![]() ![]() ![]() They pass the abandoned storefronts and the 98-cent store where they eye the toy lightsabers on sale, scurry across five lanes of Western Avenue traffic and give wide berth to the guard dog at an empty lot sticking his nose through a chain-link fence. The rest line up outside - jackets finally zipped, their School on Wheels backpacks in place - and they’re off, accompanied by two adults from the center. He nudges a bleary-eyed Stephen to wake up. Or, the ultimate gift: permanent housing.Īs the afternoon sky outside the burglar bars fades to shades of purple and orange, Evans tells the students at the South L.A. Learning Center, said she asked them what they hoped Santa would bring or what they want for a birthday. Chiaw Yongpang, a volunteer at the South L.A. ![]() Their dreams are more grounded and practical than those of others their age. Stephen, 6, falls asleep after snack time, his fruit punch-stained mouth hanging open as his head rests on a table. They awake at 5 a.m., which is why they are dragging once the afternoon rolls around. They are simply aware, even in their young age, that their lives are different from those of their classmates. “They don’t want to be identified,” said Blue McDonald, regional director of School on Wheels for West L.A. Moreover, the older students tend to hide their homelessness, making it harder for programs to find and help them. “Education is not on the top of your list,” she said of homeless students. Meek climbed under and sat with her.Ī bond had to form, Meek said, before studies were even a concern. She wouldn’t come out from under a table in the shelter. Meek recalled one of the first children she mentored: a young girl who was soon abandoned by her mother. For most, tutors measure success in much more rudimentary terms: “A kid does his homework for a month or his grades improve.”Īchieving that requires trust, she said. Meek called Sanchez the outlier among School on Wheels students. “College does start to look like a bunch of smiling faces on a pamphlet.”īut Sanchez made it to UCLA, where she’s in her second year and has enough credits to be a junior. “Your motivation starts to wane,” Sanchez said. Sanchez had ambitions of going to UCLA and becoming a teacher, but those dreams began to falter. Yet her father continued to take her to school in Glendale, where she kept up her grades. The family finally found a spot in a more hospitable family shelter in Pasadena. “It was terrible,” she said, recalling a huge, harshly lighted hall of stiff cots where men, women and children bunked together. The money ran out and they wound up in a cold-weather shelter. Like many newly homeless families, they hopped from motel to motel. Her mother had been sick and her father, an architect, lost his job. When she was 16, her family was evicted from the home she grew up in. High school became the one steady place for Angela Sanchez when a swirl of bad fortune uprooted her family. Unified’s coordinator of pupil services and attendance. School on Wheels and the district’s programs work to keep school “a point of stability,” said Melissa Schoonmaker, L.A. Unified tries to keep them in the same schools, even offering transportation to help get them there. ![]() They move around constantly, depending on shelter openings and whether family members can take them in. Homeless children tend to be four to six months behind their classmates, Meek said. They work in parks, libraries and other public places as well as in the storefront in South L.A. School on Wheels solicits and trains hundreds of volunteers who provide one-on-one tutoring for homeless students in the Los Angeles area. Learning Center and serves more than 6,000 homeless youths each year, is bracing for its budget of about $800,000 to shrink as homelessness among families expands at an unprecedented rate, said Catherine Meek, its executive director. School on Wheels, the nonprofit that runs the South L.A. The programs attempting to help the children in these situations, like School on Wheels, face a sad dilemma: The same difficult economic times that create the need for such services also cause them to struggle financially. ![]()
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