Saving Daniel

One of the students was growing listless.

Catherine Alawami, an interpreter for the deaf at Granada Hills High School, couldn’t help but notice. How the boy seemed unable to concentrate in history class. How he eyed classmates as they munched potato chips and sipped sodas. How the 17-year-old, once hefty, began to drop weight.

Alawami noticed. And because she did, a deaf boy has a new life. And her own life has changed as well.

The boy is Daniel Hamilton and, as Alawami discovered last fall, he had entered the 11th grade living on his own, hungry and near-penniless. How had that happened? A child of divorce, he had come from Washington state to California to live with an older sister. Then the sister moved away.

It took a while for people at the school to realize he was adrift, because he kept it to himself, managing to keep his grades up.

But when Daniel thought no one was looking, he stole bread in the mornings from a nearby grocery store. Or he scavenged the school cafeteria for half-eaten pizzas.

“When you’re starving, you don’t care about anything but food,” he said.

Daniel’s case is extreme, of course. But people in education understand all too well these days that what happens to students outside school often has more impact on how they learn--or don’t learn--than anything that goes on inside the classroom.

Sometimes teachers rant and rave about how hard it is to reach kids, how futile it seems. But sometimes someone in the system decides to reach out beyond the walls and change the kids’ world.

And sometimes for all their faults, schools can still save a life.

It can be the basketball coach at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles promising a dying woman that he will make sure her grandson graduates, then offering to adopt the boy, left orphaned and caring for three other relatives.

It can be a school superintendent outside Sacramento growing so frustrated trying to handle the most troubled kids, those bounced around foster care, that he sets out to establish a boarding school for them. If their homes aren’t working, the school district will create a better one.

Or it can be an interpreter for the deaf wondering about a kid in history class in Granada Hills.

*

The first thing Alawami did was send Daniel to a school counselor. That’s when he confided how he was struggling to survive.

Alawami and the counselor began supplying Daniel with tuna or turkey sandwiches, fruit and cookies. Alawami took up a collection among Granada Hills’ staff. She asked her family and neighbors to pitch in, too--bread, cans of soup, anything would do.

By the time Alawami invited Daniel to move into her West Hills home--with her husband and two children--a couple of other staffers at the school also were offering to take him in.

“I didn’t want Daniel to fall through the cracks,” said Alawami, 39. “I knew--put this kid in a group home and he’ll go down.”

Daniel accepted her offer in part because she knows sign language. But her place wasn’t bad, either: three bedrooms, a pool and Jacuzzi at the base of hills in a quintessential suburban neighborhood, where fathers shoot hoops with their sons in the driveway.

Daniel arrived last Thanksgiving weekend. He was given what instantly became the largest bedroom in the house, a converted garage with plush beige carpeting. It previously served as a playroom for Alawamis’ daughter, 8, and son, 11.

Within days, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services certified Alawami as a foster parent.

It’s a family for our time. Alawami is a Latina. Her husband, Haider, an associate planner for the city of Thousand Oaks, is Saudi Arabian.

Since arriving, Daniel has made his room his own. It now is furnished with a burgundy couch, a television and a CD boombox with a rack full of CDs. Daniel uses hearing aids to listen.

“Living with them,” Daniel says of his new family, is “a big relief.”

*

Here’s where he came from:

At 8, Daniel was placed in the Washington School for the Deaf, across the river from Portland, Ore.--a two-story brick complex where he would spend the next eight years. “I never learned anything from that school,” he recalls.

With his mother’s approval, he moved south in the summer of 1996 to live with his older sister, a student at Cal State Northridge, and her husband. Both are deaf.

It was just by fortune that Granada Hills, located blocks from the campus, has a highly regarded magnet program in which deaf and hearing students attend classes together. He enrolled in 10th grade.

Things began to unravel, he says, by year’s end. His sister and her husband divorced. She left Los Angeles.

And he drifted. Surviving on $490 a month in federal disability benefits, he slept first at friends’ homes. Then he settled into an apartment with two Northridge students. He secured a summer job, at minimum wage, as a stock boy at Sears in the Northridge Fashion Center. Added to the disability check, he could pay his share of the rent and other bills.

But when summer ended, so did the job. It was time for 11th grade. The $100 he had saved over the summer lasted only through September.

That’s when he began stealing food.

Daniel says he kept what was happening from his mother and other relatives back in Washington. He cannot recall the precise ages of his seven siblings.

“Me and my family,” he says, “we were never close.”

His county social worker says she won’t order him to go back.

A Hollywood script might have Daniel struggling as a student before the caring school staff steps in and rescues him. Then he would be transformed into an honor student.

The reality, though, is arguably more remarkable: Daniel always was a high-achieving student. He maintained a 3.0 grade-point average despite a demanding course load that included Advanced Placement classes. From the day he arrived at Granada Hills High, he was the sort who sat in the front row and was the first to raise his hand.

“Education,” he says, “is the only way you can get yourself somewhere in life.”

Daniel is determined to attend college. During spring break, he went to New York to visit NYU and Columbia University.

On one wall of his room he has fashioned a homemade sign in large letters: “Knowledge Is Power. Experience Is Wisdom.”

Next to the sign hangs the first-place medal he won in a 1996 academic competition among schools for the deaf in the western United States.

On a third wall, Daniel has cut out a newspaper advertisement. “If you had total access to every piece of knowledge on earth, where would you go?” it asks. “What would you do? Who would you be?”

Alawami’s kids dash in, signaling him for dinner. A good thing, too.

“He’s been known to eat full pizzas,” his foster mom says, “and polish off half a gallon of cookie dough chocolate chip ice cream.”