Area Program Saves Teen from the Streets
Seventeen-year-old Nicholas
Shanks is your average, teenage boy. He spends his time playing video games
with friends, watching cartoons on Saturday mornings and listening to music on
his computer. But when this soft-spoken teen took the stage on June 17, 2008 to
deliver his speech as valedictorian of Martin Luther
King High
School to 287 members of his graduating
class-more than one person in the audience had tears in their eyes.
When he was in 9th grade,
Nicholas and his mother, Sherri Newton, became homeless. “I lost my job,”
recalls Newton,
“and unemployment wasn’t paying for my rent.” When his father was laid off,
according to Nicholas “things started to fall apart.”
In September 2004, mother and
son were forced to move into Stenton Family Manor, an emergency shelter. The
move was difficult for both of them. “Nicholas lost everything,” recalls his
mother, “his room, his friends-everything.” And Newton, a recovering drug addict, struggled
to maintain stability for herself and her son in a new environment with little
privacy. “He was ashamed and I was ashamed,” she recalls.
Despite those difficult
circumstances, Nicholas continued to attend high school-consistently making
honor roll every semester and taking advanced college-level courses including
AP Physics, AP Calculus and AP Literature. “The shelter issue didn’t hinder
me,” says Nicholas, “I stayed focused.” Even when he and his mother moved to transitional
housing, and Nicholas had to take two buses and a train to get to high school,
he remained positive.
In 2006, when Elaine Colbert,
teen education specialist with the Homeless Teen Education Project at Public
Health Management Corporation (PHMC), met Nicholas, he had a fixed goal in
mind-to attend art school after graduation. Soon after Colbert began meeting
with Nicholas, he showed her his art. “I was amazed,” she recalls, “He had
never even had proper art supplies!” Colbert was able to provide Nicholas with
access to art materials and help him begin his art portfolio in preparation for
applying to art school.
Colbert’s assistance, which
extends to more than 80 teens in five shelters across the city, would have been
impossible without the Homeless Teen Education Project. The Project began when
Deborah McMillan, assistant vice president of Specialized Health Services for
PHMC, and Dorette Ligons-Ham, the homeless regional coordinator and educational
liaison for the School District
of Philadelphia’s
Homeless Children’s Initiative, saw the need for a program specifically
targeting the children of the homeless.
“The teens weren’t getting
very little assistance with their education,” says McMillan. “Shelters are
adult-focused and the kids were falling between the cracks.” Ligons-Ham agrees.
“This is an invisible population,” she says. “Most teenagers don’t even want to
admit that they are homeless at all.” McMillan and Ligons-Ham estimate that
almost 10,000 children in the School
District of Philadelphia
are homeless-living in emergency shelters, transitional housing, or
‘doubled-up’ (living with other families).
Mel Monk, director of student
enrichment for Traveler’s Aid Society in Philadelphia,
the city’s largest shelter for families with children, works with teens in
situations similar to Nicholas’s. “Because of the predicament that these kids
are in, most miss 3-6 months of school,” observes Monk. “Most of the time, they
can’t get their GPA back to what it was before they became homeless. Nicholas’s
achievement is rare and a testimony to the work he has done.”
Teachers at Martin Luther
King High
School have fond memories of Nicholas and his
work ethic. “Nicholas is fabulous,” recalls David Mandell, history department
chair at the school. “He is quiet, quick, punctual and reliable. If all my
students could be Nicholas Shanks, my job as a teacher would be a lot easier.”
On graduation day, Mandell
was among those deeply moved by Nicholas’s speech. In the speech, Nicholas drew
from his own experiences. “Bad living conditions, society and harsh backgrounds
may all sound like a set-up for failure, but good can come from it,” he said,
drawing loud applause from his audience, which included his mother and Colbert.
Nicholas was among six
graduating seniors that Colbert had worked with during her time in the
shelters. All six plan to attend colleges in the Philadelphia area. “Fifty percent of the
students who graduated from high school would not have made it without our
program,” says Ligons-Ham, recalling numerous instances where Colbert worked
with school counselors to ensure graduation requirements were met.
Nicholas plans to matriculate
in the University of the Arts this January. In the meantime, he is working on
his portfolio and working with Mr. Monk as a counselor at the Traveler’s Aid
Society summer program for kids at the shelter. “They’re regular kids, they
just need an extra push,” McMillan says of the teens in the program. “An investment in homeless children is an
investment in the future of the city of Philadelphia.”
About Homeless Teen Education Project
Through a contract with the School District of
Philadelphia, PHMC receives funding for the Homeless Teen Education Project,
which provides intensive educational
case management and direct services to approximately 100 homeless teens, ages
13 to 18, who are living with their parents in emergency shelters or
transitional housing. The program
provides comprehensive hands-on interventions with teens to improve their
school attendance and academic performance and reduce lateness, suspensions and
behavior problems.
