A Haven of Learning and Stability

On May 10, 1989, Agnes Stevens found home. She was 54 at the time--and had lived in many places. But she had never before felt she truly belonged in a particular spot, she says. Her new place--a double-wide mobile home just a few steps from Paradise Cove, where white sands kiss the Pacific--might seem the perfect spot to wind down a 30-year elementary school teaching career. But for Stevens, who’d taught while she was a Maryknoll nun (from age 18 to 35), and then as a married woman (for 13 years), and then as a single person living in one room, finding this nest, where she could run on the beach and “say good night to the ocean each evening” signaled just the beginning. Her delight in this new place propelled her to a new teaching mission: She would tutor children who have no place to call home.

In 1993, Stevens formally started the School on Wheels, a volunteer tutoring project for homeless children. But for four years before that, it was just the curly-haired former teacher and nun driving solo from place to place in a car piled high with books, rulers, pencils and other learning materials that she bought with her pension money to give to the homeless kids she was helping with their schoolwork. Now Stevens heads a group of 435 volunteers serving thousands of homeless children who live in cars, motels, on the streets, and in 30 shelters from Ventura to Pasadena.

It is a seemingly simple agenda but one that has “monumental effects on the kids” who participate, says Kris Bergen, 35, a film editor and volunteer tutor for the last year. Bergen’s 9-year-old charge, who lives at a Santa Monica shelter, is “the man of his family, who takes care of his mom and little brothers and sisters. He’s so smart in math that sometimes he teaches me.”

The program works like this: Shelters around the city contact School on Wheels, telling the organization about every child they house. The program assigns a volunteer tutor, who visits the child at least once a week for an hour to help with schoolwork. Volunteers also provide a backpack and all the school materials the child needs to function just like students who have homes and parents who can provide for them.

“It’s like Christmas when they get that backpack and those supplies,” says Nick Battaglino, who started volunteering two years ago and is now part-time program director for the group. “You should see their faces light up.”

“Our program has a narrow focus--academics,” says Stevens, who wrote the school’s training manual and guidelines. “The tutors serve as role models and academic helpers. We do not ask them to play any other role in the child’s life. It is all about school.”

This year, the program is tutoring about 1,300 children from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Homeless Kids

Carry Unique Burdens

Of course, most people who have roofs over their heads have never considered the vicissitudes of attending school for a child who has no permanent address.

“Think about it,” Stevens says. “Most children have two homes: The place where they live, and the school they go to every day. School is where they are known by name, and where they know the names of other kids, of the teachers, the janitor, the cafeteria people. They memorize every nook and cranny of hallways and could probably navigate blindfolded. School is truly their second home,” she says.

She pauses. “Now consider a child who has no home, who moves from place to place, who often misses school because of that. A child who, every few months, must face a new school, new kids, new teachers, new ways of doing things. For sure, this child has no way to catch up on work he has missed and falls even further behind each time his family moves. And for sure there’s no money to buy the backpack and other items that all the other kids have, that enable them to do their schoolwork and to feel competent and efficient.”

Even if a homeless family settles into a good shelter for a while, Stevens says, it is nowhere near like having a home. If he is old enough to understand, the child knows he will not be able to stay in these decent conditions for long.

“No more than a few months at most,” Stevens says. So he is constantly worried about how and where they will go next.

Stevens came up with a plan to stay connected with these kids as they bounce from place to place.

“I wondered how we could do it, and then the light went on in my head. We’d have an 800 phone number, so the parents or the kids could call us free from anywhere. And our tutors can go to where they are.”

So each child and parent in the program gets a little bright yellow card with a school bus printed on it and the 800 number. Children living in cars, motels or on the street are brought to the nearest public library for tutoring, Stevens says.

Talking to Stevens, it soon becomes clear that most people’s image of a homeless person (usually an adult with matted hair asking for a handout) doesn’t cover everyone. Her mental image is that of the small, precious faces of kids with bright eyes and good minds who desperately want to learn and succeed, who even more desperately want to feel “normal”--though the circumstances of their lives are not. There are at least 35,000 such children in Los Angeles, who tonight will sleep on cots in shelters. Or on mats, car seats or plastic bags on the ground. And there are 220,000 such children statewide.

Stevens came up with all this information piecemeal and put it together slowly, she says.

In 1985, while she was still a teacher, she read Jonathan Kozol’s book “Rachel and Her Children.” It was a study of homeless people in New York City, she recalls, and it “changed my life.” Soon after that, she attended Friday night services at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles because she heard that Kozol would speak that night.

“I decided then and there that when I retired, I would find a homeless child and tutor him,” Stevens recalls.

A Dream of Giving

Becomes Reality

After she retired in 1989, she heard that the Coeur D’Alene public school in Venice had at least 50 students who lived at the Bible Tabernacle homeless shelter. She met the children and their families and came to realize how frequently they move from place to place--and how incredibly difficult their lives are. “I wondered, what can I do for these kids?” The idea of tutors and the 800 number followed.

Soon, word began to spread. An attorney in her mobile home complex offered to do the paperwork to transform her project into a nonprofit organization. Schoolteachers and shelter directors who admired her work began soliciting donations for her, and people began volunteering time as tutors.

The group still needs computers, communications equipment (they have just two phone lines, both always busy), all sorts of school supplies and transportation. Stevens hopes to turn the School on Wheels into a model program to be copied beyond Los Angeles.

She has a new office staff of four (two full-time, two part-time) who work with her out of the 1,200-foot mobile home, which itself has gained new life since Stevens found it. Situated on a winding road in the little seaside encampment, it is not just Stevens’ address but also the headquarters for her dynamic project. Her 1,200-square-foot mobile home is packed with clunky office furniture, children’s books, school supplies, bulletin boards, computers, charts--and an eclectic group of upbeat people who could easily be characters in a hit musical: a former priest, a Malibu hairdresser, an elegant blond with advanced teaching degrees, and a 28-year-old techie and business whiz. A dapper Santa Monica investment banker has been the group’s volunteer treasurer for more than two years.

Stevens’ tale is really about good people who have found each other and banded together in a small but righteous army. They follow their leader (who’s sometimes still called Sister Agnes) into battle on a daily basis. And Agnes Stevens is sure they will win.

* For more information about School on Wheels, call (310) 589-2642; fax (310) 589-0606 or e-mail the organization at schoolonwhls@earthlink.net.

* Bettijane Levine can be reached by e-mail at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.