Families On The Edge

Dr. Sandie Morgan

A reporter called to be sure she didn’t have a typo in her notes from a series of questions she’d asked me to answer.  “Are there really more than 30,000 homeless students in Orange County?” 

Yes, every school district has a homeless student liaison who attempts to track and monitor students. 

A homeless student isn’t necessarily sleeping under a bridge all alone, but they do not have stable housing.

The family may have faced employment cutbacks and moved in with a relative or friend. Now four people are living in one bedroom.  Even a family that has found some employment may not have first and last month rent deposit funds, so they are living in a motel. These are families on the edge. The reporter next asked, “Do people know about this?”

In the past, children living with one or both parents in transient housing have fallen off the radar when they move out of one school district into another. 

The homeless student liaison is an advocate for the child to assist them in continuing to go to school.  Every child has a right to education and deserves an education.  Most communities know they have families on the edge, and in many communities there are local motel outreach programs in health care, mental health, child welfare organizations and churches. We want people in communities all over the US to seek answers to these two questions: Why are these children at risk? 

What can I do?

Why are these children at risk? Consider twelve year old Sheila.  Her father is recently unemployed and her mother has a part time, minimum wage job. 

They are living in a motel room. 

When her six and eight year old sisters are put to bed at 8:00 p.m. she moves outside to the stairs and finishes her homework under the parking lot light.  Someone (male or female) stops to chat with her, even shares their french fries. When the conversation is closing they offer to let her use the desk in their room or the dining room table at their nearby apartment.  It’s light, no noise, and you’ll get your homework done faster.  Or, the family moves every two to three weeks and Sheila is lonely and learns to find a group to join right away. Under different circumstances, she may not have hung out with this group, but she wants to belong.  Other scenarios include bullying, gang safety threats, and threats of sexual assault, all of which often end in abuse and exploitation.

What can I do? Start by making an appointment with your school district’s Homeless Student Liaison. Ask how you can volunteer at an after-school homework program or to provide transportation so a student can stay with her class. 

Yes, you will have to go through a background check and volunteer training.

Your next stop is your local child welfare office. 

Ask which families in your neighborhood are on the edge? 

The scope of homeless families is huge and overwhelming to take on, but you can take on one block or one family. 

They may need groceries at the end of the month, child care to keep that part time job, assistance writing a resume, job training, or even transportation to the second hand store to assure that the children have shoes that fit and seasonal clothing. An investment of support at a critical moment may keep a child with their parent and out of foster care.  Certainly, when parents have substance abuse issues and are living in transient housing, it is time for child welfare to step in on behalf of the children.  But child welfare can point you to the families that will benefit from just a little help to move them away from the edge. 

Homeless students are students at risk. 

Homeless students who are part of families on the edge are the most accessible to reach out and pull them back to safety. We do not need to wait until Sheila is totally alone. 

When someone asks me what they can do, I have often suggested that they become foster parents. I have been disappointed when they quickly closed the door to that idea. Since then, I’ve learned that not everyone will qualify, and for many, it takes a while to become comfortable with the idea. I’ve since adjusted my response to that important question to encouraging people to help children before they become victims! 

Rhonda Sciortino

There are probably hundreds of ways that people can help families on the edge. The challenge is that few of them are very glamorous and rarely lead to any recognition or fanfare. Many of them are inconvenient, some are time consuming, and a few are downright difficult. But for those generous souls who want to help, there are ways to do so that range from doing one small thing once a year all the way to the other end of the continuum of adopting a child—a 24/7, “two feet in” commitment.

Some of the things on what I like to refer to as the “Ladder of Hope” include buying a grocery store gift card or a gas for a family. One of my favorites is hiring someone to do a job for you. 

This gives the person an opportunity to maintain his or her dignity and experience the good feeling of an earned paycheck—plus it gets housework, babysitting, companion services for an elderly or disabled person, yard work, painting, sewing, knitting, dog-walking, dog-washing, paperwork filing, etc., etc., done that perhaps you haven’t had time to get to. You can include a child in an activity with your family. You can invite a child or family to join you for dinner.

You can participate in the Safe Families program and have a family live with you until they’re back on their feet. You can allow a single mom to use your washer and dryer once a week rather than her having her kids out at the laundromat late at night after work. You get the idea. You simply look for needs and offer to meet the one or ones you’re able to accommodate.

I’ll always be grateful to the woman who knocked on my door one night after I had fed my baby the last bit of food we had in the house. I hadn’t eaten in five days, and I had portioned out what we little we had to give to my child. My girl was crying because she was still hungry, and I was crying because I had no food and no money. I had a job, but payday was still a few days off. When I opened the door, a woman was standing there with a box full of food from her pantry. I’d never met that woman before, and I never saw her afterwards.

She introduced herself and said that her doctor had put her on a special diet and she could no longer eat these things. She said that she’d come up in the depression and just simply could not throw perfectly good food away. She asked if I wanted it. I tried not to act too eager as I accepted that box of food. I’m not sure what I said to that woman as I closed the door and rushed back to the kitchen to see what we could quickly eat. But what I clearly remember is the relief I felt at having that box full of food.

That one simple gesture gave me hope and instilled a faith in me that I carry to this day that some how some way I would always be provided for. You have the power to give hope to someone today.