The nonprofit that provides volunteer tutors and educational supplies for homeless children is seeking 500 donors to pledge $100 each.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
The state budget crisis is forcing Sacramento to slice some $6 billion from the Department of Education and another $3 billion from social services that, among other programs, provide transportation to schools. Students will be relying more and more on private organizations to fill the gaps. And, for homeless children, the problems are even greater.
In this economic maelstrom, Malibu-based School on Wheels is a safe haven for children whose toss-of-the-life dice has landed them and their families homeless. For 17 years, nonprofit School on Wheels has been providing volunteer tutors and backpacks loaded with essential learning supplies for some 5,000 homeless and at-risk children every year.
School on Wheels founder Agnes Stevens, a Malibu resident, wants to meet what promises to be even greater need this year with a “Founder’s Challenge,” a funding drive that seeks 5,000 new donors pledging $100 each.
“Middle and high school kids whose families live on skid row use to have a bus token program,” Stevens said in an interview with The Malibu Times. “That will be cut, so I don’t know how they will get to school now.”
Though the budget cuts will not affect Stevens’ program (School on Wheels operates totally from private donations, with more than 90 percent of funds going directly to student services), many aspects of the new fiscal austerity will impact her mission. Stevens noted that the state welfare-to-work program will be severely cut and the Los Angeles Unified School District has already cut summer school classes.
“There are 1.5 million homeless children in the U.S., most of them at major urban centers like Los Angeles,” School on Wheels Communications coordinator Sinead Chilton said. “With so many families losing their homes to foreclosures, we expect to be helping a lot more children this year.”
A substantial amount of the organization’s donations comes from local sources like the Kiwanis Club and church groups pledging $10 per month to help serve a population from Santa Barbara County through Orange County and inland to San Bernardino, though only about three percent of its donors come from Malibu. Their volunteer pool includes students, retirees, industry professionals and people between jobs.
“Many of our volunteers who are unemployed see their work as a timely sort of hedge against these kids’ future,” Stevens said. “They are all telling us, ‘Education is key to these children’s ability to survive downturns in the future.”
Jennifer Brazgel has been volunteering with School on Wheels since February, tutoring an eight-year-old girl at a Los Angeles Family Housing center. The media relations consultant was inspired to help after reading about School on Wheels on a volunteer-matching Web site.
“When I read that the average age for a homeless person in the U.S. was 10 years, it broke my heart,” Brazgel said. “When I first met my student at the Family Housing center, I was concerned that it would be depressing. It wasn’t. It was vibrant and bubbly.”
Brazgel works with her charge twice a week, tutoring her on everything from math to science, and says that the girl wants to go to college and become a teacher.
“I want her to make it,” Brazgel said. “I make my living writing, so education is very important to me. School on Wheels should help her get there. In terms of a volunteer organization, they are so together.”
Stevens has seen School on Wheels grow exponentially each year since 1993, when she founded it. Last year, the former teacher was nominated for the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child, sometimes known as the “children’s Nobel Peace Prize.” Its criteria for selecting honorees is based on a version of the Geneva Convention for people under the age of 18, and emphasizes the inherent dignity of all children.
“We had a girl living downtown on skid row who was in high school,” Stevens recounted. “Her mother had pretty severe problems and the girl had moved seven or eight times in recent years. Yet she wanted to go to community college. We helped her fill out the forms and she went and did very well. Now she’s looking for a scholarship to go to Harvard.
“It is enormously empowering for these children, who have such fragile social lives, to realize that they can learn,” Stevens continued. “I’m hoping our community rises to this challenge, because educating kids pays off for society as a whole.”
More information about School on Wheels, including donations, can be obtained online at www.schoolonwheels.org.