelter’s board of directors and has conducted arts and crafts classes for the young residents. She helped start the shelter’s after-school homework program. She also has interviewed shelter residents for a doctoral dissertation on the effects of homelessness on children’s education.

“Becky’s wonderful with adults and children. She’s compassionate and able to see the potential in people,” said Sister Kathy Stein, program director of Thomas House, which rents units in an apartment building to house as many as 13 families for an average of three to six months.

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The shelter offers more than just a place to live for those who have lost jobs or who are seeking refuge from an abusive spouse. Families participate in a variety of counseling and employment programs to help them regain their independence. Adults are required to find employment within 30 days, and the shelter pays for child care so they can save for a deposit on an apartment.

Two years ago, Newman and her husband, Riley, a physics professor at UC Irvine, set up a children’s reading room at the shelter headquarters, in one of the apartment building’s three-bedroom units. Today, the reading room is as neat as when they finished it, with books arranged on shelves and closets filled with art supplies, workbooks and games.

“We finished the room the day my mother died,” Newman recalled. “Stephanie was here, and she wrote on the chalkboard that this was a happy room for kids.” It made Newman smile on the hardest of days.

Most afternoons, the reading room is filled not only with residents but, if there’s space, shelter graduates who live nearby and neighborhood children. About 30 children participate in daily shelter activities.

The number of children living at the shelter varies from about 20 to 40 kids of all ages. Whenever a school-age child moves into Thomas House, a call goes out to Bridge for a mentor-tutor. Bridge encourages tutors to continue the visits after the child leaves the shelter.

Levin hopes the relationships last at least a year if both child and adult are willing. Some tutors move around with a child who remains in the area; often they’ll meet at a local library. He said one woman stayed with her child five years.

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Newman has been a volunteer since September 1993.

“She’s unique,” Levin said. “Most teachers don’t call us because they get their fill of working with kids. She has a desire to be involved. . . . She’s concerned about them.”

Occasionally, Newman tutors another child while she works with Stephanie. “I don’t like that,” said Stephanie, who wants Newman to herself.

Stephanie’s mother works the swing shift as a waitress, so when Stephanie is not in school, she stays with a child-care provider. To have an adult’s undivided attention is a rare thing.

Newman has continued her volunteer work with Bridge and Thomas House, even though changes in her life have made it hard to find the time.

She earned her doctorate in educational administration last spring from UCLA, and now works half-time at UC Irvine as a researcher on an after-school care project for school-age children, and half-time at Madison Elementary School in Santa Ana as project coordinator of an after-school learning center.

She also tries to make time for family, which includes two adult children from her first marriage and two from Riley’s first marriage, plus a 2-year-old granddaughter. Both she and her husband lost their spouses to cancer. They have been married since 1992.

But Stephanie has become an integral part of the Newmans’ lives. They have arranged for a music teacher at Madison school to give the girl weekly flute lessons.

The Newmans discovered that Stephanie loved music while she and her mother stayed with the couple for a few days during an especially stressful time. It was then that Riley Newman introduced Stephanie to the dulcimer as a way to take her mind off of her worries. The girl spent hours playing the string instrument. Finally, the couple decided to lend her the family flute and pay $10 a week for her music lessons.

It’s a bond Becky Newman vows to keep.

“My husband and I expect to go to Stephanie’s college graduation,” she said. “It’s a powerful chance. To matter to somebody is the biggest thing there is.”

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Thomas House Shelter can be reached at (714) 554-0357, and Bridge Learning Center at (949) 494-0591. Both agencies need volunteers.