ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701210029
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETTY STROTHER
SOURCE: BETTY STROTHER
EVERY school day, kids climb off school buses in Roanoke and walk the short distance to their homes.
Some walk to the Rescue Mission. For them, for now, that is home. For some others, home is the Transitional Living Center. Or Turning Point, the Salvation Army's shelter for women and children fleeing domestic violence.
All belong to a fluctuating population of homeless families in the Roanoke Valley. Whatever other upheavals these kids are having in their young lives, their schools are a point of stability.
Dale Matusevich's job is to see to that.
In some Virginia communities, advocates for the homeless complain, children lacking permanent addresses are being turned away at schoolhouse doors - unsettled, unwanted, unserved. Those who do manage to get or stay enrolled might bounce from school to school, unable to keep up with lessons because they are uprooted repeatedly as their families move from one temporary living arrangement to another.
Not in Roanoke.
"The city has taken a stand that the children are there, they have a right to go to school, so we're providing that for them," Matusevich explains as we make the round of shelters in his white Mustang convertible, loaded down this day with stacks of donated construction paper and plastic crates crammed with binders, spiral notebooks and other school supplies.
He is Roanoke's homeless-education coordinator, a combination teacher-social worker-administrator for a program funded by the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987.
Mornings, he teaches at Sanctuary, the city's shelter for adolescents. Afternoons, he prepares his students' assignments for the next day (individual lesson plans for each, since they are in various grades, taking a variety of subjects), then spends the balance of the day arranging for kids at the family shelters to get to school.
Matusevich is a busy guy.
He keeps students in the schools they were attending before their families lost their housing, which is mainly a matter of arranging transportation. And if families have landed at a shelter after moving from out of town, he gets the kids enrolled in school as quickly as possible, even if they don't have all the documents schools need: birth certificates, vaccination records.
"Sometimes families have to pick up quick, because they're in a domestic-violence situation, or their house burned." Matusevich gets the children into classes while he works on getting the records together. Then he tries to keep them at the same school for the rest of the year. If the family finds permanent housing outside that school's attendance zone, his job again is to arrange transportation.
School buses provide it where they can, he explains; he contracts with RADAR when students move too far from their school to make that possible. "If they come from Salem or Roanoke County, we still try to get them back to, say, Glenvar or William Byrd or wherever they go."
He stops at the Rescue Mission to drop off supplies, and as we head out the door of the family shelter, a big kid comes in, a book bag dangling from one hand. "Hi, Bernard," Matusevich greets him. "How are you doing in school? Were you able to play basketball?" He was. Bernard smiles shyly, and soon pulls out his interim grade report to share.
Matusevich spent a couple of days with Bernard getting him enrolled when he moved with his mother and brother from D.C. So, how's he doing? I ask when we're back in the car. "He's doing well," Matusevich allows with a gentle smile. "He needs some help in math and science."
We're heading now for the Transitional Living Center, where homeless families can stay for an extended time while they gain their footing to live independently. A couple of families at TLC arrived first at the Rescue Mission, he explains, and the children were enrolled at Westside Elementary. They went from there to TLC, which is in the Virginia Heights attendance zone. Now, they're each moving into their own homes, and into new school zones.
If they hadn't been able to stay at Westside, the children would be going to their third new school in less than a year. Along with school supplies for TLC, he's dropping off the paperwork they need to fill out to remain at the school this year. If they want to continue there next year, they'll have to go through the district's magnet-school application process, like any other resident.
At TLC, director Rick Sheets, his face creased with concern, immediately asks Matusevich if one of the families, which had just moved out of the shelter, will be able to keep its kids at Westside. Sheets smiles at the response. "I'm really glad you're able to keep these three kids in their same school. They're doing excellent."
"We have a lot of school-age children," the TLC director tells me. "We had 24 kids. Then we had a couple of families move out, so there are 19 now. But we have a family of five moving in tomorrow."
We get back in the car and head for the Dillard Paper Co., source of all of the construction paper he's been delivering. Dillard donates its scrap, and we stop and pick up another trunk load. It's the last stop of an easy afternoon in a city that does try hard to take care of all of its residents.
"I don't dwell too much on why they're here and where they're coming from as much as `a child needs to be in school,''' Matusevich says of the families he helps.
You do good work, I told him.
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