In August, Donielle Green lost her minimum-wage job at a bakery.
Then she lost her home.
She didn’t want her son to lose his school.
A program at Akron Public Schools made sure that didn’t happen.
Green and her three children found shelter with the Salvation Army. But their temporary home was far from their old Kenmore neighborhood.
While her youngest two children, ages 3 and 5, were in day care, her oldest boy, Nick, had already started sixth grade at Innes Middle School.
Green didn’t want her son to undergo the trauma of changing schools.
A Salvation Army counselor put her in touch with Project RISE, a program that aims to keep the growing number of kids who have lost their homes in their old schools.
“They came and picked him up every day and dropped him off and it was a way for him to stay in his own school,” Green said. “He had just started Innes, so we didn’t want to start another new school when we had to go to the shelter.
“I don’t know what I would have done without them. They gave me hope when there wasn’t any.”
She is not the only parent looking for hope in these tough times.
Last year, the number of students in the Akron school district officially labeled “homeless” because they lack permanent addresses jumped to 951 — nearly 60 percent more than in 2005.
This year’s estimate could be as high as 1,200 — about the same number of students at the nearby districts of Waterloo or Manchester.
School officials blame the lousy economy for the increase in homeless families.
“People are very stressed out,” said Debra Manteghi, who coordinates Akron’s federal grant to serve homeless students. “They’re having a hard time coping. I see families breaking down.”
As the economy grinds toward the close of the third straight year of unemployment above 9 percent in Akron and 10 percent in Canton, families with children have become steadily poorer.
Nearly 34 percent of Akron’s school-age children — kids 5 to 17 — live in poverty, according to the latest census figures.
Suburban districts have much lower poverty rates. Revere has one of the lowest in the state, at slightly less than 6 percent.
Poverty is hitting harder in cities. Among Ohio’s Big Eight city districts, Cleveland’s poverty rate is the highest at almost 45 percent.
Canton’s poverty rate is 41 percent.
That’s not surprising, said Rhonda Albu, who coordinates the federal homeless grant for Canton City Schools.
“I was raised in Canton so I know when people were working three shifts at Timken, three shifts at Republic Steel, three shifts at Hoover’s,” Albu said. “A lot of those blue-collar workers were our families. ... I think a lot of them are unemployed or working in service jobs, low-paying jobs.”
When families become so poor that they lose their homes, the school becomes a much-needed psychological anchor for children.
“If you can keep them in a school where they already have the routine established, their friends established, their teachers established, those are significant things to kids when everything else is whirling around,” Albu said.
That’s the thinking behind the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, passed in 1987 in a bipartisan effort led by U.S. Rep. Stewart B. McKinney, R-Conn., and U.S. Rep. Bruce Vento, D-Minn.
That’s the law that funds Akron’s Project RISE program, which coordinates with area shelters and organizations to get kids back into school as soon as possible, even if their home school is in another city.
Almost 10 percent of the students in Project RISE attend schools in districts outside Akron. Project RISE also serves some kids in parochial schools, online schools and children who were home-schooled before they lost their homes.
Public transportation
Federal grants cover some of the cost, but local districts are responsible for transportation.
Most of Akron’s homeless students either walk, get rides or use public bus passes to get to school, but the number riding Akron district buses has risen sharply. Last year, Akron Public Schools buses carried an average of 48 homeless kids each day. This year, that number is about 80.
One Akron Public Schools bus driver made a difference for Nick, after his mom lost her job last August and could no longer afford the rent on her house.
“He’s become such good friends with his bus driver,” Donielle Green said.
That driver, Kevin Hahn, said he and Nick had a lot of time to talk on the bus.
“We talked about what did you learn in school today, what are you planning on being, what are you going to do, that type of thing,” Hahn said. “He’s a good kid and I always was fond of him.”
They have since moved to a North Hill house, and Green is able to drive Nick to Innes herself.
Connecting homeless families with Project RISE often isn’t easy.
Many families who have lost their homes try to stay out of shelters by finding temporary refuge in a friend’s apartment or a relative’s basement until they wear out their welcome.
Often it’s a vigilant school secretary or teacher who first notices when a family is struggling. But school officials say that reaching out to families in need is difficult for two reasons: confusion about the definition of homelessness and the stigma that goes with it.
Eligible for program
The confusion is understandable. Many families don’t consider themselves homeless. After all, they have managed to get at least a temporary roof over their heads. It’s just not one they can call their own.
A family doesn’t have to be living under a bridge or in a shelter to be eligible for the RISE program. Children are considered homeless if they’re living in a car, a motel, a park, or doubled up with relatives.
Some families don’t ask for help because of shame or fear that the state will take their children.
For others, it a matter of pride.
Albu tells the story of a woman with Appalachian roots and a strong belief that families and friends take care of their own.
“She said: ‘Our friends were having some problems, but we’ve got it figured out. We put a tent up in our yard and we’re running a garden hose out. They come in and take their baths and use our bathroom, but then they have running water so they don’t have to come in every time they want a drink or something.’ ”
“I said, you know, that’s considered homeless. And she said, ‘Well, they’re not homeless. We’re taking care of them.’ ”
Beverly Manthe didn’t realize she was homeless until she got a letter from her 9-year-old daughter’s school in Akron putting her in touch with Project RISE.
“It’s something that a lot of people don’t want to admit because then people look at you like you’re poor,” she said.
Manthe and her daughter have doubled up with many relatives over the last two years.
“My fiance went to prison and I lost my house,” she said.
They have lived with Manthe’s mother, an aunt and a cousin so they wouldn’t have to go to a shelter.
Most of the families helped by Project RISE are like Manthe, single mothers with children.
Allen Aur is an exception. The 42-year-old single father drove tractor-trailers for 10 years before he was sidelined with medical problems in 2006.
He took his 7-year-old son to Baltimore last summer to be closer to family. But he said the neighborhood had gotten much more dangerous during the time he had been in Ohio.
“We were about to move from Ohio to Maryland, but that fell through so we wound up coming back here,” Aur said.
The family ended up in a temporary shelter where the nearest elementary school was Portage Path. Even after they moved to more permanent housing in another ZIP code, Project RISE made sure his son could stay at Portage Path, where he was doing well.
“I pretty much don’t know what I would have done,” Aur said.
He isn’t the only one who preferred Akron to somewhere else.
Angel Vanmeter returned to Ohio in September after 10 years in Kentucky because she believed Akron would provide better services for her autistic 6-year-old daughter.
“I brought her back up here to get better doctors and better schooling for her,” Vanmeter said. “In doing so, that put us in a homeless shelter until we could secure housing.”
Special tutors
Project RISE arranged for her daughter to stay at Leggett elementary school and receive special tutoring while she arranged more permanent housing.
“Without the tutors, I definitely would have been struggling just finding ways to get her to work through her homework,” Vanmeter said.
Poverty isn’t the only cause of homeless. Some women leave homes to escape an abusive spouse or boyfriend.
A year ago last summer, Doris, whose last name is being withheld to protect her, had a good job, a stable home and a high-achieving daughter in Akron Public Schools.
“I had a three-bedroom home, fully paid for. I used to sell life insurance and make $700 a week,” Doris said.
Last summer, she left her home and moved to the Battered Women’s Shelter.
Doris said that Project RISE provide many of the cultural and educational opportunities she thought she had left behind. They went on field trips organized by Project RISE to several area museums, gardens and parks.
Doris publicly praised Project RISE at a late-August gathering at an Akron art gallery of the families that participated in the program.
“We weren’t able to plan things that we could do with our kids this summer, but you made it possible for us to have just summer fun,” Doris said. “Not only could we get out of the stress, but the kids could get away from being tied down to the situation.”
Manteghi said the extracurricular programs offered by Project RISE are essential to the school district’s educational mission.
Lower test scores
Years of research have confirmed that poorer students generally score lower on tests than higher-income students, making poverty one of the most established predictors of academic failure.
So it should come as no surprise that on the 2010-2011 Ohio state school report card, Canton, which had the highest percentage of kids in poverty in the area, also had the lowest performance index score, which measures all levels of achievement.
Hudson, with one of the lowest poverty rates, had the highest performance index score.
Project RISE helps kids who are behind their peers catch up and those who are doing well already stay on track.
“A lot of the kids, they may be very good students, but if they are going through homelessness and all the crisis of that and all the instability, you want to keep them maintained where they are,” Manteghi said. “You want to help them to excel.
“We’re now seeing kids get to college and walking across the stages in higher education,” Manteghi said.
Project RISE helped Kaila Baechel stay at East High School, where she runs on the cross country team and participates in the U.S. Marine Corps Junior ROTC program.
In July, her mother, a home health aide, saw her income slashed.
“My hours got cut from 40 hours to four and I just couldn’t afford to pay the rent anymore,” Amy Baechel said.
Project RISE connected the family with an agency that found temporary housing on the west side of Akron, far from their old Goodyear Heights neighborhood and the schools that Kaila and her 9-year old sister attended.
The Junior ROTC program is only offered at East, so Kaila likely would have had to quit if she couldn’t stay there.
Project RISE made sure the children continued at their old schools until their mom could rent a subsidized house in Goodyear Heights.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to go and make new friends because I’ve been moved around schools a lot through elementary school,” Kaila said. “I didn’t want to switch again.”
Beacon Journal computer-assisted reporting manager David Knox contributed to this report. John Higgins can be reached at 330-996-3792 or jhiggins@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the education blog at http://education.ohio.com/