Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Saving the dreams of homeless kids

Former Homeless Student Dessirae Lorena

L.E. Baskow

Former homeless student Dessirae Lorena checks in with case manager Kandiea Everett on Friday, Jan. 15, 2016, as part of her assistance at Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth headquarters.

Former Homeless Student Dessirae Lorena

Former homeless student Dessirae Lorena receives a little piano lesson from Executive Director in the music room at the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth headquarters on Friday, January 15, 2016. Launch slideshow »

In the time it took for her older brother to drive to the store and back, Dessirae went from sitting on her bed doing homework to being battered, bruised and thrown out of her home.

The Mojave High School junior, at the time 17, was standing in her pajamas barefoot in the rain when her 22-year-old brother pulled up. It was the middle of the night. Tomorrow was a school day.

Dessirae’s laptop and homework lay scattered in pieces on her bedroom floor. Her phone was inside the house with her father, who had stumbled in the door a few minutes earlier after a night of drinking and doing drugs.

Had her older brother been there, the situation might have turned out differently. Instead, Dessirae’s younger brother and sister watched as Dessirae’s father dragged Dessirae by the hair out of her bedroom, threw her over a couch and started punching her in the face. He was upset that Dessirae was talking on a cellphone he didn’t know she had.

Dessirae’s sister threw herself at her father to try to make him to stop, but she too ended up in the wall.

Now Dessirae was kicked out. It wasn’t the first time, but this time, it was for good.

While her father was in the bathroom, Dessirae’s older brother snuck Dessirae her backpack, which always carried her birth certificate, Social Security card and a toothbrush and toothpaste. Dessirae waited outside the apartment while her brother went to the store to buy her shoes.

Dessirae had been kicked out of her home multiple times before and felt she had overstayed her welcome with friends. So she walked five miles to Craig Ranch. The park was being built at the time, but she found a picnic table and sat down. She rewrote by hand the school essay she had been working on. When security came around, she hid in portable restrooms.

“I didn’t do much sleeping,” Dessirae said.

For a month and a half, Dessirae walked the streets of Las Vegas, looking for places to sleep and do homework. There was a shopping center on Martin Luther King Boulevard and a McDonald’s on Charleston Boulevard.

At school, Dessirae worked in the cafeteria, where the manager knew what she was going through and gave her extra hours. Sometimes she napped in a sleeping bag in the school counselor’s office. The counselor had no idea Dessirae was homeless.

Every year, about 5,000 homeless youths die as a result of assault, illness or suicide.

“It was hard,” Dessirae said. “I just wanted to live a normal teenage life.”

The counselor eventually figured out what was going on.

“Where have you been sleeping?” she asked Dessirae.

Dessirae spent the rest of the year pingponging between the homes of counselors and teachers. She eventually secured housing through the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth. She still lives in the apartment the agency set her up in.

Now 19, Dessirae attends the College of Southern Nevada. She has a stable life and is thinking of transferring to a university in Utah.

Dessirae’s story may have a happy ending, but for scores of other local children who are homeless, the outcomes aren’t always so rosy.

• • •

Every year, thousands of students become homeless in the Las Vegas Valley. In 2015, Clark County School District officials identified more than 11,000 students as in need of homeless services, and the count has risen steadily. Homeless students can include those couch surfing, staying with friends, sleeping on the streets or living in any other unstable environment.

About 39 percent of America’s homeless population is younger than 18.

However, district figures include only students who are enrolled in school. Thousands more homeless children fall through the cracks because they live on the street or in shelters and do not attend school, experts say.

Almost 24,000 Nevada children were homeless in 2013, according to a 2014 report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Nevada had the highest share of unsheltered, unaccompanied youths in the nation.

State statistics mirror what has become a new national reality in the wake of the Great Recession. Student homelessness has doubled since 2008.

Even while the unemployment rate has fallen as the economy recovers, student homelessness has grown worse. As of last school year, 1.4 million students were considered homeless, up 8 percent from a year earlier.

There is no one cause for student homelessness. The reasons are as varied and diverse as the students and families who experience it.

On any given day in 2015, about 2,230 unaccompanied homeless children were living on the streets or in homeless shelters in Southern Nevada.

“It happens because you’ve been locked out of your home, because you’ve been evicted or your home has been foreclosed,” said Kelly-Jo Shebeck, a coordinator at the Clark County School District’s Title 1 Hope program, which provides services to homeless students and their families. “You’re living with friends or families because of economic hardship.”

Many homeless students’ families are doubling up in a house with another family, be it relatives or friends. Others live in weeklies — motels and extended-stay hotels that serve as temporary homes.

When young people navigate homelessness without their parents, the cause often is family related. A 2010 study by the National Runaway Switchboard found that half of unaccompanied homeless teens were thrown out of the house by their parents.

The physical and psychological consequences of homelessness can be devastating on students.

“When youths go out on the street, they go into survival mode,” said Arash Ghafoori, executive director of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth. “It’s very hard for us as adults to think back to a time when we didn’t know anything about society, virtually nothing about how to access services, resources, not being able to drive, not being able to be gainfully employed.”

Many homeless children resort to survival sex, giving up their bodies on the street in exchange for shelter or food, experts say.

“These are kids,” Ghafoori said. “Bad things can happen to them very quickly.”

• • •

One of the biggest challenges advocates face is getting homeless students into the system. The transient nature of Las Vegas means students and families may not be in one place long enough to seek help. For families with children in school, that puts much of the responsibility on school staff.

Every Clark County School District campus has coordinators to identify and serve homeless students. But identifying which children need help takes special attention to detail.

“Staff will start noticing that kids are coming to school in the same clothes all the time or the clothes are getting too small,” Shebeck said. “It’s really on schools to understand and see the need.”

The average age a teen becomes homeless is 14.7.

Once homeless students are identified, they gain access to a range of services. They can receive school supplies and toiletries, free breakfast and lunch.

The McKinney-Vento Act, which first authorized federal funds to combat homelessness, requires school districts to provide the services. Homeless students also have a right to attend the school they attended before they became homeless.

“Our goal is to ensure students are immediately enrolled and that we can provide the same services as students who are in a home,” Shebeck said.

Helping homeless children living on the streets is a different story.

“­Youth don’t advertise being homeless,” Ghafoori said. “It’s not as simple as going somewhere and saying, ‘Raise your hand if you’re a homeless youth.’”

So staffers at the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth visit homeless hotspots around the city, and return frequently, to build a rapport with the children.

Every year, about 5,000 homeless youths die because of assault, illness or suicide.

The agency also runs the Safe Place program, which provides emergency services for children and teens who are in dangerous situations, whether the cause be running away, getting kicked out of the house or going on a date with someone they feel is a threat. The young people can go to any of 83 locations in Southern Nevada, including dozens of fire stations and Terrible’s gas stations, where a Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth crisis responder will meet them within 30 minutes, assess their situation and drive them home or, if needed, to a drop-in center or emergency shelter.

The Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth headquarters is a small house south of UNLV, where children can drop in during the day for haircuts, bus passes, food and clothing. It’s also where youths can meet with a case manager, in many cases the first step to helping them back on their feet.

“The one common thing these kids need is time,” Ghafoori said. “You have to unravel what happened, otherwise it’s just a Band-Aid and you’re going to see them again.”

• • •

Homelessness doesn’t always look like a person in rags pushing a shopping cart. It also looks like Mathew Perry, an 18-year-old senior at Sunrise Mountain High School.

Perry’s mother decided last year to move back to Georgia, but Perry wanted to stay and finish his schooling in Las Vegas. He lived with his grandmother for a while, but she left for Georgia soon after. So Perry moved into an apartment with a friend, paying his share of the rent with a job at a frozen yogurt shop. He makes $150 every two weeks and barely has enough left after rent to buy a burger.

Nationwide, children ages 12 to 17 are at a higher risk for homelessness than adults.

Perry is the type of student the district’s Title 1 Hope office keeps constant tabs on. While he’s not living on the street, he could be any time.

“In reality, it sucks,” Perry said. “I hate having to go to work every day. I can’t even go out to the park and have fun for an hour. I have a schedule I have to follow, otherwise I’m out on the streets.”

As soon as school lets out, Perry heads to wrestling practice, then to work at 5:30 p.m. He gets home around midnight and wakes up at 6 a.m.

Sometimes, friends tell him he is lucky to be independent. Perry says they don’t realize the sacrifice involved. Balancing high school with adult responsibilities leaves him almost no time for himself.

If his life were more typical, he says, “I would have a little bit more of a social life probably. I would get to have more of a high school experience going out with friends after school. I couldn’t even tell you what (other teens) do.”

With the help of Title 1 Hope, Perry recently was accepted to UNLV. Program staffers helped him fill out financial aid forms, apply for scholarships and secure a spot in campus dorms.

More than any other cause, advocates say, student homelessness persists because the problem is self-perpetuating. Young people drop out of school, fall through the cracks, end up on the street and disappear from view.

As one Title 1 Hope advocate put it: “If it doesn’t fit in that box of sleeping on Foremaster Lane or in a shelter, the problem doesn’t even occur to some people.”

The way to fight it is with social awareness, advocates say.

“When you look on the corner and see a homeless adult, the problem is obvious,” said Vincent Pollard, manager of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth Outreach. “But if you were to see these kids and what they have to go through, the nation would be disgusted. The fact that this is an invisible problem is what allows it to exist.”

A SNAPSHOT OF HOMELESSNESS

• 11,253: Homeless youths enrolled in Clark County schools in 2014—2015, not including homeless youths who are not enrolled in school

• 12.3 percent of homeless people in Nevada are unaccompanied children 17 or younger (as of 2014). The only states with a higher percentage are California (28.4 percent) and Florida (19.6 percent).

• Homeless youths are more likely than their peers to engage in substance abuse, suffer from mental and physical health problems, contract sexually-transmitted diseases, experience unwanted pregnancies, commit and become victims of crimes, go to prison, become involved in gangs, drop out of school and become homeless adults.

• 1 in 5 Children under the age of 18 will run away at least once

• One-third of homeless youths engage in survival sex

• 50 percent of children and teens in shelters and on the streets nationwide report that their parents either told them to leave or knew they were leaving but didn’t care

• 46 percent of homeless youths left home because of physical abuse

• 17 percent of homeless youths left home because of sexual abuse

• Runaways are 6 to 12 times more likely to become infected with HIV compared with nonrunaways

• 40 percent of homeless youths identify as LGBTQ. Racial and ethic minorities, and LGBTQ youths, are overrepresented among the homeless population

HOW YOU CAN HELP

• Understand the problem. Many people define homelessness inaccurately, assuming that someone is homeless only if he or she lives on the street. But homelessness refers to any lack of regular, stable housing. Homeless people may couch surf, rent rooms by the week or live in a vehicle. Understanding the proper definition is key to addressing the issue because it is the first step in realizing how widespread the problem is.

• Volunteer. Most homeless-advocacy groups welcome help from volunteers. Pitch in with administrative duties, sort clothing, cook meals, assemble furniture, teach a computer class, help with a job application or sponsor a field trip. The opportunities are vast, and many require only a small investment of time.

• Donate. Nonprofits that work with homeless and displaced teens are in constant need of supplies. The next time you are shopping, why not grab a few extra items to donate? Or organize a donation drive at your office, school or house of worship. Monetary donations also are appreciated, and many of the local agencies guarantee 100 percent of the contributions go directly to helping kids.

• Lobby elected officials. More resources for outreach and prevention means more homeless youths can be helped in a meaningful way. But expansions in programming take money and political will. Lobby your elected officials and ask them to act today to end homelessness. Write letters, make phone calls, send emails. “These youths are not a policymaker’s problem,” said Arash Ghafoori, executive director of the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth. “They’re not voters. They’re not taxpayers.” So you be their voice instead.

ORGANIZATIONS TO DONATE TO OR VOLUNTEER AT

• HELP of Southern Nevada's Shannon West Homeless Youth Center, 1640 E. Flamingo Road, Suite 100, Las Vegas; 702-369-4357; helpsonv.org/programs-youth.php

HELP of Southern Nevada's Shannon West Homeless Youth Center provides services for at-risk youths who are homeless or are at risk of becoming homeless. The Youth Center aims to motivate residents to reach self-sufficiency by providing them training and skills to further their education, employment, social skills and life skills. Services offered on site include substance abuse counseling, mental health referrals, financial literacy classes, educational assessment, vocational training, health education and anger management classes. Young people can visit the center any time day or night to be assessed for programs.

• Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth, 4981 Shirley St., Las Vegas; 702-383-1332; nphy.org

The Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth provides services to thousands of children and teens in Southern Nevada. Programs aim to stabilize homeless youths’ lives, meet their immediate needs, provide a safe, supportive environment and offer the young people a path to self-sufficiency. The organization operates a drop-in center and emergency shelter, facilitates family reunifications and runs an independent living program.

• Street Teens, 5599 S. Pecos Road, Las Vegas; 702-215-4171, streetteens.org

Street Teens is a volunteer-based, nonprofit group that helps homeless, abandoned and at-risk youths, ages 12-21. Volunteers provide basic necessities such as clothing, food, showers, sleeping bags, phone cards and bus passes, and help the young people access educational, health care and employment resources.

• Project 150, 3600 N. Rancho Drive, Las Vegas; 702-721-7150, project150.org

Project 150 collaborates with schools and community organizations to maximize resources for struggling teens to allow the students to focus on graduating from high school. Project 150 serves more than 1,500 homeless, displaced and disadvantaged students at 38 high schools in Southern Nevada.

• Title 1 Hope: Homeless Outreach for Education, 702-855-6682, ccsd.net/departments/title-i-hope

Title I Hope, an effort by the Clark County School District, works to remove barriers so homeless students can enroll in and remain in school. Staff provides students tutoring and mentoring, transportation, clothing, food, scholarships, computer access and more.

WHAT SHOULD I DONATE?

Drop off items for donation 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday at the volunteer center, 3600 N. Rancho Drive, Las Vegas, or at any Harmony Homes sales office in the valley.

These are the most requested items at Project 150:

• School supplies: Pens, pencils, highlighters, binders, paper, spiral notebooks, notebook dividers, calculators, USB flash drives, backpacks and combination locks for lockers

• Food: Juices, crackers, instant soup, canned meats, canned beans, peanut butter, instant oatmeal, protein bars, granola bars, dry noodles and pastas, applesauce and dried fruit

• Clothing: Gently used or new teen appropriate clothing (jeans, T-shirts, jackets, tennis shoes, sleepwear); socks, underwear, bras and undershirts

• New small fleece throw blankets

• Bus passes

• Personal hygiene items and toiletries

Have formal wear you’re looking to toss? Donate it instead to Las Vegas Prom Closet, Project 150’s special-occasion boutique. This year’s shopping event will be March 12 in Zappos Plaza, but donations are accepted year-round. Teens who otherwise might not attend prom because they can’t afford clothing can pick out outfits for their special day. Needed items include new or gently used formal dresses, suits, shoes, ties, purses and accessories, with a critical need for plus-size dresses, young men’s dress clothes and jewelry. Makeup, makeup brushes, hair products and hair irons also are needed. Drop off item at the Project 150 volunteer center.

HOW TO GET HELP IF YOU NEED IT

• If you have nowhere to sleep: Teens ages 12-18 who have no place to sleep, have run away or been kicked out of their home, need a stable housing situation, need food, clothing or hygiene supplies, or feel like they are in danger can call the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth crisis hotline 24 hours a day at 1-866-U-ARE-SAFE (1-866-827-3723) to talk to someone and get immediate help.

• If you need help immediately, go to these spots: Any time of day, youths can request help by going to any Terrible Herbst convenience store or city of Las Vegas fire station, or boarding any Regional Transportation Commission bus and asking for help. A Safe Place crisis responder will meet the child within 30 minutes.

• If you need help finding jobs and housing: Young people ages 12-21 can call the Street Teens 24-hour hotline at 702-809-3585. Volunteers help young people be as safe and healthy as possible while living on the streets and provide resources to help homeless youths find jobs and housing.

• if you need services: Between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, youths can visit the Nevada Partnership for Homeless Youth Drop-In Center at 4981 Shirley St., Las Vegas, to access services. Walk-ins are welcome.

MORE RESOURCES

Nevada211

702-836-2195, nevada211.org

Nevada211 connects people, for free, to critical health and human services. Access the database of local community services by phone, by text or online.

• • •

Rape Crisis Center

702-366-1640, rcclv.org

The Rape Crisis Center provides victim assistance immediately after an assault, via a 24-hour hotline or in-person at the hospital.

• • •

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

1-800-273-8255, 1-800-799-4889 (TTY), suicidepreventionlifeline.org

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline helps people find a reason to keep living. By calling, you’ll be connected to a trained counselor at a crisis center in your area. The hotline operates 24/7.

• • •

Child Protective Services

702-399-0081, clarkcountynv.gov/depts/family_services/services/

Child Protective Services investigates reports of child abuse and neglect in our community. That can include physical, mental or sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, negligent treatment or maltreatment of a child under age of 18 by a person responsible for his or her welfare.

• • •

The Trevor Lifeline

1-866-488-7386, thetrevorproject.org

The Trevor Project provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning young people ages 13-24.

• • •

Safe Nest

702-646-4981, 1-800-486-7282, safenest.org

Safe Nest shelters, counsels and advocates for victims of domestic violence. Shelter homes are maintained in undisclosed locations for the safety of victims.

• • •

National Runaway Safeline

1-800-786-2929, 1800runaway.org

The National Runaway Safeline offers support to young people who have run away or are considering running away. Trained counselors can suggest options for outreach or simply listen.

• • •

National Human Trafficking Resource Center

1-888-373-7888, polarisproject.org

The National Human Trafficking Resource Center operates a toll-free hotline to answer calls from anywhere in the United States, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in more than 200 languages. Staff connect human trafficking victims to support and services to get help and stay safe. Victims also can send a message to the BeFree Textline (233733) to get help and connect with local services.

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