Tom Lechner sits at a schoolroom-style desk in one corner of a busy office, a computer screen in front of him, folders of paperwork on the desk, pen in hand, phone at the ready. He’s a tall, slim guy with tightly curling black hair showing wisps of gray, and frameless glasses perched on his nose. It’s his job to get 80 elementary school children to school every day, no matter where they may have spent the night.
As transportation coordinator, Tom is crucial to the Community Transitional School on Northeast Killingsworth Street. The CTS serves one special sector of the metro area’s population of school-age children: All of the students are homeless. They live in cheap motels or doubled-up in the apartments of relatives or friends; they sleep in shelters or in family cars or outside, on the street. Some students might be in the school for just a day; others have stayed for years. The average length of stay is 13 weeks.
CTS takes care of these complexities one family at a time, wherever they are. How do they do it? Size and intimacy explain a lot. It’s a small, close-knit school; everyone knows everyone. They don’t have to follow each federal guideline. They can be in touch with every family, answer every call.
And they have Tom.
He had no experience with homeless people before coming to CTS. But, he said, “I always had this urge to do something that had some sort of good mission to it.”
He’s been touched by seeing the things these kids deal with on a daily basis.
“Sometimes there are circumstances that just stick with you through the evening, and that’s hard.” He looked down and turned his palms up, a small gesture, matter-of-fact.
“I’m a newcomer here,” Tom said, downplaying his role in a way I came to learn was typical. In fact, he’s been running the school’s transportation system for about 10 years.
Before getting the transportation job, Tom was the school’s night janitor. He had been studying physics and math, but at some point, he said, “I noticed I was spending all my time making art, so I dropped out and went off to be an artist.” He graduated from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1998, and it was tough to find work.
“It seemed like when you apply for jobs, if they see the math-science side, they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re overqualified. You don’t want to work here; you’ll just quit,’” he said. “And if they see the art side, they’ll think you’re a flake. It was by pure chance I found out about this school.”
He heard about the janitorial job through friends. “It sounded great, interesting. And part time, so I’d still have time to do art.”
One by one, he acquired other responsibilities. “Whenever they had a computer problem, I’d be just hovering in the background, and I think it was just kind of noticed.” He became – informally – the school’s entire tech department. Then in August 2006, the transportation job opened up, and there he was.
“Every single part of it was difficult,” he said of the early days. “Figuring out all the laws, and then the requirements of the parents. And getting the buses repaired. If it’s just changing lights or something simple, I do it.”
He still makes art, and he’s become the school’s main photographer. Once a week, he teaches a drawing class for a group of lucky students. There are other regular art classes, with all kinds of materials, but in Tom’s class, he said, “we usually just use paper and pencil.” Tom calls it observational drawing, but the kids simply call it Art with Tom.
•••
I visit on a sunny spring morning, to watch four school-bus-yellow mini-buses pull into the small parking lot and line up. The children look eager as they climb down the steps to start their school day.
Tom is uncannily calm; he seems to operate in a pool of quiet space. He doesn’t hurry, doesn’t raise his voice, speaks slowly and carefully. A vibrant grade school bustles around him, and his little pool remains unrippled.
As though to illustrate the multiple roles Tom plays, a small boy knocks and hurries through the door, a worried look on his face.
“Tom, there’s no soap in the boys’ bathroom.”
“Are you the bathroom monitor?”
“There’s no bathroom monitor for the boys.”
“All right. Are they both empty, or just one?”
“Both!”
Tom nods, and finishes the thought he was working on before the boy comes in: “Every single part has more to it than you really expect going in. Sometimes each component of that is easy, and sometimes it’s not easy at all.”
Moments later, a girl (the official girls’ bathroom monitor) comes in with the same bad news about the girls’ room.
Next, a younger girl, in a dither.
“Tom! There’s a spider in the bathroom! And I hate spiders!”
The kids are lively, eager, friendly, curious — as grade school kids tend to be, wherever they live.
“The kids are really pretty happy for the amount of chaos that they live through,” Tom said. “They always have an unusual perspective on everything.”
Patient, and not in a dither, Tom gets up to take care of the three emergencies.
A few minutes later, back at the desk, he explains: It’s not in his job description, but “during the day, if someone throws up, I’ll take care of it. For janitorial supplies – well, I’ve got all the keys.”
•••
Tom arrives each morning by bicycle before the buses and settles in at his desk. His first task of the day is to take out the kitchen trash.
He enjoys the diversity of people who come through the doors and interact in the busy, welcoming office: the homeless children and their parents; the dedicated staff and teachers; the many volunteers from all over town, coming in just to help out for a few hours; the neighbors dropping by to donate clothing or school supplies; the high school kids from Lake Oswego who collected breakfast cereal; the big donors bringing a check for a thousand dollars. Everyone becomes part of the team.
What holds this team together is the focus on children. Every CTS student shares the stresses that children with a stable home do not understand – even tease them for. They may be escaping domestic violence, or a parent has lost a job, or there’s been a medical crisis that left the family unable to pay rent. They are all equals in that one important way; no one’s going to put anyone down for where he or she lives. And there are new students every week. It’s one of the benefits, Tom points out: “You’re never the new kid for very long. That’s a great situation.”
And the bus system Tom runs is a vital part of the support the children feel here at CTS. Juli Osa, the school’s development director, told me: “Kids will say, ‘The bus driver knows my name!’ Someone knows they’re out there and is coming to get them.”
•••
Founded in 1990 as part of Portland Public Schools and originally housed at the YWCA downtown, CTS is today a registered private school, an independent nonprofit organization serving homeless children. It’s the only such school in the state. With about 80 students each day – this year 221 students from 121 families – it can reach only a tiny portion of the homeless children in the metropolitan area. But the school does what it can. It operates on a tight budget with a staff of three full-time teachers, one part-time Title I teacher, two teacher’s aides, three office staffers, one meal server, four bus drivers, and many loyal volunteers – all focused on the school’s mission of providing to these children “a place where they have room to learn, laugh with friends and build hope,” according to the school’s website.
Osa outlined the astonishingly simple application process: no birth certificate, no proof of immunization, no paperwork. And no tuition. Families learn of CTS through word of mouth, and the shelters and other support organizations post signs and help spread the word. CTS maintains a close relationship with those in social services; the school depends on these people to help homeless families learn about CTS. A parent calls and gives the child’s name and birth date and most recent grade level, and “in five minutes,” Osa said, “they’re on Tom’s list for the next morning.”
Although the 1987 McKinney-Vento Act made it a federal requirement that all public schools provide support for homeless children, and later amendments included transportation to and from school, the requirement doesn’t guarantee that it’s affordable or that school districts can effectively comply. Every school district in Oregon has at least one homeless-student liaison whose job is to support homeless children toward success in school. Portland Public Schools, the state’s largest district, has only two liaisons.
It’s hard to pin down statistics. The one thing that is clear is that the number of children without housing has increased dramatically in recent years. The 2015 Multnomah County Point-in-Time Count of Homelessness found 374 homeless children on the night of the count and 2,103 homeless students attending public schools in the county. Sixty-one percent of homeless schoolchildren were people of color.
But these numbers include high-school-age students, whom CTS does not serve. And they do not include those who aren’t in school at all – or, of course, those who were not found.
“It’s impossible to know the number,” Osa said. “They are called ‘the hidden homeless.’”
•••
One of the biggest challenges for homeless parents – a challenge that is passed on to the school – is simply to get the kids to school and home again. A family might have to move quickly over a weekend; things can change in the middle of the day, and the child has to be dropped off at a different stop. CTS eases that one stress point.
The rule is that parents have to call with any changes of location before noon to get on the next day’s schedule. But Tom can be a little flexible.
“Sometimes if they warn me something might happen over a weekend, I can be on the lookout, and then if it happens to be near one of our normal stops, I can usually fit it in and let the driver know ahead of time.
“When it’s not close, and we can’t handle it, then the parents are bringing them in,” he said.
Some CTS parents have cars, but it’s not the norm. And even if they do, he said, “it’s probably a car that often doesn’t work so well, or if it’s toward the end of the month, they wouldn’t be able to afford gas or something. Then they’re putting the kid on TriMet to get to the stop.”
Tom may have to figure out where a family has moved. Once, when parents didn’t call in, Osa told the child, “Find an envelope that has an address on it, and tell us what it says, and then we’ll figure out where to go.” Every day, that second grader read out a new address, and called in to say where she was. She moved 22 times that year. This past year, one student moved 13 times in 110 days, and missed only two days of school.
“Usually I’ll figure out approximately which bus a child should go on and what route,” Tom said, “but that doesn’t always translate into a realistic picture of how things will actually work, and the drivers – sometimes they’ll have to decide what makes sense, which side of the street they can pick up on. If an apartment looks seedy, they might not want to let the kid off until they see a parent there. Or if the kid’s never been there before, he might say, ‘I’m not gettin’ off here!’”
If a child doesn’t show up at the morning bus stop, Tom or someone in the office will call to find out what’s going on – but if they can’t get through and the child doesn’t show up for a couple of days, they stop sending the bus. It’s a painful part of the job: “You get to know the kids, and then they’re gone.”
Osa described what these families deal with: “It’s chaotic, a brutal lifestyle. Outside of school, it’s near-constant instability.”
Once the children arrive at CTS each day, they’re safe, well-fed and cared for. For homeless families, that may seem more important than the education the kids are getting, she said; many of their parents didn’t finish school.
“The family culture is survival,” she said. “Even kids who’ve been with us a long time, they don’t understand that education is their ticket to a better life.”
Yet at school, “someone is holding them accountable and believes in them enough to have expectations.”
Tom knows to expect tense moments.
“The situations that the kids are in, it tends to make their whole family stressed out,” he said. “Parents might be mad at something else, and they direct it at us. Like if I say the bus will be there at 7 and it’s not there till 7:10, they’ll be like, ‘How dare you!’”
Tom is understanding about such outbursts. “They’re doing the best they can.”
The rule of thumb, he said, is that about two-thirds of each route will be the same every day. Other than that, it’s anybody’s guess. A parent can’t find her car keys. A bridge is out. A bus has a flat tire. A kid says he’s moving, but the parent hasn’t called. “Every single stop has its quirks,” he said.
One of the hardest things about his job, Tom said, is finding bus drivers, and their work is an essential piece of the daily puzzle. He’s occasionally had to drive one of the runs himself.
There’s a kid-written butcher-paper sign beside the office door, sporting a child’s drawing of a cheerful guy in jeans and a green t-shirt and listing office rules of behavior:
“Stay focused.
“Quiet voice.
“Wait your turn.
“Be respective.
“Don’t waste others time.
“No messing with things.
“Don’t ask for things you shouldn’t have.”
Tom embodies these rules so naturally and completely that they might have been written specifically to describe his behavior.
He said that what he should have is buses that never break down, and he’d like to be able to pay drivers better. But he makes do. When a bus does break down on the road and can’t be repaired right there, there’s no back-up bus waiting at school. Tom has to call on local taxi companies to rescue the kids. Yes, it’s expensive, but what else can he do? The kids are depending on him.
“Bus situations just kind of keep happening,” he said. “It’s overwhelming. But compared to what these kids and their families have to go through …” He shrugs. No need to finish that sentence.
•••
Behind Tom’s desk, there’s a huge pink heart made from construction paper. It’s decorated with messages, in children’s practiced handwriting – a list of words to describe Tom: happy, clever, good artist (“Without you, I wouldn’t have known what shading is”), good with computers, helpful, organized, brave, “helps us with our math problems,” “has a big job.” And thank-you notes: Thank you for the keys to the bathroom. Thank you for lifting the tables at lunchtime, for driving the bus, for bringing color into our lives.
And one last note: The unsung hero of CTS.
Tom dismisses any talk of his own accomplishments and puts it all on the children. He doesn’t get them to school, he insists; they do it.
“A lot depends on the kids’ initiative,” he said. “They have to figure it out. Somehow, magically, they find a way to get here.”
It’s a remarkable place, and magic doesn’t seem too strong a word.
What would Tom most want others to know about the Community Transitional School?
He answers slowly, pausing to think, and finally decides: “That it exists.”