A few articles
Sep. 7th, 2009 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One about turning dumps into havens
A Wooded Prairie Springs From a Site Once Piled High With Garbage
By KENNETH CHANG
South of the Belt Parkway near Exit 15 in Brooklyn, approaching Kennedy International Airport, an unassuming hill slopes upward, dotted with small, scraggly trees and bushes.
A quarter-century ago, the hill was a more memorable sight. It was the Fountain Avenue Landfill.
“It was an ugly old dump,” said Lee Shelley, a longtime resident of the Starrett City neighborhood who heads a citizens’ committee that, for nearly two decades, pestered the city, then cooperated with it, to clean up and transform the pile of garbage.
Today, someone at the top of the hill stands 130 feet above the sea in a field of prairie grasses. It is some of the highest ground in the city, its panoramic views taking in the Empire State Building to the northwest, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and New York Harbor to the west, Jamaica Bay to the south.
In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the Fountain Avenue Landfill and the neighboring Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill with a layer of plastic, then put down clean soil and planted 33,000 trees and shrubs at the two sites. The result is 400 acres of nature preserve, restoring native habitats that disappeared from New York City long ago.
The site is not yet open to the public. Indeed, it is still listed by the state as a toxic waste site. But the air is clear and fresh.
“You can probably compare it with a day in the Alps,” Mr. Shelley said during a tour given to local residents by the city this summer. “We had hoped we would have a park. It’s turned out to be better than a park.”
The Fountain Avenue Landfill opened in 1961, filling up with residential trash, construction debris, asbestos incinerator ash and, notoriously, the bodies of mob victims. In its last year of operation, 1985, an average of 8,200 tons of trash arrived there each day — some 40 percent of the city’s refuse. The Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill was open from 1956 to 1980. In its later years, it was primarily a dump for debris from construction and demolition.
Once closed, the landfills were deemed by the city to be ecologically “sanitary,” meaning they caused no significant harm or health problems, but still offended the senses. Fires often smoldered, emitting putrid odors. Runoff containing heavy metals, oil, pesticides and PCBs flowed into Jamaica Bay. Residents complained about health concerns, and finally, in 1995, hammered out an agreement with the city to rehabilitate the dumps.
During that era, the thinking about what to do with closed landfills was evolving, too. The piles were “capped” with a layer of clay and plastic to keep water out, and covered with a few inches of soil. The usual practice was to plant grass and mow it as if it were a big lawn.
In the 1980s, Leslie Sauer, a founder of Andropogon Associates, a landscape architect firm in Philadelphia, was one of the first to think landfills had more potential. “The idea of mowing landfills is lunacy,” she said.
While working as a consultant for Fresh Kills, a former city garbage dump on Staten Island, she surveyed the fate of other closed landfills. “We could not find one landfill that was being maintained,” she said. Instead of a manicured lawn, the landfill grass inevitably turned into “a weedy junk pile,” she said.
Three feet of soil on top of the landfill cap would hold more moisture, Ms. Sauer surmised, allowing a wider array of plants to grow. Even trees. The common wisdom was never to put trees on a landfill because the roots would push down and puncture the cap.
But in her surveys, Ms. Sauer found that trees inevitably started growing on top of landfills anyway, and that roots typically spread out in a wide but fairly shallow pattern. The network of roots would also do a better job of holding the soil together against erosion than plain grass, and the result might be a sustainable ecology instead of a monotonous grassy hill that required continuous lawn care.
John McLaughlin, who directs the ecological rehabilitation of the Brooklyn landfills for the Department of Environmental Protection and worked with Ms. Sauer at Fresh Kills, carved up the landscape into a series of “islands,” assigning a different mix of plants to reflect a different ecological niche in the region. Some resemble the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Others drew inspiration from Sandy Hook, N.J., and Fire Island.
The first seeds were laid down in 2004 on the Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill, followed a year later by the first plantings of shrubs and trees, at a density of 800 to 1,000 per acre, about double what typically grow in a natural setting. The final plantings went in last year. All told, the ecological portion of the landfill project cost about $20 million.
More than 93 percent of the trees and shrubs have survived.
“We call this the birth of a forest,” Mr. McLaughlin said. In a decade, the trees might be 20 to 25 feet tall.
Once the plants take hold, nature will be allowed to take its course, evolving the land into microclimates. In some areas that turned out to be damper than had been foreseen, sassafras and black oak, which prefer dry soil, are not doing as well as expected, but other plants should prosper, Mr. McLaughlin said.
Birds including ospreys, egrets and snowy owls are spotted and counted at the former landfills.
“My friends were all like, ‘You’re going where to work with wildlife?’ ” said Lee Humberg, one of the United States Department of Agriculture biologists keeping watch over the site. “One wouldn’t expect to find a prairie setting in New York City.”
A spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said the Fountain Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue Landfills, currently listed as a “significant threat to the public health or environment,” could be reclassified by next spring as safe for public access, requiring only continued monitoring of their conditions.
Then the final steps for opening them to the public would start. Mr. Shelley, the Starrett City resident, envisions an amphitheater for concerts, bicycle paths and fishing areas, perhaps within a handful of years. “What they’re doing here,” he said, “was an absolute miracle.”
One about a man in Harlem who literally will walk into the middle of gang fights to break them up
On Harlem’s Restive Streets, Preaching Peace With a Convert’s Zeal
By JASON GRANT
The man known on some of Harlem’s toughest streets as the “P.O.D.,” shorthand for “pastor on deck,” brought his black Jeep Compass to a screeching halt on Lenox Avenue, near 128th Street, on a recent Saturday night, and jumped out.
Two teenage girls — members of the rival street gangs Girls G.F. and Barbie Dolls — were rolling across the sidewalk in a tangle of elbows, kicks, fists and screams. Blood smeared the concrete as a roaring circle of at least 20 people urged them on.
That was when the man who had been in the car, the Rev. Vernon Williams, made his move.
Powering his way through the crowd, Mr. Williams shouted: “It’s over! It’s over! Go home!”
The crowd, mostly teenagers, slowly started walking away. One of the girls had stopped fighting and was crying on the ground, while the other was coming at her again in a rage. All at once, Mr. Williams darted forward, scooped up the weeping young woman in his thick arms and carried her to the safety of his car, where she took about 10 minutes to calm down before walking home.
“I didn’t know the girls in that fight, but I knew I had to break it up,” Mr. Williams said later as he drove through the darkened streets. “This is what I’m supposed to be doing. You know, as I’ve progressed in my walk with God, this is exactly what I’m built for.”
For the past 16 months, Mr. Williams has been putting his 50-year-old, 235-pound body on the line working to defuse street confrontations between combatants who are often armed with guns or knives. He gets text messages or phone calls from teenagers worried that a fight may erupt, and while patrolling the streets, he often intervenes when he spots gang members who have ventured into rivals’ territory.
He relies on his powerful preacher’s voice, as well as on the wisdom gleaned from his own criminal past, which includes more than 10 years in prison on various convictions.
Though Harlem is a safer neighborhood than it has been in the past, street gangs still abound, battling one another for supremacy on particular blocks and in housing projects.
At least seven major gangs operate in an area bordered roughly by West 125th Street, West 155th Street, Fifth Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue and Harlem River Drive, according to residents and community leaders. They include G.M.B., short for Get Money Boyz; F.S.U., which uses two profanities in its name; O.T.N., short for 129; and G.F., meaning GoodFellas.
Mr. Williams, a broad-shouldered man with a round face, has become a familiar figure on these streets, talking in soothing and respectful tones to teenagers, counseling nonviolence and respect for others.
To a group of teenagers he spotted carrying metal pipes near a housing project on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard one night, Mr. Williams implored: “Please don’t fight. You know Pastor don’t like that, O.K.?”
The youngsters say Mr. Williams’s own story resonates with them.
“We have mad respect for Pastor because he done experienced it,” said John Smith, 18, as he stood at the corner of 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, wearing baggy blue jeans hanging low off his waist. “We don’t want to see our friends end up in a casket. I think Pastor knows we’re not ready for disaster like that.”
Deputy Inspector Kevin T. Catalina, the commanding officer of the 32nd Precinct, which patrols parts of Harlem and has seen a decrease of more than 40 percent in murders and shootings since last year, said Mr. Williams had played a significant role in stopping violent incidents.
“I love Vernon Williams,” Inspector Catalina said in an interview. “I spend a lot of time on the street. I’m out there in the thick of it, and he’s out there out there in the thick of it, on the front lines. They do listen to him. I’ve seen him tell gang members to stop fighting — and a lot of times if he says to stop, they will. And I’ve seen him stand in between two groups and hold people back who are going to fight.”
It is strong praise for a man who spent many of his younger years doing things that landed him in handcuffs. When crack cocaine was the scourge of the city in the 1980s, Mr. Williams was a crack user and a heroin dealer.
“I was not a nice person,” he said. “I was someone you’d want to cross the street to get away from.” He ended up behind bars three different times on drug-related charges.
Then, at age 29, he committed a more serious offense after finding the mutilated body of his sister, who Mr. Williams said was a heroin addict, wedged under a boiler in a Harlem drug den.
Believing she had bled to death after an attack, an enraged Mr. Williams went on a mission to find her killers and shut down crack houses. Eventually, he walked alone into a drug den in the Bronx while firing away with an Uzi submachine gun.
Nobody was hit, but Mr. Williams was arrested as he left. He was later convicted on various charges and spent more than six years in prison.
But while he was free on bail and awaiting trial, he had a spiritual awakening, he said: “One day I broke down crying. I kept asking myself, ‘Do I want to live or die?’ That’s when I found Jesus.”
While in prison he lived in an “honor dorm” for well-behaved inmates, taught African-American history to other prisoners and began studying the Bible.
After leaving prison, Mr. Williams eventually earned a master’s degree in divinity from Drew University in New Jersey in 2005. Mr. Williams, who works as a service coordinator for Bethany Development Outreach in Harlem, started his own Baptist congregation, called Perfect Peace Ministry, which worships in space provided by Emanuel A.M.E. Church on West 119th Street.
Regarding his preaching, Mr. Williams said: “I don’t Bible-thump or preach damnation. I preach hope and then I challenge the people to change.”
He recently recalled a harrowing day in April when he stepped into the middle of a gang fight as gunfire erupted, forcing him to dive to the ground. Moments later, he confronted a teenager who had just shot at, but missed, a rival gang member.
“My whole thing is eye contact,” Mr. Williams said. “I got eye contact with him, and I was approaching him from an angle. I walked up and said, ‘Yo, put that away.’ ”
Slowly, the young man tucked the gun into a drawstring gym bag and muttered, “O.K., Rev,” he recalled.
“You got to have a cause you’re willing to die for,” Mr. Williams said. “And I’m willing to die to see that these young men make it out.”
One on reading on the train - which is why trains beat cars, hands down!
Reading Underground
By ALEXIS MAINLAND
THE middle-aged woman with the black cardigan around her shoulders had assumed a meticulously calibrated posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely clenched, muscles relaxed yet alert.
She was not preparing for a tae kwon do bout, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, intently, on a sardine-can D train heading swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush. Without holding on.
“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”
Reading on the subway is a New York ritual, for the masters of the intricately folded newspaper like Ms. Kornhaber, who lives in Park Slope and works on the Upper East Side, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines, office workers devouring self-help inspiration, immigrants newly minted — or not — taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the tattered covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude in a city of inveterate multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.
Even without a seat, even while pressed with strangers into human panini, even as someone plays a keyboard harmonica and rattles a cup of change, even when stumbling home after a party.
There are those whose commutes are carefully timed to the length of a Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, those who methodically page their way through the classics, and those who always carry a second trash novel in case they unexpectedly make it to the end of the first on a glacial F train. There is a lawyer from Brooklyn who for the past two months has catalogued what she and other commuters are reading on a blog, “The Subway Book Club,” and a student at the New School who spent the summer passing out 600 donated books to subway riders to spread her passion for reading.
And then there are those reading the readers, imagining their story lines. That man in a suit studying “Rosetta Stone Level 3 Italian” on the No. 2 train must be preparing to meet his fiancée’s family in Tuscany. The woman reading a young-adult novel at 81st Street is probably a teacher preparing for class. We are usually left to wonder, but I recently spent 12 hours crisscrossing four boroughs underground, asking people what they were reading and why.
Bob Alderson, 46, the man learning Italian, is a patent lawyer, with no imminent overseas travel plans, but aspirations. “Someday I want to visit Italy, so I’m studying,” he said.
And the woman reading “City of Glass,” an urban fantasy involving a slavering demon and several warlocks? Kimberly Nessel, 26, a dog walker with a graduate degree in forensic psychology, said she became addicted to young-adult fiction with dark plot lines when she worked in a bookstore.
JUST BROWSING
C train at 135th Street, 9:30 a.m.
The blue bag balanced on her lap was packed full of health care administration textbooks and homework, but Deborah Hairston, who works in the cancer unit at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital was using her commute to peruse the catalogs that stuff her mailbox each week.
“Sometimes I find things I want to buy, but most of the time I am just browsing,” she said, paging past a display of bead-embellished Chadwicks cardigans. “I don’t want to read the news or get involved with anything too heavy. I have enough of that in my life.”
A PAGE A DAY
B train at 96th Street, 10 a.m.
To learn the Talmud, many of its students read one of its 2,711 pages each day. And it helps to have a chevruta, or study partner. Harry and David Zinstein, brothers from Washington Heights, generally conduct their Daf Yomi — page of the day, in Hebrew — study sessions en route to work on the Upper West Side.
Except on Wednesday, which turns out to be a kind of day of rest for Harry, the elder of the two Zinsteins at 28. A manager at Mike’s Bistro, a kosher restaurant on West 72nd Street, Harry Zinstein forgoes his subway Talmud study those days to read the Dining section of The New York Times.
“It’s the only thing I read on the train except for the Talmud,” he said, his thick, leather-bound Babylonian text tucked inside his messenger bag for later consumption. “And it’s the perfect length for the commute.”
David Zinstein, 19, who is studying in Israel but spent the summer working for his brother, sat to the right, reading his Aramaic tractates (with English translations). “I always read the Talmud on the subway,” he said. “Even on Wednesdays.”
MULTITASKING
A train at 23rd Street, 12:30 p.m.
Donalay Thomas is the kind of reader who creates a private space for herself among the multitudes, whether she is squashed by the door or has a whole row of seats to herself. With her iPod earbuds firmly in place (“On the Ocean,” from an R & B album by K’Jon) and a thick hardcover (“Resurrecting Midnight,” by Eric Jerome Dickey) open on her lap, Ms. Thomas, head down, can zone out and leave the world behind.
“I always listen to music while I read on the train because it sets the mood for me to get lost in the author’s plots,” said Ms. Thomas, 21, a model in between jobs who lives in Englewood, N.J., and was headed to West Fourth Street for an afternoon of skateboarding. “I can become one of the characters that I’m reading about.”
She does not, however, get so lost in her books that she loses touch with fellow passengers. “I’ll ask other readers if they’re enjoying a book I’m familiar with,” Ms. Thomas said.
Then she turned to a woman across the aisle. “Your stop is next,” she said, proving that she had been paying a little bit of attention to everything all along.
SUBWAY AS STAGE
B train at 42nd Street, 1:30 p.m.
If every restaurant in New York employs at least one actor, then every subway car seems to carry at least two — rehearsing for a part, or just daydreaming about one.
An actress named Rachel, who is 25 and wore dark sunglasses that may or may not have been helping her get into character, was in from Los Angeles, with several auditions lined up, including one for the part of Sosa in “The A-Team,” a movie remake of the 1980s television series. “Sosa is an aide to the secretary of defense,” she explained. “I am trying to channel her. She is sexy, but official.”
Across the aisle, James Wright, 31, was dressed casually, sitting beneath a dark suit and starched white shirt on a hanger. On his way to an audition for a soap opera, “As the World Turns,” he was reading Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — he aspires to play Biff some day — to warm up.
A few minutes later, another actress, Angelica Ayala, was gesticulating forcefully and mouthing the words to her part, a woman with multiple names and personalities. Ms. Ayala, 45, made no apologies for her theatrical display.
“I just have to do what I have to do,” she said. “People might stare, but I need to rehearse.” Her play, “Peccatoribus,” was being staged at the Pregones Theater in the Bronx.
“It’s a play about war and fighting for yourself,” she said.
WRITING, TO READ LATER
N train at 59th Street, 4 p.m.
Having finished “The Nimrod Flipout,” a book of short stories by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, on her morning commute, Alysia Vallas, on her way home to the Upper West Side, pulled out the journal in which she had been recording a summer’s worth of impressions of New York.
“I generally write little vignettes about daily occurrences I’d like to remember,” she said. “Strange places I’ve visited, people who have caught my eye on the subway, things of that nature.”
The journal, a patterned hardcover, also includes carefully drawn tables and notes on guitar chords she researched at the New York Public Library.
Ms. Vallas, 21 and a student at Grinnell College in Iowa, spent the summer as an intern at the Queens Library HealthLink. She said she typically used her train time to read or write.
“It’s the one the time of day that you have completely to yourself with no sort of immediate obligations, unplugged,” she said. “Although you’re surrounded by people, the anonymity is really forgiving.”
READERS IN TRAINING
2 train at 42nd Street, 5 p.m.
The day-campers from Tremont United Methodist Church in the Bronx, ages 5 to 8, were exhausted. They had been going full speed with activities since 7:30 a.m., including a field trip to the New York Hall of Science in Queens.
Waiting on the platform at Times Square, the children plotted how to score a coveted rush-hour seat, planning who would sit on whose lap if the options were scarce. Hands were held tight, and two of the youngest girls rested their heads against each other’s for a moment.
As the train pulled into 42nd Street, Jesus Figueroa, a Tremont counselor for six summers, readied the campers to board: “Get your books ready.” An explosion of titles — “Jig and Mag,” “A Rose, a Bridge, and a Wild Black Horse,” “The Kid Who Invented the Popsicle” — were pulled from backpacks.
According to a church rule, Tremont campers must read whenever they win a seat on the subway. Each day, campers select a book from the church library or bring one from home. They practice reading in short increments — 20 minutes here and there — and keep reading journals to document their progress.
“The books keep them occupied while they ride and help them stay on point with their reading skills,” said Mr. Figueroa, 20.
On the train, even campers who had to stand took to their books. An 8-year-old named Christopher used both hands to hold “Time Together,” supporting himself by twisting one of his black Nike Shox around the pole behind him. Next to him was Steven, also 8, who cracked open “50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth” with one hand and held on to a counselor with the other.
With an index finger following the words on Page 4 of “Mary Anne to the Rescue,” a book in the Baby-Sitters Club series, 8-year-old Laronda perched intently on her seat between two men scanning newspapers. For a moment, she looked up to offer an assessment of the task at hand. “This is a lot of work,” she said, “but it’s fun.” And then she turned back to the book.
JOINING THE CLUB
D train at Grand Street, 5:45 p.m.
Fellow passengers would probably never suspect that Carlton Clarke, standing in the middle of a crowded car, was consumed with the ramblings of a disaffected teenager.
With a logo bag from the accounting firm where he works slung over his shoulder and a stack of papers bound by a black clip balanced on his left palm, Mr. Clarke appeared to be taking his work home with him to Brooklyn.
But he was, in fact, three chapters into J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” a copy of which he had printed from a downloaded version circulating around his office book club, which meets weekly and turns 50-somethings like Mr. Clarke into armchair literary critics.
“I’m only part of the way into this book, but I already have questions about where it could be going and whether or not it can get there,” he said, bracing himself as the train lurched across the Manhattan Bridge.
In recent months, the book group has read the first and second installments in Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” series. “That was a different kind of reading experience because they are graphic novels,” Mr. Clarke said. “I had never been exposed to that genre before.”
As for “Catcher in the Rye,” Mr. Clarke could not remember whether he had read it before. “Maybe I did, in school, but either way, this is different,” he said. “I definitely never read it on the subway before.”
MEDITATION IN MOTION
7 train at Queensboro Plaza, 6:15 p.m.
On a crowded car hurtling toward Jackson Heights, Panee Ma was immersed in a solitary pursuit, radiating monklike calm.
For two years, Ms. Ma has used her round trips from Queens to the garment district, where she spends long days applying intricate beading to clothing by hand, to read “The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra,” a six-volume Buddhist literary masterpiece. And here she was, on a warm Wednesday evening, most of the way through her last book.
Ms. Ma, 68, a native of Korea who came to New York in 1981 via Thailand, speaks in heavily accented English. Her reading goal is simple: “I am learning through these books to become a better human being and get better at English.
“I try to improve myself every day,” she added, thoughtful about the necessity of combining her spiritual life with the grime and noise of the subway. “I am trying to learn to live life as a Buddha. I don’t want to waste any time.”
One on how homeless children are straining schools
Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
By ERIK ECKHOLM
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C’s she got last spring — a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel.
Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.
The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.
Still, Charity said of her last semester, “I couldn’t go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff,” and she often nodded off in class.
Charity and her brother, Elijah Carrington, 6, were among 239 children from homeless families in her district as of last June, an increase of 80 percent over the year before, with indications this semester that as many or more will be enrolled in the months ahead.
While current national data are not available, the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group.
There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.
With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.
“It’s hard enough going to school and growing up, but these kids also have to worry where they’ll be staying that night and whether they’ll eat,” said Bill Murdock, chief executive of Eblen-Kimmel Charities, a private group in Asheville that helps needy families with anything from food baskets and money for utility bills to toiletries and a prom dress.
“We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don’t cry,” Mr. Murdock said.
Since 2001, federal law has required every district to appoint a liaison to the homeless, charged with identifying and aiding families who meet a broad definition of homelessness — doubling up in the homes of relatives or friends or sleeping in motels or RV campgrounds as well as living in cars, shelters or on the streets. A small minority of districts, including Buncombe County, have used federal grants or local money to make the position full time.
The law lays out rights for homeless children, including immediate school placement without proof of residence and a right to stay in the same school as the family is displaced. Providing transportation to the original school is an expensive logistical challenge in a huge district like Buncombe County, covering 700 square miles.
While the law’s goals are widely praised, school superintendents lament that Congress has provided little money, adding to the fiscal woes of districts. “The protections are important, but Congress has passed the cost to state and local taxpayers,” said Bruce Hunter, associate director of the American Association of School Administrators.
Fairfax County, Va., where the number of homeless students climbed from 1,100 in June 2007 to 1,800 last spring, has three social workers dedicated to the homeless and is using a temporary stimulus grant to assign a full-time transportation coordinator to commandeer buses, issue gas cards and sometimes call taxis to get the children to their original schools.
Like Fairfax County, the Asheville area looks prosperous, drawing tourists and retirees, but manicured lawns, million-dollar homes and golf courses mask the struggles of many adults working at low-paying jobs in sales and food service.
Emily Walters, the liaison to the homeless for the Buncombe County schools, is busy as school begins, providing backpacks and other supplies and signing children up for free breakfasts and lunches. But her job continues through the school year as other families lose their footing and those who had concealed their status, because of the stigma or because they were not aware of the benefits, join the list.
Sometimes it includes driving families in crisis to look at prospective shelters — a temporary solution at best, Ms. Walters said. When the county receives a two-year stimulus grant next month, she said, she hopes there will be more money to help people avoid eviction or pay security deposits for new rentals.
The evening before school began, Ms. Walters drove 45 minutes to an RV campground to deliver a scientific calculator and other essential school supplies to Cody Curry, 14, who lives with his mother, Dawn, and his brother, Zack, 11, in a camper. Mrs. Curry had to downsize from a trailer, she said, when her work as a sales clerk was cut to two days a week.
The first day of school, Ms. Walters drove to a men’s rescue shelter in the city to take Nate Fountain, 18, to high school. Nate said his parents kicked him out of the house last spring, during his senior year, because he was not doing his school work and was drinking and using drugs. With Ms. Walters’s help, he said, he expects to finish high school this semester and study culinary arts at a community college.
“I spend a lot of time just making sure the kids stay in school,” Ms. Walters said.
The busing service was especially valued by Leslie Laws, who was laid off from her job in customer service last year and lost her rental apartment.
Ms. Laws and her 12-year-old son are staying in a women’s shelter in Asheville, far from his former school. He is deeply involved with activities like chorus. Now he must catch the bus at 6:05 a.m. and ride one and a half hours each way.
Educators and advocates for the homeless across the country said that in the current recession, the law had made a difference, minimizing destructive gaps in schooling and linking schools with social welfare agencies.
Charity Crowell, despite her vow to bring up her grades, may be in store for another rough semester. Her stepfather works long hours delivering food on commission, but business is poor. Her mother, Katrina, wants to look for a job, but that is difficult without a car.
Food stamps help, but by the second half of each month the family is mostly eating “Beanee Weenees and noodles,” Ms. Crowell said. As school resumed in late August, the family was facing eviction from the $475-a-month trailer and uncertain about what to do next.
An NYT blog post on the importance of free play for children.
A Wooded Prairie Springs From a Site Once Piled High With Garbage
By KENNETH CHANG
South of the Belt Parkway near Exit 15 in Brooklyn, approaching Kennedy International Airport, an unassuming hill slopes upward, dotted with small, scraggly trees and bushes.
A quarter-century ago, the hill was a more memorable sight. It was the Fountain Avenue Landfill.
“It was an ugly old dump,” said Lee Shelley, a longtime resident of the Starrett City neighborhood who heads a citizens’ committee that, for nearly two decades, pestered the city, then cooperated with it, to clean up and transform the pile of garbage.
Today, someone at the top of the hill stands 130 feet above the sea in a field of prairie grasses. It is some of the highest ground in the city, its panoramic views taking in the Empire State Building to the northwest, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and New York Harbor to the west, Jamaica Bay to the south.
In a $200 million project, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection covered the Fountain Avenue Landfill and the neighboring Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill with a layer of plastic, then put down clean soil and planted 33,000 trees and shrubs at the two sites. The result is 400 acres of nature preserve, restoring native habitats that disappeared from New York City long ago.
The site is not yet open to the public. Indeed, it is still listed by the state as a toxic waste site. But the air is clear and fresh.
“You can probably compare it with a day in the Alps,” Mr. Shelley said during a tour given to local residents by the city this summer. “We had hoped we would have a park. It’s turned out to be better than a park.”
The Fountain Avenue Landfill opened in 1961, filling up with residential trash, construction debris, asbestos incinerator ash and, notoriously, the bodies of mob victims. In its last year of operation, 1985, an average of 8,200 tons of trash arrived there each day — some 40 percent of the city’s refuse. The Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill was open from 1956 to 1980. In its later years, it was primarily a dump for debris from construction and demolition.
Once closed, the landfills were deemed by the city to be ecologically “sanitary,” meaning they caused no significant harm or health problems, but still offended the senses. Fires often smoldered, emitting putrid odors. Runoff containing heavy metals, oil, pesticides and PCBs flowed into Jamaica Bay. Residents complained about health concerns, and finally, in 1995, hammered out an agreement with the city to rehabilitate the dumps.
During that era, the thinking about what to do with closed landfills was evolving, too. The piles were “capped” with a layer of clay and plastic to keep water out, and covered with a few inches of soil. The usual practice was to plant grass and mow it as if it were a big lawn.
In the 1980s, Leslie Sauer, a founder of Andropogon Associates, a landscape architect firm in Philadelphia, was one of the first to think landfills had more potential. “The idea of mowing landfills is lunacy,” she said.
While working as a consultant for Fresh Kills, a former city garbage dump on Staten Island, she surveyed the fate of other closed landfills. “We could not find one landfill that was being maintained,” she said. Instead of a manicured lawn, the landfill grass inevitably turned into “a weedy junk pile,” she said.
Three feet of soil on top of the landfill cap would hold more moisture, Ms. Sauer surmised, allowing a wider array of plants to grow. Even trees. The common wisdom was never to put trees on a landfill because the roots would push down and puncture the cap.
But in her surveys, Ms. Sauer found that trees inevitably started growing on top of landfills anyway, and that roots typically spread out in a wide but fairly shallow pattern. The network of roots would also do a better job of holding the soil together against erosion than plain grass, and the result might be a sustainable ecology instead of a monotonous grassy hill that required continuous lawn care.
John McLaughlin, who directs the ecological rehabilitation of the Brooklyn landfills for the Department of Environmental Protection and worked with Ms. Sauer at Fresh Kills, carved up the landscape into a series of “islands,” assigning a different mix of plants to reflect a different ecological niche in the region. Some resemble the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Others drew inspiration from Sandy Hook, N.J., and Fire Island.
The first seeds were laid down in 2004 on the Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill, followed a year later by the first plantings of shrubs and trees, at a density of 800 to 1,000 per acre, about double what typically grow in a natural setting. The final plantings went in last year. All told, the ecological portion of the landfill project cost about $20 million.
More than 93 percent of the trees and shrubs have survived.
“We call this the birth of a forest,” Mr. McLaughlin said. In a decade, the trees might be 20 to 25 feet tall.
Once the plants take hold, nature will be allowed to take its course, evolving the land into microclimates. In some areas that turned out to be damper than had been foreseen, sassafras and black oak, which prefer dry soil, are not doing as well as expected, but other plants should prosper, Mr. McLaughlin said.
Birds including ospreys, egrets and snowy owls are spotted and counted at the former landfills.
“My friends were all like, ‘You’re going where to work with wildlife?’ ” said Lee Humberg, one of the United States Department of Agriculture biologists keeping watch over the site. “One wouldn’t expect to find a prairie setting in New York City.”
A spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation said the Fountain Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue Landfills, currently listed as a “significant threat to the public health or environment,” could be reclassified by next spring as safe for public access, requiring only continued monitoring of their conditions.
Then the final steps for opening them to the public would start. Mr. Shelley, the Starrett City resident, envisions an amphitheater for concerts, bicycle paths and fishing areas, perhaps within a handful of years. “What they’re doing here,” he said, “was an absolute miracle.”
One about a man in Harlem who literally will walk into the middle of gang fights to break them up
On Harlem’s Restive Streets, Preaching Peace With a Convert’s Zeal
By JASON GRANT
The man known on some of Harlem’s toughest streets as the “P.O.D.,” shorthand for “pastor on deck,” brought his black Jeep Compass to a screeching halt on Lenox Avenue, near 128th Street, on a recent Saturday night, and jumped out.
Two teenage girls — members of the rival street gangs Girls G.F. and Barbie Dolls — were rolling across the sidewalk in a tangle of elbows, kicks, fists and screams. Blood smeared the concrete as a roaring circle of at least 20 people urged them on.
That was when the man who had been in the car, the Rev. Vernon Williams, made his move.
Powering his way through the crowd, Mr. Williams shouted: “It’s over! It’s over! Go home!”
The crowd, mostly teenagers, slowly started walking away. One of the girls had stopped fighting and was crying on the ground, while the other was coming at her again in a rage. All at once, Mr. Williams darted forward, scooped up the weeping young woman in his thick arms and carried her to the safety of his car, where she took about 10 minutes to calm down before walking home.
“I didn’t know the girls in that fight, but I knew I had to break it up,” Mr. Williams said later as he drove through the darkened streets. “This is what I’m supposed to be doing. You know, as I’ve progressed in my walk with God, this is exactly what I’m built for.”
For the past 16 months, Mr. Williams has been putting his 50-year-old, 235-pound body on the line working to defuse street confrontations between combatants who are often armed with guns or knives. He gets text messages or phone calls from teenagers worried that a fight may erupt, and while patrolling the streets, he often intervenes when he spots gang members who have ventured into rivals’ territory.
He relies on his powerful preacher’s voice, as well as on the wisdom gleaned from his own criminal past, which includes more than 10 years in prison on various convictions.
Though Harlem is a safer neighborhood than it has been in the past, street gangs still abound, battling one another for supremacy on particular blocks and in housing projects.
At least seven major gangs operate in an area bordered roughly by West 125th Street, West 155th Street, Fifth Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue and Harlem River Drive, according to residents and community leaders. They include G.M.B., short for Get Money Boyz; F.S.U., which uses two profanities in its name; O.T.N., short for 129; and G.F., meaning GoodFellas.
Mr. Williams, a broad-shouldered man with a round face, has become a familiar figure on these streets, talking in soothing and respectful tones to teenagers, counseling nonviolence and respect for others.
To a group of teenagers he spotted carrying metal pipes near a housing project on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard one night, Mr. Williams implored: “Please don’t fight. You know Pastor don’t like that, O.K.?”
The youngsters say Mr. Williams’s own story resonates with them.
“We have mad respect for Pastor because he done experienced it,” said John Smith, 18, as he stood at the corner of 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, wearing baggy blue jeans hanging low off his waist. “We don’t want to see our friends end up in a casket. I think Pastor knows we’re not ready for disaster like that.”
Deputy Inspector Kevin T. Catalina, the commanding officer of the 32nd Precinct, which patrols parts of Harlem and has seen a decrease of more than 40 percent in murders and shootings since last year, said Mr. Williams had played a significant role in stopping violent incidents.
“I love Vernon Williams,” Inspector Catalina said in an interview. “I spend a lot of time on the street. I’m out there in the thick of it, and he’s out there out there in the thick of it, on the front lines. They do listen to him. I’ve seen him tell gang members to stop fighting — and a lot of times if he says to stop, they will. And I’ve seen him stand in between two groups and hold people back who are going to fight.”
It is strong praise for a man who spent many of his younger years doing things that landed him in handcuffs. When crack cocaine was the scourge of the city in the 1980s, Mr. Williams was a crack user and a heroin dealer.
“I was not a nice person,” he said. “I was someone you’d want to cross the street to get away from.” He ended up behind bars three different times on drug-related charges.
Then, at age 29, he committed a more serious offense after finding the mutilated body of his sister, who Mr. Williams said was a heroin addict, wedged under a boiler in a Harlem drug den.
Believing she had bled to death after an attack, an enraged Mr. Williams went on a mission to find her killers and shut down crack houses. Eventually, he walked alone into a drug den in the Bronx while firing away with an Uzi submachine gun.
Nobody was hit, but Mr. Williams was arrested as he left. He was later convicted on various charges and spent more than six years in prison.
But while he was free on bail and awaiting trial, he had a spiritual awakening, he said: “One day I broke down crying. I kept asking myself, ‘Do I want to live or die?’ That’s when I found Jesus.”
While in prison he lived in an “honor dorm” for well-behaved inmates, taught African-American history to other prisoners and began studying the Bible.
After leaving prison, Mr. Williams eventually earned a master’s degree in divinity from Drew University in New Jersey in 2005. Mr. Williams, who works as a service coordinator for Bethany Development Outreach in Harlem, started his own Baptist congregation, called Perfect Peace Ministry, which worships in space provided by Emanuel A.M.E. Church on West 119th Street.
Regarding his preaching, Mr. Williams said: “I don’t Bible-thump or preach damnation. I preach hope and then I challenge the people to change.”
He recently recalled a harrowing day in April when he stepped into the middle of a gang fight as gunfire erupted, forcing him to dive to the ground. Moments later, he confronted a teenager who had just shot at, but missed, a rival gang member.
“My whole thing is eye contact,” Mr. Williams said. “I got eye contact with him, and I was approaching him from an angle. I walked up and said, ‘Yo, put that away.’ ”
Slowly, the young man tucked the gun into a drawstring gym bag and muttered, “O.K., Rev,” he recalled.
“You got to have a cause you’re willing to die for,” Mr. Williams said. “And I’m willing to die to see that these young men make it out.”
One on reading on the train - which is why trains beat cars, hands down!
Reading Underground
By ALEXIS MAINLAND
THE middle-aged woman with the black cardigan around her shoulders had assumed a meticulously calibrated posture: feet shoulder-width apart, arms slightly bent, fists loosely clenched, muscles relaxed yet alert.
She was not preparing for a tae kwon do bout, but performing her personal version of the underground battle engaged in daily by millions of New Yorkers: reading, intently, on a sardine-can D train heading swiftly toward Brooklyn in the evening rush. Without holding on.
“I am a New Yorker,” the woman, Robin Kornhaber, 54, told me as if those five crisp words explained everything. “I can do anything on the subway.”
Reading on the subway is a New York ritual, for the masters of the intricately folded newspaper like Ms. Kornhaber, who lives in Park Slope and works on the Upper East Side, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines, office workers devouring self-help inspiration, immigrants newly minted — or not — taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the tattered covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude in a city of inveterate multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.
Even without a seat, even while pressed with strangers into human panini, even as someone plays a keyboard harmonica and rattles a cup of change, even when stumbling home after a party.
There are those whose commutes are carefully timed to the length of a Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, those who methodically page their way through the classics, and those who always carry a second trash novel in case they unexpectedly make it to the end of the first on a glacial F train. There is a lawyer from Brooklyn who for the past two months has catalogued what she and other commuters are reading on a blog, “The Subway Book Club,” and a student at the New School who spent the summer passing out 600 donated books to subway riders to spread her passion for reading.
And then there are those reading the readers, imagining their story lines. That man in a suit studying “Rosetta Stone Level 3 Italian” on the No. 2 train must be preparing to meet his fiancée’s family in Tuscany. The woman reading a young-adult novel at 81st Street is probably a teacher preparing for class. We are usually left to wonder, but I recently spent 12 hours crisscrossing four boroughs underground, asking people what they were reading and why.
Bob Alderson, 46, the man learning Italian, is a patent lawyer, with no imminent overseas travel plans, but aspirations. “Someday I want to visit Italy, so I’m studying,” he said.
And the woman reading “City of Glass,” an urban fantasy involving a slavering demon and several warlocks? Kimberly Nessel, 26, a dog walker with a graduate degree in forensic psychology, said she became addicted to young-adult fiction with dark plot lines when she worked in a bookstore.
JUST BROWSING
C train at 135th Street, 9:30 a.m.
The blue bag balanced on her lap was packed full of health care administration textbooks and homework, but Deborah Hairston, who works in the cancer unit at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital was using her commute to peruse the catalogs that stuff her mailbox each week.
“Sometimes I find things I want to buy, but most of the time I am just browsing,” she said, paging past a display of bead-embellished Chadwicks cardigans. “I don’t want to read the news or get involved with anything too heavy. I have enough of that in my life.”
A PAGE A DAY
B train at 96th Street, 10 a.m.
To learn the Talmud, many of its students read one of its 2,711 pages each day. And it helps to have a chevruta, or study partner. Harry and David Zinstein, brothers from Washington Heights, generally conduct their Daf Yomi — page of the day, in Hebrew — study sessions en route to work on the Upper West Side.
Except on Wednesday, which turns out to be a kind of day of rest for Harry, the elder of the two Zinsteins at 28. A manager at Mike’s Bistro, a kosher restaurant on West 72nd Street, Harry Zinstein forgoes his subway Talmud study those days to read the Dining section of The New York Times.
“It’s the only thing I read on the train except for the Talmud,” he said, his thick, leather-bound Babylonian text tucked inside his messenger bag for later consumption. “And it’s the perfect length for the commute.”
David Zinstein, 19, who is studying in Israel but spent the summer working for his brother, sat to the right, reading his Aramaic tractates (with English translations). “I always read the Talmud on the subway,” he said. “Even on Wednesdays.”
MULTITASKING
A train at 23rd Street, 12:30 p.m.
Donalay Thomas is the kind of reader who creates a private space for herself among the multitudes, whether she is squashed by the door or has a whole row of seats to herself. With her iPod earbuds firmly in place (“On the Ocean,” from an R & B album by K’Jon) and a thick hardcover (“Resurrecting Midnight,” by Eric Jerome Dickey) open on her lap, Ms. Thomas, head down, can zone out and leave the world behind.
“I always listen to music while I read on the train because it sets the mood for me to get lost in the author’s plots,” said Ms. Thomas, 21, a model in between jobs who lives in Englewood, N.J., and was headed to West Fourth Street for an afternoon of skateboarding. “I can become one of the characters that I’m reading about.”
She does not, however, get so lost in her books that she loses touch with fellow passengers. “I’ll ask other readers if they’re enjoying a book I’m familiar with,” Ms. Thomas said.
Then she turned to a woman across the aisle. “Your stop is next,” she said, proving that she had been paying a little bit of attention to everything all along.
SUBWAY AS STAGE
B train at 42nd Street, 1:30 p.m.
If every restaurant in New York employs at least one actor, then every subway car seems to carry at least two — rehearsing for a part, or just daydreaming about one.
An actress named Rachel, who is 25 and wore dark sunglasses that may or may not have been helping her get into character, was in from Los Angeles, with several auditions lined up, including one for the part of Sosa in “The A-Team,” a movie remake of the 1980s television series. “Sosa is an aide to the secretary of defense,” she explained. “I am trying to channel her. She is sexy, but official.”
Across the aisle, James Wright, 31, was dressed casually, sitting beneath a dark suit and starched white shirt on a hanger. On his way to an audition for a soap opera, “As the World Turns,” he was reading Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — he aspires to play Biff some day — to warm up.
A few minutes later, another actress, Angelica Ayala, was gesticulating forcefully and mouthing the words to her part, a woman with multiple names and personalities. Ms. Ayala, 45, made no apologies for her theatrical display.
“I just have to do what I have to do,” she said. “People might stare, but I need to rehearse.” Her play, “Peccatoribus,” was being staged at the Pregones Theater in the Bronx.
“It’s a play about war and fighting for yourself,” she said.
WRITING, TO READ LATER
N train at 59th Street, 4 p.m.
Having finished “The Nimrod Flipout,” a book of short stories by the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, on her morning commute, Alysia Vallas, on her way home to the Upper West Side, pulled out the journal in which she had been recording a summer’s worth of impressions of New York.
“I generally write little vignettes about daily occurrences I’d like to remember,” she said. “Strange places I’ve visited, people who have caught my eye on the subway, things of that nature.”
The journal, a patterned hardcover, also includes carefully drawn tables and notes on guitar chords she researched at the New York Public Library.
Ms. Vallas, 21 and a student at Grinnell College in Iowa, spent the summer as an intern at the Queens Library HealthLink. She said she typically used her train time to read or write.
“It’s the one the time of day that you have completely to yourself with no sort of immediate obligations, unplugged,” she said. “Although you’re surrounded by people, the anonymity is really forgiving.”
READERS IN TRAINING
2 train at 42nd Street, 5 p.m.
The day-campers from Tremont United Methodist Church in the Bronx, ages 5 to 8, were exhausted. They had been going full speed with activities since 7:30 a.m., including a field trip to the New York Hall of Science in Queens.
Waiting on the platform at Times Square, the children plotted how to score a coveted rush-hour seat, planning who would sit on whose lap if the options were scarce. Hands were held tight, and two of the youngest girls rested their heads against each other’s for a moment.
As the train pulled into 42nd Street, Jesus Figueroa, a Tremont counselor for six summers, readied the campers to board: “Get your books ready.” An explosion of titles — “Jig and Mag,” “A Rose, a Bridge, and a Wild Black Horse,” “The Kid Who Invented the Popsicle” — were pulled from backpacks.
According to a church rule, Tremont campers must read whenever they win a seat on the subway. Each day, campers select a book from the church library or bring one from home. They practice reading in short increments — 20 minutes here and there — and keep reading journals to document their progress.
“The books keep them occupied while they ride and help them stay on point with their reading skills,” said Mr. Figueroa, 20.
On the train, even campers who had to stand took to their books. An 8-year-old named Christopher used both hands to hold “Time Together,” supporting himself by twisting one of his black Nike Shox around the pole behind him. Next to him was Steven, also 8, who cracked open “50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth” with one hand and held on to a counselor with the other.
With an index finger following the words on Page 4 of “Mary Anne to the Rescue,” a book in the Baby-Sitters Club series, 8-year-old Laronda perched intently on her seat between two men scanning newspapers. For a moment, she looked up to offer an assessment of the task at hand. “This is a lot of work,” she said, “but it’s fun.” And then she turned back to the book.
JOINING THE CLUB
D train at Grand Street, 5:45 p.m.
Fellow passengers would probably never suspect that Carlton Clarke, standing in the middle of a crowded car, was consumed with the ramblings of a disaffected teenager.
With a logo bag from the accounting firm where he works slung over his shoulder and a stack of papers bound by a black clip balanced on his left palm, Mr. Clarke appeared to be taking his work home with him to Brooklyn.
But he was, in fact, three chapters into J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” a copy of which he had printed from a downloaded version circulating around his office book club, which meets weekly and turns 50-somethings like Mr. Clarke into armchair literary critics.
“I’m only part of the way into this book, but I already have questions about where it could be going and whether or not it can get there,” he said, bracing himself as the train lurched across the Manhattan Bridge.
In recent months, the book group has read the first and second installments in Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” series. “That was a different kind of reading experience because they are graphic novels,” Mr. Clarke said. “I had never been exposed to that genre before.”
As for “Catcher in the Rye,” Mr. Clarke could not remember whether he had read it before. “Maybe I did, in school, but either way, this is different,” he said. “I definitely never read it on the subway before.”
MEDITATION IN MOTION
7 train at Queensboro Plaza, 6:15 p.m.
On a crowded car hurtling toward Jackson Heights, Panee Ma was immersed in a solitary pursuit, radiating monklike calm.
For two years, Ms. Ma has used her round trips from Queens to the garment district, where she spends long days applying intricate beading to clothing by hand, to read “The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra,” a six-volume Buddhist literary masterpiece. And here she was, on a warm Wednesday evening, most of the way through her last book.
Ms. Ma, 68, a native of Korea who came to New York in 1981 via Thailand, speaks in heavily accented English. Her reading goal is simple: “I am learning through these books to become a better human being and get better at English.
“I try to improve myself every day,” she added, thoughtful about the necessity of combining her spiritual life with the grime and noise of the subway. “I am trying to learn to live life as a Buddha. I don’t want to waste any time.”
One on how homeless children are straining schools
Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
By ERIK ECKHOLM
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C’s she got last spring — a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel.
Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.
The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.
Still, Charity said of her last semester, “I couldn’t go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff,” and she often nodded off in class.
Charity and her brother, Elijah Carrington, 6, were among 239 children from homeless families in her district as of last June, an increase of 80 percent over the year before, with indications this semester that as many or more will be enrolled in the months ahead.
While current national data are not available, the number of schoolchildren in homeless families appears to have risen by 75 percent to 100 percent in many districts over the last two years, according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, an advocacy group.
There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.
With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.
“It’s hard enough going to school and growing up, but these kids also have to worry where they’ll be staying that night and whether they’ll eat,” said Bill Murdock, chief executive of Eblen-Kimmel Charities, a private group in Asheville that helps needy families with anything from food baskets and money for utility bills to toiletries and a prom dress.
“We see 8-year-olds telling Mom not to worry, don’t cry,” Mr. Murdock said.
Since 2001, federal law has required every district to appoint a liaison to the homeless, charged with identifying and aiding families who meet a broad definition of homelessness — doubling up in the homes of relatives or friends or sleeping in motels or RV campgrounds as well as living in cars, shelters or on the streets. A small minority of districts, including Buncombe County, have used federal grants or local money to make the position full time.
The law lays out rights for homeless children, including immediate school placement without proof of residence and a right to stay in the same school as the family is displaced. Providing transportation to the original school is an expensive logistical challenge in a huge district like Buncombe County, covering 700 square miles.
While the law’s goals are widely praised, school superintendents lament that Congress has provided little money, adding to the fiscal woes of districts. “The protections are important, but Congress has passed the cost to state and local taxpayers,” said Bruce Hunter, associate director of the American Association of School Administrators.
Fairfax County, Va., where the number of homeless students climbed from 1,100 in June 2007 to 1,800 last spring, has three social workers dedicated to the homeless and is using a temporary stimulus grant to assign a full-time transportation coordinator to commandeer buses, issue gas cards and sometimes call taxis to get the children to their original schools.
Like Fairfax County, the Asheville area looks prosperous, drawing tourists and retirees, but manicured lawns, million-dollar homes and golf courses mask the struggles of many adults working at low-paying jobs in sales and food service.
Emily Walters, the liaison to the homeless for the Buncombe County schools, is busy as school begins, providing backpacks and other supplies and signing children up for free breakfasts and lunches. But her job continues through the school year as other families lose their footing and those who had concealed their status, because of the stigma or because they were not aware of the benefits, join the list.
Sometimes it includes driving families in crisis to look at prospective shelters — a temporary solution at best, Ms. Walters said. When the county receives a two-year stimulus grant next month, she said, she hopes there will be more money to help people avoid eviction or pay security deposits for new rentals.
The evening before school began, Ms. Walters drove 45 minutes to an RV campground to deliver a scientific calculator and other essential school supplies to Cody Curry, 14, who lives with his mother, Dawn, and his brother, Zack, 11, in a camper. Mrs. Curry had to downsize from a trailer, she said, when her work as a sales clerk was cut to two days a week.
The first day of school, Ms. Walters drove to a men’s rescue shelter in the city to take Nate Fountain, 18, to high school. Nate said his parents kicked him out of the house last spring, during his senior year, because he was not doing his school work and was drinking and using drugs. With Ms. Walters’s help, he said, he expects to finish high school this semester and study culinary arts at a community college.
“I spend a lot of time just making sure the kids stay in school,” Ms. Walters said.
The busing service was especially valued by Leslie Laws, who was laid off from her job in customer service last year and lost her rental apartment.
Ms. Laws and her 12-year-old son are staying in a women’s shelter in Asheville, far from his former school. He is deeply involved with activities like chorus. Now he must catch the bus at 6:05 a.m. and ride one and a half hours each way.
Educators and advocates for the homeless across the country said that in the current recession, the law had made a difference, minimizing destructive gaps in schooling and linking schools with social welfare agencies.
Charity Crowell, despite her vow to bring up her grades, may be in store for another rough semester. Her stepfather works long hours delivering food on commission, but business is poor. Her mother, Katrina, wants to look for a job, but that is difficult without a car.
Food stamps help, but by the second half of each month the family is mostly eating “Beanee Weenees and noodles,” Ms. Crowell said. As school resumed in late August, the family was facing eviction from the $475-a-month trailer and uncertain about what to do next.
An NYT blog post on the importance of free play for children.
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