Homeless children tell their stories
'My Own Four Walls' documents young lives wanting a place to call home.
from the May 24, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
"Living in poverty, it was a difficult life, and I don't think a child should grow up in poverty, you know?" Ms. Martinez says in a phone interview with the Monitor. "I realized you need to do something more, you can't just live paycheck to paycheck."
She just finished her first year at New Mexico State University, studying criminal justice and biology with the hopes of becoming a forensic scientist. Scholarships from groups like NAEHCY have so far enabled her to attend without taking out student loans.
To help homeless teens fulfill their college dreams, bipartisan sponsors in Congress introduced the FAFSA Fix for Homeless Kids Act earlier this year. For a long time, it's been difficult for students separated from their parents' financial support to prove they were on their own and get sufficient aid. The law would allow educational liaisons, shelter directors, or financial aid administrators to identify a youth as homeless and unaccompanied.
Watching Nilan's video and hearing about that bill at a recent conference on homeless children in Boston gave Ms. Jackson a new view of her own teenage years. Her mother stopped supporting her when she was 12, and she lived with various people, which she now sees as a form of homelessness.
When it came time to apply for college, she was still expected to include her mother's income on the forms. Jackson says she didn't qualify for sufficient aid until she had her own baby, but that made college difficult in other ways. Now she's determined to show "My Own Four Walls" to fellow staff at the Crittenton Women's Union and to get everyone she knows to support passage of the FAFSA bill.
In Nilan's efforts to raise awareness that homelessness can exist in any type of community, she has shown the video in some affluent school districts. Students there have been particularly moved by one teen boy who graduated from high school while living on the streets. Ben talks about how he'd "press" his clothes by folding them up under his pillow when he slept at night. And then he shows the spot near some bushes where he'd stash his stuff, the very spot where he sat down to gaze upon his diploma on graduation day. Some well-off teens have told Nilan that it makes them think twice about their own unappreciative attitudes about high school.
Nilan returned recently to Reno, Nev., to show the documentary in a community where she had filmed. Gloria Bratiotis, the McKinney-Vento liaison for the surrounding Washoe County School District, says that ever since seeing it, a man who runs a free-clothing center for the homeless "writes every week [saying] 'What do you need now? I cannot get those children out of my mind.' "
Each year, Ms. Bratiotis's district of 67,000 students serves about 1,200 who are homeless. By the fall, "every school advocate will see the film and have it for their staff and faculties.... It's a powerful message, and I think teachers need to be reminded that these children sit in their classrooms."
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