Homeless kids: Young, invisible and largely forgotten

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Homeless kids: Young, invisible and largely forgotten
Of Osceola's 1,885 homeless, almost half are school-age children -- and little help is available

By Jeannette Rivera-Lyles, Orlando Sentinel

10:35 PM EST, January 10, 2010
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Dymond Walker's eyes sparkle when she talks about her future. Plan A, the 15-year-old says, is to be a veterinarian. Plan B is to work as an animal rescuer.

Keeping those dreams alive is a daily struggle. Dymond and her two younger sisters, T'ara Pollins, 13, and Krystal Pollins, 11, and their mother, Shaneek Livingston, have been homeless for nine months. In that time, they have lived doubled up with a family of five, slept in a car for days and stayed in a walk-in closet with a twin bed.

"My mom didn't really sleep in the bed," Dymond said. "Sometimes there are three of us on the floor. We can't curl up because the space is so tight. And it [was] hot, like 110 degrees," she said.

The little family is the real, yet invisible face of homelessness in Osceola. According to a survey by the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, the county has 1,885 homeless people. Nearly half of those, counts show, are school-age children.

In Central Florida, Osceola has the highest percentage of school-age children in its homeless population, followed by Seminole County and then Orange County, according to Homeless Services Network. Missing from these tallies are homeless children too young to be in school. In Osceola, the only county where such estimates are available, including those youngsters raises the percentage of children to nearly two-thirds of the homeless population.

As if being homeless isn't hard enough, it's even tougher in Osceola. The county has no residential shelters or centrally located soup kitchens, and local officials have historically directed few resources toward the problem, in part because they haven't grasped its magnitude.

"The homeless in this county are invisible to the average citizen," said Cathy Jackson, director of the Homeless Services Network, a regional organization that helps fund homeless services in Osceola, Seminole and Orange counties through grants and donations. "Perhaps because it is more rural, and it [homelessness] is a problem often associated with more urban areas. When I tell people about the numbers in Osceola they say, 'Wow, are they from here?' I say, 'Yes, we didn't import them from Detroit.'"

Few organizations provide help

Only a few private organizations in Osceola, such as churches, make the homeless their mission.

"It is very distressing," Jackson said. "They [Osceola] have between 20 [percent] and 23 percent of the homeless of the region but have no services for this population. Almost nothing."

An Osceola group called Helping Others Make the Effort, or HOME, focuses on homeless mothers with children. Official counts place the number of homeless school-age children in Osceola at 900, based on school-enrollment numbers. But for every client HOME sees with a school-age child, there are usually two or three younger siblings, said Mary Downey, its deputy director.

"A conservative estimate of the population's total would be about 1,400 [kids]," she said.

Stephen, 4, and Kevin Ryan, 2, are part of that unofficial estimate. They have lived in cars and in a friend's garage. They now live in a motel room where roaches crawl freely. Their mother, Stephany, would not give her last name to a reporter for fear that her children would be taken away and she would be kicked out of the motel. In Osceola, it is illegal to live more than three months in a motel.

"I have faith I'll get out of here soon," said Stephany, who recently got a job as a theme-park merchandise clerk. "My family in Georgia is helping me as much as they can, and so is my church. But it has been a nightmare from which I haven't been able to shield my boys."

Stephany's problems started when she lost her roommate and her job at a marina in less than a month. Her Kissimmee apartment went next.

Unstable conditions

A recent study by the Homeless Network attempted to locate Osceola's homeless families. About 43 percent live in crammed, unstable conditions, doubled up with other families, and 28 percent, like Stephany, live in motels where they could be kicked out anytime. In the worst cases, they live in cars or in one of the 18 homeless camps throughout the county. The makeshift villages are made up of tents or shacks of cardboard and other scrap material.

Dymond and her sisters are now among 15 families in transitional-living apartments run by HOME. They became homeless after her mother lost her $30-an-hour job as a drug counselor. The only job Livingston could get immediately in the slow economy was as a restaurant hostess.

The family's lowest point, Livingston said, was sleeping in the walk-in closet, which was in the house of a friend's mother.

"Our only other option was the car, so we took it [the closet]," she said. "But it was horrible. The closet was still full of clothes."

HOME provides families with a safe place to live and helps them become independent through counseling and job-hunting assistance.

The latter, however, is becoming increasingly difficult in the economic downturn that has seen Osceola's unemployment rate reach 12.8 percent. The national average is about 10 percent.

"We have women here with a college education and many others with lots of experience in specialized fields, and they just can't get a job," Downey said.

'This is intolerable'

County Commissioner Ken Smith was spurred to take action when he learned the number of the county's homeless children.

"We need to decide as a community what we need to do," said Smith, who grew up in Osceola County. "When I was a kid, I didn't know a single kid who was homeless. Now we have 1,200 or more kids without a home. This is intolerable."

At a recent County Commission meeting, Smith urged colleagues to think of ways to address the crisis comprehensively. He suggested the creation of a committee to identify resources and define strategies.

Ivelisse Frias, who lives in a HOME apartment with her daughter, Angelica, 15, has an extensive resume in the medical field that includes seven years as a surgery coordinator. Nine months of unemployment and 200 résumés later, she's finding it hard to keep hope.

"I can show you a log of all the jobs I have applied for," Frias said. "I wonder if someone is even looking at them [résumés]."

Angelica is having a tough time dealing with the loss of her family's home. She and her mother were evicted from the Kissimmee house they rented when Frias' husband left and she was laid off from two jobs in six months.

Mother and daughter went to live in a motel room that Frias rented with money she got selling the furniture and appliances she had in storage from her former home. There, they listened in terror to the almost daily beatings their next-door neighbor got from her husband. They called the police and left the place in fear.

Angelica has had chronic bouts of depression and is embarrassed about her current situation, her mother said.

"She went from being a very happy kid to a very quiet one," Frias said. "This program has been a blessing, and she's slowly regaining self-confidence. But it has been really tough on her."

Jeannette Rivera-Lyles can be reached at jrivera@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5471.

Homeless children of school age:

Osceola: 900 of 1,885 total homeless (48%)

Seminole: 802 of 1,750 total homeless (46%)

Orange: 2,504 of 6,252 total homeless (40%)

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