On a sunny Monday afternoon in October, kindergarten students paste leaves and smiley faces to orange pumpkin cut-outs, their fingers sticky with glue. In another classroom, a little boy is coloring a giant letter A in red, while other children play with blocks on the ground.
They are scenes typical of an American elementary school. But Positive Tomorrows, the only elementary school in Oklahoma dedicated to serving homeless students, has carved out a niche for itself.
Well over one million American students are homeless, and their complex needs are often not met by traditional public schooling. For instance, how do you teach a student who is hungry? How do you arrange a school bus route when a child moves from shelter to shelter?
Positive Tomorrows believes the best way to address these needs is to run a school exclusively for homeless kids. Based in the capital Oklahoma City, the private school serves 105 students from kindergarten to sixth grade before graduating them to public schools in the area (students spend an average of 89 days at the school).
More than addressing logistics, the school believes it can make students feel less alone. “It’s one less difference [between homeless and non-homeless students],” says Crystal Henry, whose 11-year-old son Tristen is a student at Positive Tomorrows, “because all the children are homeless.”
The two have been living in a homeless shelter since August, when Henry relapsed and started using drugs again. She believes it’s been a good alternative for Tristen because the school allows him to interact with kids in similar circumstances.
“Here, that stigma is lifted,” says Rachel Durham, Development Officer for Positive Tomorrows. “Our kids can celebrate getting into an apartment or mom getting a GED without other kids going like, ‘Why are you celebrating that?’”
EEarlier that afternoon, first and second graders munched on chicken sandwiches, mashed sweet potatoes, and corn, famished after a sweaty recess.
The logistical hurdles the students face are significant, and these chicken sandwiches are as important as the learning environment. “You can’t learn on an empty stomach, so we make sure our kids are not hungry,” Durham says. Food is sent home with them on the weekends and summer breaks, thanks to help from a local community food bank.
Providing meals is just one way Positive Tomorrows is able to tailor its services to the needs of its students.
When it comes to transportation, students are picked up and dropped off every day by a school bus, like most schools. But here, the process is a little different. “It’s a big challenge if you’re mobile and you move three times in a week,” Durham says. “A public school system may not have the resources to find you. We do. Our bus routes change pretty much daily.”
The students also receive medical checkups, clothes, shoes, and backpacks.
“When our kids get here and there’s already a backpack with their name on it, they feel like they belong,” she continues. “They know they’re supposed to be here and that paves the way for them to learn in the classroom.”
This means a lot because, for some students, Positive Tomorrows is the first school they have attended.
Because of this, students get specialized education. For example, a 7-year-old who doesn’t know how to read may drop down a grade for certain subjects, but continue to eat and play with kids their age during recess and lunch.
According to Positive Tomorrows, almost every grade level improved their math skills during the 2015–2016 school year. But individualized education only does so much if a student has an unstable family environment. Because of this, case managers help parents get into housing and teach skills like money management and job interview techniques.
For parent-teacher conferences, Positive Tomorrows provides transportation, on-site daycare, and dinner so the family doesn’t have to choose between the meeting and eating at the shelter. “Our parents want to be here but sometimes there are barriers that get in the way,” Durham says.
Last year, over half of Positive Tomorrows families had at least one parent working at a job and 67 percent either showed an improvement in housing options or maintained stable housing.
Isolating homeless students isn’t a strategy everyone agrees with. And as such, Positive Tomorrows has struggled with funding. When No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, it mandated that students couldn’t be segregated based on their homeless status. As a result, Positive Tomorrows lost its federal funding, which comprised about half of its budget. Private funders stepped in, including basketball player Kevin Durant, who used to play with the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Mark Sperling, interim director of the School of Education at Indiana University Northwest, tends to agree. Sperling has worked on issues of homelessness for over a decade and he doesn’t believe that a segregated school is a good idea.
“It would not provide them the educational and interactional opportunities that all students need to have,” he says. Students, he continues, deserve to have a variety of teachers, subjects, and extra-curricular activities, along with opportunities to interact with their peers. “Being homeless should never be a reason that a student does not receive the type of education that they require and deserve.”
Since the school relies on private funding, it is by necessity small and difficult to scale. With a daily capacity of 74 students, it leaves an estimated 9,400 homeless children in Oklahoma City in the public school system.
Durham says Positive Tomorrows offers its students opportunities that they may not have by attending a public school, which often don’t have sufficient school supplies, field trips, or opportunities for extracurricular activities like slumber parties, ballet, or scouting.
“They often struggle to focus in the classroom due to the trauma homelessness brings,” she says. “At Positive Tomorrows, we make sure they get to experience all those things that they miss out on, and that they have their most basic needs met so that they can focus on learning instead of survival.”
Henry agrees. Her son Tristen has behavioral issues, and she says Positive Tomorrows teachers know how to handle him. She also says the school gives him opportunities that he may not have living in a homeless shelter, such as the birthday party the school threw him right before Halloween.
Tristen received several presents, including a long-board, Bluetooth speakers, and a teddy bear for his mother. “It was a great birthday party,” Henry says. “He probably had one of the best birthdays he’s ever had.”
The two recently moved out of the City Rescue Mission and into a sober living apartment, cooking their first meal of beef stroganoff. “It’s been amazing,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of friends who have supported me and I’ve had people bringing stuff almost every night.”
