Throwaway Kids

Throwaway Kids


by Christine Parrish
Feature Writer

In 2008, the Breakwater teen homeless shelter in Rockland closed after seven years in operation.

"That first winter you would see kids on the street. Since then, they've gone underground," said Jack Carpenter, who has spent 20 years in Maine, working with troubled youth.

Carpenter helped start KITS, an effort to provide replacement shelter in local churches. The goal of KITS, the Knox Interfaith Teen Safe-havens project, was for area churches to take turns providing meals, transportation, clothing and supervised shelter to homeless youth between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.

This age bracket is the most at risk for homelessness and for entering a defeating lifestyle that is hard to break.

"I've seen lots of homeless kids," said Carpenter. "They have aged out of foster care. Or dad is in prison and mom's a doper. Mom has a new boyfriend, but the boyfriend says you can't bring those kids.

"I was working as a youth advocate for a 12-year-old boy and mom is there, pleading with the judge not to send the boy to Juvee. And the judge says, what alternative do I have? Will you supervise him? She says, I can't because my boyfriend refuses to have him. I'll tell you, the look on that 12-year-old's face was: 'I'm screwed.' He was. He got sent to Juvee."

Some kids end up in juvenile corrections, then foster care, and some just get thrown out.

The kids may not end up literally on the street, but they are without a home, sleeping on someone's couch one night, a floor the next, unsupervised and often making bad decisions.

"You got this big strapping 16-year-old boy and the family, mom or whoever, says we can't afford to feed you anymore, you're old enough to take care of yourself," said Carpenter. "The boy may look like a man but he's no more emotionally mature than any kid. What's he going to get into? Who is he going to look to for guidance?

"There was a girl at the Rockland High School, a good student with a full-ride scholarship for college. She came to school one day, to the guidance counselor, with her belongings in trash bags. Things had changed again: her father had a new girlfriend. Earlier she had been in a foster home after her grandparents, who raised her down in Biddeford, died. She found out her father was out of prison and asked if she could live with him up in the Rockland area. The new girlfriend kicked her out and because there was nothing available, no place to go, she ended up back in Biddeford, couch surfing."

The KITS shelter project was set to go by November, 2009, with 70 volunteers trained to manage the shelter, which would rotate from one church to the next every month, during the five months of the coldest weather.

"It gets complicated when you're talking about unsupervised minors," said Carpenter.

They did it, though. Orientation and drills had been held. The volunteers, who would always work in pairs, were trained. Liability coverage was in place.

Then the project was shut down because the churches didn't meet code requirements for lodging.

* * *

Up in Waldo County, school social worker Judy Cohen< has 10 to 15 students in Searsport, Stockton Springs and Frankfort schools that she knows are not living at home. "We see their little faces every day," she said.

There could be more.

"Not every school has a social worker and Waldo County has a poor, needy population. It's dysfunction and it's lack of money. Those are the problems. You've seen it: people living in houses that are sinking into the earth, houses with holes in the roof and all the winter firewood stacked inside."

"It's hard to know how many are homeless," said Cohen. It isn't always obvious and teachers and staff don't always know.

Across the country it is widely recognized among social service providers that the population of young people without stable housing is far greater than the numbers indicate. Many don't want to be counted.

Young people who become homeless typically already have a bad track record at school; if they haven't dropped out before they have no place to live, the research indicates they soon will. The likelihood of finishing high school and moving on to job training or college is very slim, according Opening Doors, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness 2010 Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. The lack of education and job skills sets the kid up for a low-wage life that will be hard to escape.

"If you are couch surfing, if you don't know where to stay or don't have clean clothes, it's very unstable," said Cohen. That's when kids start dropping out.

Complicating that is the fact that not every kid who is not at home is homeless. Some are just unwilling to follow the rules.

"If the kid is really not interested in being at home where there are healthy expectations within a healthy family, then they are not homeless," said Gary Skigen, director of the Belfast high school alternative education program, BECOPE, and the spokesman for Waldo County Safe Homes, an effort to find housing for homeless students.

"If they just don't want to do chores, or follow the rules, that is not a legitimate reason," said Skigen.

Teens often run away because of severe family conflict which, according to the Opening Doors study, not uncommonly includes running away from violence at home, including incest and rape. Homosexuality, or uncertainty about their sexuality, are other reasons teens cut loose from ties at home. Kids taken away from crummy homes and placed in foster care can find themselves without housing on their eighteenth birthday.

"People do tend to have this idea that it's all kids who don't want to follow the rules," said Carpenter. "That is rarely the basic problem."

* * *







It's not just the throwaway kids that suffer. And it's not just the people whose hearts hurt when they find out they are right here among us. It's also the taxpayer and the consumer, because homelessness costs a lot of money - more, in fact, than housing, job training and counseling, according to a 2009 report, The Cost of Rural Homelessness.

That's because people who are homeless are in crisis and crisis care is expensive.

Expensive emergency room visits, for example, are passed on to paying customers and insurers. Regular clinic care is much cheaper. If they get hospitalized, homeless people tend to stay four days longer, on average, than those with housing, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The extra cost is around $2,400 per hospitalization.

Health problems go up when kids become homeless, according to the Opening Doors study, including depression, asthma, hypertension, diabetes, hepatitis and suicide. Substance abuse is common, as are other mental health disorders.

No specific study has been done on the cost of youth homelessness in Maine, but the 2009 study on the cost of rural homelessness in Maine indicates that each homeless individual costs the rest of us around $19,000 a year. When they get supportive housing and services, including drug treatment, job training, and more, the cost to society drops to less than $12,000 a year.

The police and emergency services time devoted to these throwaway kids is no joke. When they end up in jail for using or trading drugs or for theft, that costs county and city taxpayers real money. According to the Maine Board of Corrections, it costs $43,000 a year to keep a prisoner in the Knox County Jail.

And, if the pattern continues and escalates and the messed-up kid becomes a messed-up adult and ends up in Maine State Prison or the minimum-security Bolduc unit, it costs $47,500 a year per person, according to Denise Lord, the associate commisioner at the Maine Department of Corrections.

* * *

For youth who are still in school or want to be, people in the greater Belfast area have gathered together to create the Waldo County Safe Homes Foundation.

"It's to provide safe, family-based living situations for students in need," said Skigen. "This effort has been under way in Waldo County for 10 or 12 years. I've only been involved for the last two.

"That's when I first noticed that I was losing students because they didn't have a place to live," he said.

Skigen, an infinitely patient no-nonsense man in his fifties, was dressed in jeans and work boots and a faded canvas shirt. His grey hair was pulled back in a ponytail. When Skigen recognized that he had homeless students, he also found out there was already a group of law enforcement officers, the juvenile probation officer, educators, job counselors, churches, restorative justice advocates and others who had joined together to find a housing solution.

The goal is to keep homeless kids in school.

"But it has to work for the kids, too," said Skigen, leaning back in his chair. His small office was crammed with students. One dark-haired boy in baggy black clothes was sitting a foot away from Skigen, writing a story on his laptop, a pretty girl was eating a bowl of fruit on the couch and another, with her hair pulled back, was tapping into her laptop. The phone kept ringing and students and teachers stopped in constantly. One girl was looking for her draft essay, which turned out to be in Skigen's out-box; a boy popped in to ask for Tylenol, another for a cough drop, a third wanted to go home sick and his mother arrived to take him.

"There are families willing to take them in, but there has to be an agreement," said Skigen, between interruptions. He turned to the young woman eating fruit.

"Would you stay at a house that expected you to go to church every Sunday?" he asked her.

"I wouldn't stay at a place that wouldn't let me stay at my boyfriend's," she said, then looked at me. "I have a serious boyfriend, right?"

"I might," said the other girl, looking up from her laptop. "I like going to church."

"A list of screening questions is very important," said

Skigen. "We placed one young woman in a home and realized too late we should have asked a lot of questions ahead of time.

"I am hoping that by the end of the school year we will have something in place, but I always want things done six months ago."

It's not foster care and it's not adoption. It is simply a way to provide housing in a stable home so a student can finish high school, if that is what they want, said Skigen.

The Safe Homes project, which is newly formed, is just about at the point of starting to raise money to offset some of the costs to the families who volunteer to take in students. Families will not be paid. Instead, the goal is for Safe Homes to pay for clothes, unfunded medical care and transportation in an effort to reduce the cost to the family, said Skigen.

"Most families that have talked to me about providing a home are not asking for money," said Skigen.

* * *

Jack Carpenter in Rockland said KITS is now directing its efforts towards raising money to help six families who have taken students into their homes. Typically, these kids are staying with the family of a friend.

"The help includes paying back rent, a truck payment, heat and electric bills, a mortgage payment, clothing, food cards and more," said Carpenter.

Recently, a newly formed group has gotten behind the KITS fund-raising effort. Where Do I Go Now (WDIGN) started a homeless-teen awareness project in the past few months and on Saturday evening, March 19, will hold a "Camp-a-thon,"a fund-raiser at Chapman Park next to the Rite Aide pharmacy on the corner of Park and Main streets in Rockland. Volunteers will make a soup from donated food over an open fire and provide it free to all comers. They plan to have music and speakers on teen homelessness from 5 to 9 p.m., and pass the hat for donations to KITS.

* * *

Judy Cohen in Searsport is part of the Waldo County Safe Homes effort. But she doesn't think there is a silver-bullet solution to the problem.

"There is no one-size-fits-all for these kids," said Cohen. One of her homeless teen boys, who was living in a motel room with his three siblings and his mother, jumped at the chance to go to Job Corps when he was told about it.

Job Corps, a federal Department of Labor program for at-risk youth, provides education and job training, housing, and a paycheck for youth 18 to 24 years old.

"It's very structured. Students have to live there. It's not for everyone," said Cohen. "But he's doing great.

"Look, I've been here 17 years and it's a patchwork approach to helping kids," she said. "It's just the way it is."

* * *

Long-term planning to address teen homelessness is also under way and that effort is also new. Pinny Beebe-Center, the director of Penquis community programs, also serves as the spokesperson for the Midcoast Homeless Consortium, which was started last year.

The Homeless Consortium has rallied behind the idea of starting a resource center and homeless shelter in downtown Rockland to help two key homeless populations for which there are few resources: single parents aged 18 to 24 years old, and kids who have been in the foster-care system who have turned 18 years old and have no place to go.

"It would be on the Camden Community School model of instruction and life skills; a resource center with beds," said Beebe-Center. "We even have a building in mind in downtown Rockland, where you can walk to everything."

What they don't have is money.

"We went after a major source of funding," said Beebe-Center. "But it fell through."