Moreover, the older students tend to hide their homelessness, making it harder for programs to find and help them. “Education is not on the top of your list,” she said of homeless students. Meek climbed under and sat with her.Ī bond had to form, Meek said, before studies were even a concern. She wouldn’t come out from under a table in the shelter. Meek recalled one of the first children she mentored: a young girl who was soon abandoned by her mother. For most, tutors measure success in much more rudimentary terms: “A kid does his homework for a month or his grades improve.”Īchieving that requires trust, she said. Meek called Sanchez the outlier among School on Wheels students. “College does start to look like a bunch of smiling faces on a pamphlet.”īut Sanchez made it to UCLA, where she’s in her second year and has enough credits to be a junior. “Your motivation starts to wane,” Sanchez said. Sanchez had ambitions of going to UCLA and becoming a teacher, but those dreams began to falter. Yet her father continued to take her to school in Glendale, where she kept up her grades. The family finally found a spot in a more hospitable family shelter in Pasadena. “It was terrible,” she said, recalling a huge, harshly lighted hall of stiff cots where men, women and children bunked together. The money ran out and they wound up in a cold-weather shelter. Like many newly homeless families, they hopped from motel to motel. Her mother had been sick and her father, an architect, lost his job. When she was 16, her family was evicted from the home she grew up in. High school became the one steady place for Angela Sanchez when a swirl of bad fortune uprooted her family. Unified’s coordinator of pupil services and attendance. School on Wheels and the district’s programs work to keep school “a point of stability,” said Melissa Schoonmaker, L.A. Unified tries to keep them in the same schools, even offering transportation to help get them there. They move around constantly, depending on shelter openings and whether family members can take them in. Homeless children tend to be four to six months behind their classmates, Meek said. They work in parks, libraries and other public places as well as in the storefront in South L.A. School on Wheels solicits and trains hundreds of volunteers who provide one-on-one tutoring for homeless students in the Los Angeles area. Learning Center and serves more than 6,000 homeless youths each year, is bracing for its budget of about $800,000 to shrink as homelessness among families expands at an unprecedented rate, said Catherine Meek, its executive director. School on Wheels, the nonprofit that runs the South L.A. Got a question? Send it to Answer Fella via /talk.The programs attempting to help the children in these situations, like School on Wheels, face a sad dilemma: The same difficult economic times that create the need for such services also cause them to struggle financially. Plantenga's soon-to-be-released Blaaaaaat!: Finns and Flatulence. Stucky, whose "Hellooo-aiiiiii-eeee-ooooo" punctured both his eardrums.ĭon't miss Mr. No doubt each had much to say, but AF's first call was to Ms. They have this method of singing back and forth between two voices, and it's just pure pleasure at that level."ĪF also phoned two professional yodelers, Erika Stucky, whose album Suicidal Yodels won Germany's Schallplattenkritik award, and Randy Erwin, aka Cowboy Randy, who works rodeos, kids' shows, and the pumpkin-festival circuit throughout the Midwest. The Pygmies use it for many things, including feasts and playing. It probably also had to do with people amusing themselves. More practically, it probably began 10,000 years or so ago, when animals first were domesticated, a way to keep the cattle together. Plantenga suggests that yodeling most likely originated in Africa, "at the beginning of mankind, when man decided he could do different things with his voice. That's what my book tried to dispel, the idea that it's limited to this one area of the Alps." Bart Plantenga, author of Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World, tells AF that this "Swiss thing" business is hooey: "There are tons of yodelers in France and the Netherlands. Yodeling: I know it's a Swiss thing, but when did it start and why? And does anyone still do it?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |