Instead of moving from one school to another, Oregon’s Community Transitional School lets homeless students remain in class as they find somewhere to live

A school that offers a place to learn, even if the kids have nowhere to live

In her 11 years of life, Jada has moved between homeless shelters, overcrowded flats and barely habitable motels.

“We couldn’t find a stable home and we moved a lot. We couldn’t afford the rent,” said the 11-year-old with glasses and big hair. “I’ve never lived in a house. I’d like to live in a house.”

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With each move, Jada found herself in a new school, rotating through six in just her first three years in the education system. With each school came the trauma of making new friends and adapting to the curriculum before being cut adrift again. That was until she landed at a small school in an industrial area of Portland, Oregon.

“Our kids are pretty hardcore homeless, well their families are, and so this is a stable place,” said Cheryl Bickle, principal of the Community Transitional School. “They can stay here for six or seven years while their families are in and out of homelessness.”

You learn to be really honest with the kids here and they can be really honest with you Cheryl Bickle, principal at CTS

Bickle founded the Community Transitional School (CTS) in 1990 to provide some stability in the lives of children facing a struggle to escape itinerancy because their education was constantly disrupted. Instead of moving from one school district to another, students can remain at CTS no matter where their parents live.

The school applies a broad definition of homelessness. Some students live in shelters on the edge of the city. Others move between church basements, other people’s couches and cheap motels where entire families cram into a single room.

“Homeless means they’re living in a shelter, a motel, or moving from friend to friend, or they’re doubling up with a relative for a while. But the relative doesn’t usually have enough resources or the rental agreement does not allow people to come and move in,” Bickle said. “To be truthful with you, there’s a lot of drugs and alcohol among our parents.”

Jada said her family struggled after her father found it difficult to find steady work.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With each move, Jada found herself in a new school, rotating through six in just her first three years in the education system. Photograph: Chris McGreal/The Guardian

“My dad keeps going in between jobs. My mom used to be a nurse but she got knee surgery so she can’t walk that well. She has disability and she has a lot of disorders,” she said.

Jada’s best friend at school is Mykalah, also 11, who moved between foster homes.

“It’s different but I’ve gotten used to it after the first one. I liked the foster home I just got out of because they were nice and they had a baby and babies are just so chubby,” she said with glee.

Asked what she thinks of CTS, Mykalah is matter-of-fact.

“The school is small and there’s not that much chaos,” she said. “Kids in other schools act different. They find school easier because they don’t have all the chaos in their lives.”

Chaos is a word that comes up a lot as students describe the challenges of their home lives.

“If you move around a lot, sometimes you get confused and then you forget stuff you learned in school,” Jada said.

Their friend Lila, 12, has a different take. She arrived from El Salvador a year ago with her mother. They have yet to find somewhere permanent to live and share a house with a relative and several other people. Lila said that her school in El Salvador was so overcrowded that students attended for only half the day, so she appreciates the space at CTS.

This school year about 250 children attended CTS, which was itself homeless for years, moving from one property to another until finding a stable home near Portland’s airport with the help of a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The buildings are light and airy but classes are not small. Bickle teaches 42 students in a single class.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mykalah: ‘Kids in other schools act different. They find school easier because they don’t have all the chaos in their lives.’ Photograph: Chris McGreal/The Guardian

CTS was initially met with hostility by Portland officials who wanted homeless children to attend whichever school was closest to their shelter or temporary residence. The school board even challenged the transitional school’s legality by suggesting that it was practicing racial discrimination because it went looking for students to help and a high proportion of those were black or Latino.

Bickle suspected the real issue was funding, as grants to help educate homeless children went to CTS instead of the local authority. But in time the school found acceptance. Today CTS gets part of its budget from the county but mostly relies on grants and fundraising from places such as the local bar, which donated half the takings in its restaurant for one day.

The students find acceptance they could not in other schools. At CTS, everyone’s family has a difficult story and the pupils are not judging each other for it.

“Once you let them know it doesn’t matter what your living situation is, everybody here has been homeless at one time in their life. Have been in foster care? Probably. Has a parent in jail. Has moved around a lot. You don’t have to be nervous about it,” Bickle said.

International surveys show that US students fall behind other countries in subjects ranging from physics to languages but that they generally come out top in self-confidence. Not so much at the transitional school.

“Our kids don’t come to us with any confidence because you get your first confidence from your family. If you’ve lost your housing or you see your parents doing all the stuff that’s not good to do, that doesn’t make you feel like you’re very confident,” Bickle said. “The children grow up knowing the shelter system really well but having no one who has very many expectations of them. That’s the hardest thing. They have no expectations for themselves. We believe more in our students than they believe in themselves. They don’t have the role models about what to expect out of life.”

Bickle is forthright to the point of saying she hopes she does not sound too negative. But the principal sees it as her job to help students confront their reality in order to move beyond it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lila arrived from El Salvador a year ago with her mother and has yet to find somewhere permanent to live. Photograph: Chris McGreal/The Guardian

“If we don’t teach them now that they have got to be able to live between the world of homelessness outside of school and the world of being a typical student in America who wants to go on to high school and wants to go to college and wants to have a job, if you don’t learn the skills you’re not ever going to escape from the world of being homeless,” she said. “You learn to be really honest with the kids here and they can be really honest with you. They’ll say: ‘I wish my family were this way or that way’.”

Still, Bickle treads a fine line. She needs to motivate her students to do better in life than their parents, to escape the trap of low pay, homelessness and sometimes drugs, without condemning or judging those parents in front of children who love them.

“You just have to say: ‘You don’t have to make all the choices that you see being made and you have to think of what you want out of life’,” she said. “It’s a fine act. You don’t say things about their parents, but you have to teach the kids you can’t use your parent as an excuse. If you didn’t do your homework, start with the ‘I’,” she said.

The school takes children up until the age of 14 in the hope of preparing them to prosper in a regular high school.

“People say, have you had a graduate from Harvard?” Bickle said. “No, we haven’t. I’m always happy if we can say, ‘But we have a graduate from college and it took a lot for that person’.”

A few do go on to college and success. Others struggle to make it through high school.

Bickle describes one longtime student who was doing well in school until her home life overwhelmed her.

“Her family got homeless again so she just was so disgusted with it all – she’s been homeless off and on her entire life – so she just stopped turning in her work,” she said.

Jada wants to be a vet and Mykalah a doctor. Lila is focused on learning English and adjusting to America. But talk of future plans prompts Bryson, a bouncy, bright 10-year-old, to speak up.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bryson went through several schools when he was younger but has been at CTS for four years. Photograph: Chris McGreal/The Guardian

“We moved between a lot of different places,” he said before ticking off a couple of Portland suburbs and the city of Vancouver just across the Columbia river in Washington state. “We lived in trailer park and then we moved to another trailer park.”

Bryson lives with his father and a brother. Another brother is in prison. He went through several schools when he was younger but has been at CTS for four years.

He likes the school, particularly having so many friends. But Bryson has his eye on a shining future.

“I want to be an NBA all-star player,” he said, beaming.

His declaration prompts a chorus of scorn from the girls who accuse him of breaking the basketball hoop by hanging onto it. He tries to bluster his way out, but they insist and eventually he acknowledges the crime a little shamefacedly.