Causecast

By Mark Price

Kenya McCormick, 14, is typical of the eighth-grade boys at Charlotte’s John Taylor Williams Middle School. He’d love to play professional basketball, wants his own dirt bike and imagines the perfect meal to be Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.

There is one difference, though: He’s homeless.

Kenya, his mother and two siblings were evicted a month ago and now share a single room in one of Charlotte’s shelters.

He’s an example of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ growing population of homeless students. If predictions hold true, there could be as many as 3,000 in the system by year’s end.

Odds say many will end up as dropouts. The lucky ones will find hope through Communities In Schools, a United Way agency that seeks out students in crisis and works to keep them in school.

Kenya contends not just with homelessness, but with all that come with it – including hunger, embarrassment and day-to-day fear of what’s next.

“My mother has diabetes and she’s not well,” said Kenya. “My father is dead…and I worry that she’ll die and I will get sent to foster care. I want her to live forever.”

This year, Communities In Schools is working with 4,700 students in 36 schools, many in single-parent homes living at or below the poverty level.

Dennis Dixon is Communities In Schools coordinator at John Taylor Williams Middle School. He said 25 of the 92 students he works with are living in shelters or hotels. That’s the highest number he’s seen in 14 years with the program.

“Kids in middle school can be very cruel, so most of the kids who are homeless don’t want anybody to know,” said Dixon. “I got called to the office the other day for a young lady from a shelter that came to school in pajamas. She came in the only clothes she had. She was in the eighth grade.”

Dixon is part mentor, part counselor and part parent. Not only does he listen and encourage, but he can scrounge up an extra school uniform, or month’s worth of free school supplies on short notice. He’s also apt to show up at their home or shelter if they miss too many days of school.

“I do whatever it takes to keep them in school,” he said. “I imagine without this program, a lot of them would just disappear.”

Dixon has worked with Ken ya McCormick for three years, and the teen considers him a father figure. That’s why Ken ya continues to attend John Taylor Williams Middle School, though now he lives outside the attendance zone. Kenya and his 12-year-old sister ride a trolley, and then hop a city bus to get to class each day.

“Mr. Dixon is somebody I can count on, somebody I can trust, and people like that are hard to find,” said Kenya. “He has taught me to believe in myself.”

The program has a 97.7 percent success rate at keeping homeless and other at-risk students in school through graduation.

But that success is jeopardized by threats to the program’s funding, partly because of a $15 million shortfall in the 2008 United Way campaign. United Way supplies the program with about $500,000 each year – about 13 percent of its budget. Other big contributors are Charlotte’s troubled banks.

Communities In Schools Executive Director Bill Anderson said the agency is already preparing for cuts with a hiring freeze, a salary freeze and reductions in program costs.

“We’ll do all we can not to cut schools from the program,” said Anderson. “The greatest challenge facing these students is having someone who truly believes in them, pushes them, nags them…Most will be the first in their family to graduate from college, and they want their piece of the American dream.”

Kenya said his dream includes “lots of money to buy food” and two houses: one for himself and one next door for his mother.

Until then, he’ll be happy just to prove wrong all the people who have treated him like a lost cause.

“What I want people to know,” he said, “is that I’m not worthless.”