A little girl once said, "There

is no place like home." But for

many children, clicking your

heels three times like Dorothy

did is no remedy for

homelessness.

Steve Lopez is a columnist for

The L.A.

Times, who recently published a

four part series on child

poverty in L.A., focusing on the

stories from Telfair Elementary

School, where nearly a quarter

of the student body is homeless.

Many live in motels and garages.

They have little to eat and

nowhere to do homework.

They are victims of rising

housing costs.

Our Hari Sreenivasan sat down

with Steve Lopez ontinuing our

ongoing initiative about

poverty, jobs and economic

opportunity in America called

Chasing the Dream.

Steve Lopez, you did a four part

series on child poverty in Los

Angeles.

You spent months looking at one

school.

Why?

I was curious about how it could

be that California could have

the fifth largest economy in the

world, not the nation but in the

world, and yet about 20 percent

of the population living in

poverty and when you break those

numbers down, it means there are

about 2 million children in

California living in poverty and

one day I bumped into the

superintendent of Los Angeles

Unified School District and he

was new on the job and asked how

it was going and he mentioned

that the challenges are many and

asked if I was aware that there

are a couple of schools where

nearly a quarter of the student

body was homeless, so I decided

to check that out and one of

those schools is Telfair

Elementary, so I spent several

weeks hanging around there

talking to teachers, to the

principal and to families.

So what does it look like if a

quarter of the school population

is homeless.

How do they, we're not talking

about people panhandling on the

streets, it's different kind of

homelessness.

It is a different kind of

homelessness.

We're not talking about students

camped in tents outside the

front office of the school.

What happens is that families

each year in Los Angeles Unified

are asked to fill out a

residency questionnaire and you

have to check these boxes.

Do you live in a motel?

Do you live in a vehicle?

Do you live in a shared

apartment or home or do you live

in a place of your own?

And a shocking number of

students in Los Angeles Unified,

a couple of years ago it was

17,000 checked one of those

boxes and last year 15,000 plus

and little Telfair Elementary

School, which only had about 750

or 60 students had more than

anybody, they had about a

hundred and eighty of their

students who had checked one of

those boxes and a third of those

were living in garages in the

neighborhood.

You mean the garages that are

attached to homes, just where we

would normally park our cars?

Where you would keep your

lawnmower and your motor oil,

yes, no there is, it's actually

become quite an industry in Los

Angeles.

It's not entirely new, it's just

that in this economy the housing

costs are still rising way

faster than wages are rising, so

people are, you know, stretched

to the limits and there are all

of these creative living

arrangements and I spoke to one

real estate agent who recently

sold a four bedroom house to

somebody who was going to live

in a back shanty and rent three

of the bedrooms for seven

hundred dollars a month each and

the one bedroom that had a

bathroom was going to go for

about 950.

So you have families living in

situations like that all around

Telfair Elementary School.

These are not low prices.

Why do people agree to pay some

of these prices or are you also

mention that they're living in

motels.

That's not an economic option.

No there are no economic options

in Los Angeles right now.

We've had, because of a housing

shortage, a skyrocketing of

rents of every kind, so it's not

uncommon to find somebody living

in a garage paying fifteen

hundred dollars a month.

Now these are garages that, you

know, they've been converted,

some of them have bathrooms,

there's running water, some of

them have kitchens, so it's kind

of like in many cases maybe a

studio apartment or a one

bedroom.

So they're not necessarily

horrible living conditions but

when you have families and you

have children in school and

there's no quiet place to do the

homework and there's no yard to

go out side and play in because

the owners families out there,

it puts all of these burdens on

these families and then those

burdens transfer over to the

schools because teachers will

tell you about students who show

up who maybe didn't have a

nutritional hot meal or they

didn't get their homework done

because they didn't have a quiet

place to do it.

They're not focused on on the

lesson plan that day because

maybe somebody next door was

noisy and they didn't get any

sleep, so all of these burdens

walk into these classrooms every

day at Telfair.

You focused on for one of the

stories, there is video of a

family that you meet who is

living in a motel.

Just the act of getting the

children to school on a daily

basis is an uncertainty.

That's right.

Two months into the current

school year the family had lived

in three or four different

places.

They were in a motel, moved into

an apartment that was a two

bedroom one bath that 17 people

were living in.

That wasn't working out, so

moved back to a motel, but the

cheapest motel was six miles

from school and the mother

doesn't have a car, so it was

either public transportation or

call a relative a friend and

hoped somebody would take the

kids to school and sometimes

they showed up and sometimes

they didn't and in that motel

room--this is one room--it''s a

small room with two beds.

There is no kitchen.

There is no desk, no place to do

your homework.

The place is kind of noisy.

There's some nefarious

activities going on in that

motel and all the surrounding

motels and this is how thousands

of children are growing up in

Los Angeles.

One of the things that strikes

me about that video is the

mother's concerns about

malnutrition, that she is not

able to feed her children

regularly.

"The last two days we didn't

have no food until yesterday and

it gets hard.

It just, it hurts me to see them

hungry."

You know when I was in the motel

room, I saw a 7-Eleven pizza box

and this was early in the

morning, so I assumed it was

from the night before, which I

guess it was and when the ride

was not showing up to take the

three kids to school, one of the

one of the kids the little girl

who was 5 years old was getting

hungry, so she walked over

opened up that 7-Eleven pizza

box and put a piece of pepperoni

pizza into the microwave and

that was breakfast.

I mean the one thing these kids

look forward to is school is

kind of an oasis.

It's safe, they serve you they

serve you hot meals, but if you

don't get to school you don't

get to take advantage of those.

So what happens to these

children?

What are the ripple effects?

What are the forces that are

weighing on them by the time

they get to class?

Well, you know, teachers talk

about how they're a little

unfocused.

Maybe they're tired, maybe they

didn't do their homework, maybe

they ate something, but it

wasn't the best food to prepare

you for a day in school, so

there are those things and then

it becomes a little more

serious.

They find irritability, they

find mood disorders, high rates

of depression, even among

elementary school students, and

the thing that's of even greater

concern is all of this recent

research about adverse childhood

experiences and the more of

these that you're exposed, to

including unstable housing

situations and broken families

and not enough of an income to

to get you to school regularly

or to put food on the table, you

have not just physical and

mental challenges and ailments

as a child, but they're finding,

researchers are, that these are

lasting into adulthood something

like twice the normal rate of

heart disease if you're exposed

to four or more of these adverse

childhood experiences, so this

is not just a problem in K

through 5 for these kids.

This is something that may be

with them for a lifetime.

It also sounds like a teachers

here are the frontlines for not

just teaching, but everything

else.

I mean you're describing a

social worker or a team of

social workers that would have

to grapple with any of these

specific challenges

individually, but really the

only person that's going to have

to face this for 15 or 20 kids

in her or his classroom is that

teacher.

You know, we look at some of the

test scores at schools like

Telfair and we sit back in

judgment and oh that school is

failing.

What I saw was inspirational and

you're right, teachers are

social workers, sometimes

they're parents.

They were a lot of different

hats and they're dealing with

problems that come in with these

kids because of the conditions

they're living in and I should

tell you that if you drive just

a few miles from Telfair

Elementary you can see where the

Lockheed Martin plant closed,

you can see where the GM auto

manufacturing plant closed,

where the Price Pfister kitchen

faucet plant closed and all of

those jobs were replaced, which

were middle income jobs, were

replaced by service economy

jobs, so a lot of these families

I'm talking about that are

living in motels, some of them

in vehicles, some of them in

garages, they're not sitting

around all day.

These are working families, but

we have an economy that is

serving a just a few people at

the top and those in the middle

at the bottom are struggling, so

the Telfair story is not just

about child poverty, it's about

this economy, it's about

something broken in California.

How can you have this state that

has such incredible staggering

wealth, hundreds of

billionaires, fifth largest

economy in the world and

thousands, actually millions of

children living in poverty.

Something's broken and I have

not yet met anybody who has any

ideas on how to really address

that.

You're pointing to something

systemic.

You're pointing to something

also generational when some of

these children grow up in these

situations, they're almost

trapped.

The odds are really against them

and that was another thing that

really inspired me about this

school, Telfair.

The teachers believe in them,

the teachers believe that each

of them can make it under the

right circumstances and they

know that they come from, you

know, living conditions that can

be pretty depressing and they

want the school to be an

uplifting, safe, comfortable

place and the person who sets

the tone for that is the

Principal, Jose Razo.

Jose Razo grew up just a few

blocks from Telfair Elementary

and when he was a boy, lived

with his mother and his siblings

for a while in a garage and Jose

tells the story about that

garage not having a bathroom and

if you needed to use the

restroom, you had to walk

outside the garage go around, go

up knock on the front door of

the owner the owner's house and

ask permission to use the

bathroom.

This is a guy who had faith, he

had his mother behind him saying

your faith and education is

going to get you through it.

He did well in school, he played

in the band in high school, he

joined the United States Marine

Corps, he came back, he started

as a teacher's aide and then

became a teacher and then wanted

to run a school and he runs this

school with banners, college

university banners are hanging

from the hallways from the

auditorium from the first day.

It's not are you going to

college, kids, which one are you

going to go to.

On Fridays you don't have to

wear your uniform to school if

you wear a university t shirt or

a sweater, so this is a really

sad story, it's tragic, but I've

found great inspiration in the

attitudes and the hard work and

the ethic of the principal and

his teachers.

You know, one of the things that

your stories also point out is

that if we just looked at the

test scores, we'd miss the

nuance that you're describing

here.

We wouldn't see the

inspirational and I think one of

the people in the story had said

the test scores really are much

more of a measure of poverty not

necessarily of their potential.

Yeah I think that it's a measure

of poverty rather than promise.

These are smart kids and when

they have access to the right

things I think there's no limit

on what they can accomplish, but

let's take a look at Telfair and

what do they have, or what do

they not have.

Given all of this trauma, you'd

think they would have a

psychiatric social worker.

They do not.

You'd think they'd have a nurse.

The nurses are only a couple of

days a week.

You'd think you'd want to expose

them to reading and to you know

the power of words.

The library is usually closed.

These are the problems we're

seeing at a school in a district

in a state that when I was in

public school, this is a few

years ago in California,

California was a model for the

nation.

Schools were well funded.

The resources were there and

those schools helped drive what

became this great powerful

economic engine in California.

We short shrift our kids today.

How can you have a situation

like that in this economy, with

this level of poverty and not

have the tools that the students

need to succeed?

That part of this is tragic and

very discouraging.

One of the statistics that leapt

out to me and other people when

we were reading the story, you

said 80 percent of the students

at the L.A.

Unified School District qualify

for free or reduced lunch.

That's 480,000 kids out of the

600,000 that go to this school

district.

Imagine that.

Imagine that and yet we've had

these conversations about gee,

what's wrong with the schools,

do we need more charters.

Is the teacher's union union

running things, and we do we

need to crack down on that.

Let's have another politicized

school board election.

What I think I discovered in

working on the series was that

the schools are not the problem,

society is.

Everything else is.

We're the problem.

We are expecting schools to

address the shortcomings in this

economy and they're doing their

best.

Many of them, sure they could

improve, sure we need to find

new ways to support the schools

and help them do better, but

we've got much bigger problems

than what's going on in the

schools.

As you look at this problem,

what have you seen?

Have you seen anybody tackle

this in a successful way?

You often hear people say that

let's not throw more money at

this problem and those tend to

be people whose children are not

at those schools.

I mean, when you don't have a

nurse and you don't have a

library that you can keep open,

yes, money would help.

Some recent studies have have

determined that that one problem

in California, more so than in

other states, maybe it's because

of the large poor community and

large immigrant population, is

that once students in California

begin school, they do as well as

students in other states, but

they begin further behind and so

there is talk about a new focus

in California on preschool

intervention, on very early

childhood education, on a better

system of coordinating all of

those kinds of services, more

parent coaching.

I'd like to see school campuses

become community centers.

This is an idea I got many years

ago from New Jersey Senator Bill

Bradley who was running for

president and I was out on the

campaign trail and he asked,

when he made his campaign stops

in many neighborhoods in

America, he said a public school

campus is the only safe oasis

and it's a place where you may

have the only library and the

only gymnasium and the only

place with all of these

resources.

Why do we lock the doors at 3pm?

Why don't we keep those up and

make them community centers

where people with a trade can

come and talk about how they got

into that business, where the

kids have access to the books

and the library.

I think we need to rethink what

can be done with school campuses

and also what can be done to get

kids better equipped before

kindergarten so that they're

ready for school.

All right, Steve Lopez, the four

part series is at the L.A.

Times.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.