From Homeless to A Full Scholarship

By Daren Fonda/Phoenix

For years, he spent long nights trying to sleep in abandoned cars and vacant lots. His father said they were just camping out. Chuck Bacon, his little brother Ryan and his mom and dad would carry blankets into weedy fields around Phoenix, Ariz. They would eat burgers and hot dogs, but there was no campfire under the cloudless desert sky; the food had been microwaved at a convenience store. In the morning, the boys would scrub themselves with liquid soap in a gas-station rest room. In the evening, they would beg for handouts at traffic lights. When Chuck went to school, he felt as if his poverty was emblazoned on him like a letter on his forehead.

To meet him today, you'd never guess that Chuck grew up homeless. At 19, he is well-spoken and clean-cut, a former high school linebacker with his own car and a longtime girlfriend. Last month he graduated from Carl Hayden Community High School with a B average. This fall he'll enroll with a full academic scholarship at Phoenix College, where, he says, he'll try to "rediscover a bit of the childhood I lost."

Bacon says he owes a good deal of his success to a special institution in Phoenix, the Thomas J. Pappas School. An oasis amid boarded-up buildings, in the shadows of downtown skyscrapers, it serves some 750 children in grades K through 10--all of them homeless. A day school, funded by both the state and private donations, it is the largest of America's 40 "schools" for homeless children. Most of them are little more than classrooms in shelters. Pappas, named after a local philanthropist, is the only public school with a $300,000 foundation, new buildings and a politically savvy staff determined to make it a national model.

"If a child doesn't have immunization records, transcripts and a permanent address, it's very hard to attend a regular school," says Sandra Dowling, who founded Pappas in 1989 and now, as superintendent of Maricopa County Schools, is its biggest booster. "Any child may enroll without barriers, and kids don't feel stigmatized here."

Each morning at 7:45, sleepy-eyed pupils file off yellow buses and begin a typical school day: breakfast, recess, class, lunch, more recess and more classes. Many come from nearby shelters, though Pappas' buses can find them on a day's notice wherever they've landed for the night--whether at a flophouse or by the side of a highway. Most of the kids need remedial help, having missed months or years of school because their families moved around.

Pappas' library has more than 13,000 books, and a new computer lab will open this fall. But the school has no gymnasium, no theater, no after-school clubs and no instrumental-music classes. Kids are required to attend mainstream schools if their families get settled. In practice, however, scores of children drift in and out of Pappas for years, partly because it's such a nurturing place. A student who shows up with dirty clothes will get new ones. There's a medical clinic on campus. And nearly every kid takes home a box of food each month along with toothpaste, shampoo, socks and underwear--all donated by Phoenix residents. Once a month, Pappas holds birthday parties replete with clowns, cake and a closetful of new toys from which honorees can pick a doll or racing car.

The kids say they love Pappas. But some advocacy groups, led by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, say schools for homeless kids are "segregationist" and deny them equal access to education. "The law says homeless children must not be separated from mainstream public schools," says law-center attorney Sarah McCarthy. Her organization is pushing for legislation that would make it harder for schools like Pappas to receive federal funds.

Chuck Bacon hopes the bill stays where it is--stalled in the U.S. Senate. "Have you ever been homeless?" he asks. "Do you know what it's like? Yes, we were separated at Pappas. But that was good for us. We were treated with respect. Without the school's support, I might never have made it."