The minute Jennifer Friend opened the door to the Anaheim motel room a few months ago, she flashed back to her childhood.
She understood how this motel was a de-facto neighborhood, a place for people living just a step away from the streets, home for men and women and children. That includes schoolkids who struggle in the best of times, but are particularly underwater during the pandemic, when their motel room might have to double as a class room and class might require technology they can’t afford.
But that wasn’t all of it. This particular motel — the Robin Hood, on Beach Boulevard, with its iconic name and the sign featuring the fictional folk hero who robs the rich to give to the poor — triggered Friend.
She used to live there.
That was four decades ago. For a six-year stretch, Friend said, the Robin Hood was one of the few places her family could afford, as they bounced among motels in Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Garden Grove.
Back then, Friend shared a single room with her parents and three brothers. When it was time to go to sleep, they would drag a mattress from one of two queen beds to the floor. That’s where she’d sleep, with one brother, while the other two made do with a box spring. Her parents took the other bed.
The room she walked into as an accomplished adult — a successful lawyer and married mother of two — was not the same 200-square-foot space she’d once called home. But the look and feel of it was still overwhelming.
“In my mind, (our) room was bigger,” said Friend, who had come to drop off food as part of her job as head of Project Hope Alliance, a nonprofit that helps homeless children.
“To think that all six of us were in there, was almost too much.”
32,000 homeless kids
The temporary shock was not enough to keep Friend away from the Robin Hood and other motels that Project Hope Alliance has been visiting regularly since April, shortly after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted schooling.
Friend, herself the mother of a junior in high school and a fifth-grader, knew immediately that the technology and social isolation confounding many parents and students as remote lessons got underway would be compounded for kids living in motels and the other places where struggling families find shelter.
About 32,000 schoolchildren identified under federal guidelines as “homeless” live in Orange County. That includes children who lack a “fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence,” but might stay at times in homeless shelters, cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations.
Or motels.
In March, as campuses shut down under stay-at-home orders, school districts tried to get laptops into the hands of many of those students. But those efforts lagged, as educators ran into the challenge of unexpected demand.
Friend knew that the children assisted by her 31-year-old organization might be beyond reach if their parents didn’t have email.
Or, she figured, they might not have internet access needed for online school. And even if they received school-issued Chromebooks, many homeless children had to go to a public library or try to study in free WiFi places like Starbucks — options that the pandemic has eliminated.
Since late March, Project Hope Alliance has purchased Chromebooks and/or rented WiFi hotspots now being used by about 850 homeless schoolchildren. Some were kids the nonprofit was previously working with, through on-campus programs. But the vast majority were kids they discovered only when Friend and a case manager for Project Hope, La Shawn Hye, visited motels in Anaheim, Tustin, Santa Ana and Stanton.
“We reached out to a lot of our nonprofit colleagues to see where the largest number of motel families were,” said Friend.
Mostly, operators at the motels visited by Friend and Hye were willing to help, putting the workers in contact with families in need of help. Project Hope Alliance and other groups still regularly visit about a half dozen of those motels, to troubleshoot the technology, assist children with schoolwork and distribute food.
Friend’s organization also created a bilingual online learning guide so parents can help their children by giving them the information they need to access the online portals used by their schools, such as an email address and password for each child.
Recently, Friend persuaded the landlord of the building where Project Hope Alliance is located to let her group use a vacant suite of offices as a learning center for students who live in motels and other crowded conditions. The kids can do their schoolwork without disruption, and the nonprofit’s case managers can help as tutors.
Friend explained how there is a “shame factor” that’s particularly acute when laptop cameras show an entire class how each student lives. Some of the Project Hope Alliance kids reported that their teachers had scolded them for not appearing on camera; their case managers made calls to the teachers to explain why.
When the students describe these experiences, Friend said, “you can see the shame in their faces.”
There to help
So far, Project Hope Alliance has gotten about 240 devices — many shared by multiple siblings — into the hands of 829 children who were not on the group’s radar before the pandemic.
But Friend knows there are probably thousands of others who need technology or other help to stay in school. Education, she added, is a critical factor in breaking the cycle of homelessness that can perpetuate among many families over generations.
Her own parents — a tech entrepreneur and a preschool teacher — made sure all four of their children graduated Huntington Beach High. Friend went on to UC Irvine, then to law school and, later, a partnership at a Santa Ana law office. She now works full-time for Project Hope Alliance.
Project Hope Alliance is limited in how many motel children it can help. The nonprofit has gone into the red by spending $93,000 on technology devices and ongoing services, including a $7,000-a-month bill for the WiFi hotspots from Verizon. Donors and other supporters have stepped up to help, but Friend said covering the recurring costs while campuses remain largely inaccessible isn’t sustainable.
“We desperately need a tech partner to step in and, at minimum, defer some of these costs,” Friend said. “This isn’t going to go away.”
Changed lives
On a recent Thursday morning, a crew from Project Hope Alliance and volunteers with Mariners Church delivered food, school supplies and other assistance to families living at an Anaheim motel. It was part of an effort that reaches up to two dozen families a week.
A single mother of a 10-year-old boy who is on the autism spectrum shared how the Chromebook, WiFi service and groceries have helped keep them going. (The Register is not revealing the names of families helped by Project Hope Alliance.)
At 46, the woman — who says she grew up a victim of human trafficking — said she and her son live on $550 a month in welfare assistance. She also said she is trying to better their lives by attending college business courses, and that during the pandemic she and her son both study via Zoom.
The pair had been sharing a sluggish laptop or her phone with limited WiFi. But a new Chromebook and hotspot provided by Project Hope Alliance have helped their schoolwork and her son’s virtual speech therapy.
“He is able to do his work efficiently,” she said. “There isn’t any cutting off.”
She also said she’s grateful for the food — non-perishable goods, fresh fruit and vegetables, and cooked meals — brought to them twice a week.
“That food helps a lot,” she said.
Another student, a high school junior who excels at math, said a Chromebook she recently received from Project Hope Alliance has made school a lot easier. Her family — seven siblings, her mom, her stepfather, and a stepsister — share a two-bedroom apartment with another renter. She started virtual classes again in August.
She explained that a previous school-issued Chromebook had stopped working, and that her school said they didn’t have a replacement.
“I was missing my classes,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
But she’s been assisted by Project Hope Alliance since eighth grade, and she shared her problem with her case manager, Guadalupe Contreras.
“Whenever I need help,” the girl said, “they’re there.”
Room to grow
Contreras hopes the teen will start visiting the learning center set up at the Project Hope Alliance office. Right now, the girl often has to stop her studies to help her younger siblings with their work or tech issues. Her mom and stepdad lost their jobs to the pandemic, and the family is behind in rent.
“It puts a lot of stress and strain on her,” Contreras said of the girl’s living conditions.
The learning center looks like a humble high-tech startup, with high ceilings and seven socially-distanced work stations. Everything gets sanitized between users, and there’s room to add work stations as needed.
Friend hopes to keep operating the center for as long as campuses remain closed.
“School is that one place where our kids could feel like everyone else. And it’s gone now.”
