RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) - An aspiring gym teacher who loves art class and playing volleyball with her friends, Jasmine Clements, a fourth-grader, sometimes seems timid in class.
Betsy Nelson, Jasmine’s teacher at General Beadle Elementary School, said she notices small things. Jasmine hesitates to get involved in groups, Nelson said, and she looks to Nelson for constant compliments.
Her behavior may be explained as just normal youthful insecurity, Nelson said. Or, part of the reason may be Jasmine’s unstable home life. She, her three siblings and her mom are homeless, living in a shelter.
In many classrooms, Rapid City teachers are noticing a growing population of children like 10-year-old Jasmine, coming to school from shelters or other nontraditional dwellings. The schools have homeless coordinators, and sympathetic, alert teachers such as Nelson, to help make both the learning and living experiences better, but the resources to address the problem are limited.
The problem has reached an “epidemic level,” said Rapid City Area Schools homeless coordinator Anita Deranleau. “The floodgates have opened. Only those that are working in the trenches have any idea.”
As of Dec. 18 - only halfway through the school year - Deranleau said that of the district’s more than 13,800 students, her department has identified 578 who have been homeless at some point since classes started in August.
Rapid City schools have gone through a half-decade of rapidly increasing numbers of students identified as homeless, from 629 in 2011-2012, to 742 last school year. Those numbers are for the full year, making the 578 thus far particularly troubling.
On a recent Friday night, Tamara Clements was watching warily as her oldest daughter, Alajhandra, 13, stuffed clothes in her pink backpack before heading out to stay with a friend.
The strain of the day showed on Clements’ face. Two of her four children were sick most of the week and missed school. An appointment for welfare benefits had to wait.
The home they squeeze into is not really a home. For weeks, they have been sharing a pair of bunk beds in a space the size of a dorm room at the Cornerstone Women’s Mission on Columbus Avenue in Rapid City.
With hope in her voice, Clements said the mission is a temporary stop for a few months until she again finds a job so she can get Alajhandra, Jasmine, 5-year-old Max and 2-year-old Chyna under a bigger roof. But the difficulty of a job search is compounded by her lack of a car.
Clements, 30, is a recovering methamphetamine addict. She has been out of jail recently, but she is facing a probation violation after a brief relapse.
“I feel like I’m living a nightmare,” she said. “I’m trying to get my life back, but it’s been hard when I’ve been through heck and back.”
With a restraining order in place against the father of her two younger children, and her two older children’s father largely out of the picture, she said she now struggles daily to provide as much normalcy as possible for them while she tries to rebuild her own life.
“All I’m asking is for another chance to be with my kids,” she wrote remorsefully in mid-October, asking the judge for clemency on the probation violation. “I’m all they have.”
As a high school dropout, she wants to do everything she can to push her children, especially Alajhandra, to finish their education and prevent them from falling into her same trap: pregnant at 16, falling into alcohol, drugs, and now temporary homelessness.
“People make mistakes,” Deranleau said. “We kind of look like a very affluent community, but that’s not everybody’s reality.”
Rapid City has a 16 percent poverty rate, compared with 14.1 percent statewide. The Native American poverty rate in Rapid City is much higher, 50.9 percent, the highest by far for Native Americans living in any urban area in the country.
Deranleau said the school district purposely uses a wide definition of “homeless,” including any situation in which a child is without a permanent, stable living situation. A homeless family can be one that is “doubled up” with relatives or family friends, living temporarily in run-down motels, in shelters, in cars, or even possibly, she fears, occasionally on the street.
By her office’s count, 394 this year are doubling up, 125 are temporarily staying in hotels or motels, 51 are staying in shelters, and eight are “unsheltered,” meaning they are living in cars or other situations.
Each year, she said, her department starts a fresh count from scratch. Once children are identified as homeless, they stay on the list for the rest of the year to qualify for the district’s homeless services.
And the district’s rising numbers mirror a national trend.
According to a report released last month by the National Center on Family Homelessness, an estimated 2.5 million children in the United States in 2013 experienced some form of homelessness - an all-time high - up from 1.6 million in 2010.
Rapid City schools follow federal policies meant to bring some stability to the lives of the homeless students. The federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act requires certain rights for them, including enrollment without a permanent address and the ability to stay in the same school regardless of where they move in town.
Such students automatically qualify for free and reduced meals. The district is also responsible for transportation - by school bus, city bus, or sometimes by taxi - if a homeless student moves across town.
The state gets $183,247 this school year in federal funding to assist with homeless students, most of which goes to Sioux Falls and Rapid City, $85,000 each, according to Mary Staddick Smith, a spokeswoman for the South Dakota Department of Education.
Deranleau pointed to the intractable obstacles to attacking the homeless problem in Rapid City: overwhelmed social-services agencies and the lack of both well-paying jobs and affordable housing.
While each school has its own homeless coordinator and many have extra closets to provide clean clothes and warm coats, the help they can provide is only scratching at the surface, she said.
That means teachers are sending home backpacks filled with food for the weekend, quietly slipping laundry vouchers or bus passes to parents, or just being there to listen to a student who has had a hard day.
“At the end of the day, a lot of what we do is providing a Band-Aid,” said Jessica Dial, a career counselor at Rapid City High School.
At General Beadle, Betsy Nelson said Jasmine Clements has suffered because she was in a different school for part of the year before transferring back to General Beadle in November.
“She just needs the confidence to take off on her own,” Nelson said. “I just think it hasn’t been discovered yet.”
Nelson added: “She has a sweet personality. She works hard, but because she’s been uprooted so many times, it muddies the waters for her understanding.”
But, Nelson said, unlike some of her other students in temporary-housing situations, Jasmine regularly comes to school, which does help her.
Nelson said six, possibly seven, of her 28 students are homeless. That life is “just normal for them,” she said. “That’s the way it is.”
“If they don’t have a stable environment,” Nelson said, “I can’t always count on homework coming back.”
She notices behavior problems in some of her other homeless students: anger, lashing out, sometimes putting up invisible barriers to socialization or hoarding random items at their desks to keep them away from other students.
“It’s something they can control,” she said.
According to the latest preliminary estimates from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average weekly wage dropped slightly in Pennington County this calendar year, from $727 per week from January through March to $692 from April through June.
Even though she faces the daunting task of landing a job despite a felony on her record, Clements said she was determined to overcome the odds to stay clean and sober. She receives food stamps, and a caseworker at Working Against Violence, Inc., donates diapers.
By this time next year, Clements said she hoped to see her children “in their own rooms fighting over who’s going to be in the shower,” she said. “I feel like I owe it to them.”
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Information from: Rapid City Journal, https://www.rapidcityjournal.com
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