Homeless students exceed 200 in Burbank and Glendale schools

More than 200 students enrolled in Burbank and Glendale schools during the last school year were homeless.

While more than half of them doubled up with other families, almost 40% lived in temporary shelters or motels, while a handful in each city were living in cars or on the street, according to data released by the Glendale and Burbank Unified school districts.

While their individual circumstances are difficult for district officials and aid workers to pin down, many remain in the cities despite the lack of stable housing to keep their children in local schools, while others may avoid shelters that separate men and women to avoid being split up from their children.

“Some homeless families, because of the quality of the school district, are averse to finding housing outside Burbank because they want their kids to be able to at least be ensured to have a good, solid education,” said Barbara Howell, chief executive officer of the Burbank Temporary Aid Center, which provides meals, showers, laundry services, bus tokens and other resources to about 300 homeless people and 3,000 low-income Burbank households.

School districts, meanwhile, ensure that their homeless students have what they need to enroll, which may include tracking down school and immunization records that families may not have, while providing access to counseling and tutoring services, school supplies and transportation to and from school.

“They’re our kids, they deserve to be in our schools,” said Brian O’Rourke, Burbank Unified’s director of safety and student services. “It’s our jobs to take the roadblocks away. We don’t want our schools to be like the DMV.”

Many of them are children of single parents who have lost their job or ability to pay rent, said Shanna Warren, chief executive officer of the Boys and Girls Club of Burbank, which offers free snacks and meals after school.

“It’s sad because it’s unstable for them,” she said, adding that the students may spend weeks bouncing between couches of friends or relatives. “A lot of them don’t even know where their dinner is going to come from.”

For a week before starting his senior year at Glendale High School last year, 19-year-old Jose Armas was homeless. His mom had just moved to Miami, but he wanted to stay, even if that meant crashing at his longtime church for a few days.

He had moved to Glendale in 2011 from the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles because he wanted to attend Glendale High School.

Eventually, his uncle found him a place to live alone in downtown Los Angeles for $500 a month.

Though he had a roof over his head, his struggles continued.

He missed the first day of school, and considered dropping out completely.

Working three jobs, without a car, as a high school student, he said it was tough to feel motivated to show up for school, let alone find the time to do homework.

Commuting from downtown Los Angeles to Glendale High School, then to a pet store in Monterey Park where he worked weekday afternoons before taking a bus to his security guard job in Koreatown, he wouldn’t finish his shifts until 1 a.m. On Saturdays, he took a bus and two trains to get to another job as a security guard in Compton.

He earned enough to pay his rent and bus fare, he said.

For three weeks in October of last year, he just didn’t show up for school.

A school counselor intervened and introduced him to Ilin Magran, a school psychologist and coordinator in the school district’s Healthy Start office, who let him know about some of the services — like free bus tokens — the district offered to students in his shoes.

“Because of her, I graduated,” he said, later adding that he is now pursuing his dream of becoming a police officer.

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Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @atchek