(Published Monday, February 26, 2007 11:34:26 AM CST)
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
By Anna Marie Lux Gazette staff
Savannah Bugg and Kayla Williams are bucking the odds to earn their high school diplomas.
Both teenagers have been homeless.
Both are mothers.
Savannah will earn her diploma by the end of this month.
Kayla should graduate this summer.
The young women attend Janesville's Rock River Charter School for students who do not fit into traditional high schools.
While pregnant more than two years ago, Savannah, then 15, bounced from house to house, sleeping on the couches of friends.
Kayla Williams, left, and Savannah Bugg talk about their lives and schedules with social worker Angela Lynch. Both girls have gone through period sof homelessness in their lives, but are working to get their high school diplomas.
Bill Olmsted/Gazette Staff
Sometimes she wandered all night in Janesville, making sure police did not notice her.
"I went anywhere my feet would take me," the 17-year-old recalls. "I was very worried. I did not know what to do."
She had been in 13 foster homes and attended nine schools before enrolling in the charter school in January 2005.
"In a lot of people's eyes, I have been a failure," Savannah says. "But I have changed my view of myself. I come here for my education. It is important to me because I have a child."
Her daughter will be 2 in April.
Savannah says her homeless days are over. She now lives in a group home, which has taught her stability.
The teen recalls how hard it was to focus in school without a place to live.
Janesville School District social worker ann Forbeck talks to a Janesville Craig High School class about homelessness. Forbeck is behind new efforts to work with homeless students to help them do better in school.
Al Hoch/Gazette Staff
"There were times when I was too tired," she explains. "There were times when I worried about whose house I would spend the night in. I don't want that for me or for my daughter. There is no way anyone is going to stop me from achieving my goal."
She wants to enroll in Madison Area Technical College to study photography.
Kayla has dreams, too.
She insists she is willing to fight all odds to achieve them.
Last year, she was homeless for six month, drifting between four houses.
During it all, she continued to attend class because she knew her future depended on it.
The 18-year-old mother of two is now living with a relative in Beloit.
When she enrolled in the charter school, she lived in Janesville. A driver now brings her from Beloit so she can finish her studies at the school where she found stability and success.
Without the chance to graduate, she says, "I would be stuck at home, working at Wal-Mart forever."
She talks about becoming a paralegal.
"I've lived in poverty my whole life, and I don't like it," Kayla says.
"I have to go to school because I don't want to live this life anymore."
Her school social worker, Angela Lynch, helps Kayla sort through child-care issues and day-to-day challenges.
Lynch also provides critical emotional support.
"I believe in all my students," Lynch says. "It helps them believe in themselves. Our job is to keep them going, especially when they don't have any cheerleaders at home."
In addition to the charter school, Lynch is the social worker at Jackson Elementary, which has 27 homeless students.
It ranks second among the district's 18 schools in the number of homeless students, who last year totaled 274.
"If we want these students to become good citizens in our community, we have to help them succeed," she says.
Ann Forbeck is leading new efforts to identify homeless students. She is a social worker at Edison Middle School and Harrison Elementary.
She also focuses two days a week on developing ways to help homeless children do well in school.
The district received a state-administered $58,000 grant over the next three years to close the achievement gap between homeless students and their peers who have stable homes.
Some of the money will pay for tutors to help homeless children, who often have huge holes in their learning because of absence and truancy.
An estimated four to six months of academic progress are lost every time a child changes schools, Forbeck says.
This is why educators try to keep homeless children in the same schools for the entire year.
It gives them stability where they otherwise have none, Forbeck says.
She knows a middle school student who has changed school 13 times because he was homeless.
"Some students are failing, and some are at great risk of failing," she says. "There are others whose lives seem so hopeless that they have stopped trying."
Among Forbeck's goals by the end of the school year:
-- To visit every school in the district to inform teachers about the definition of homelessness and the rights of homeless students. She also will tell teachers how to better serve homeless students and make them feel welcome at school.
-- To develop ways to get homeless parents more involved in their children's educations.
"Getting parents involved is one of the most proven measures to help a child succeed," she says.
Providing bus tokens or gas money for parents to come to school meetings may be a start.
-- To create a mentoring program at Edison for students with potential truancy problems.
-- To inform the community-including people at the Rock County Job Center, child protective services and agencies that help the poor-about the rights of homeless children.
By the end of three years, she hopes to increase graduation rates of the homeless; increase enrollment of pre-school children of homeless parents; and boost overall academic achievement of homeless students.
"I don't want to see any of them slip through the cracks to become the next generation of homeless families," she says.
