When Ashley Keiran of Portland, Maine entered foster care at age 14, she kept it quiet. "I really didn’t tell very many people about my situation. I was very hush-hush," remembers Keiran. Then, in her sophomore year of high school, life got crazy. "I told a few people I trusted, including teachers. And they were fantastic. They were supportive. They realized why I didn’t always have my homework in exactly on time."

Keiran, now a 18-year-old senior, is off to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York this fall – something she attributes in part to support from the “cheerleaders” she has found in school and in life since becoming more open about her living situation.

So, as a parting gift to her school, and with help from Laurie Davis, an adult friend of Keiran’s who is also the No Child Left Behind coordinator for Portland schools, and with money from a youth leadership development grant, Keiran is preparing to design and lead two training sessions for Portland High teachers on the educational challenges faced by teens who are homeless or in foster care.

Youthink: Empowering Portland Teens

Keiran’s project is one of five student-proposed projects funded over a year ago by Youthink, an 18-member student board that considered applications from young Portland residents proposing projects that would address key issues facing young residents of the city.

The money awarded by Youthink came from Maine’s Kids Consortium, which in turn had received funding from the Youth Innovation Fund, a W. K. Kellogg Foundation-funded effort to get students nationwide more involved in school and community issues.

Other Portland projects funded by Youthink include the creation of a student-produced video intended to dispel negative images about one Portland neighborhood with a bad reputation, and a cookie business built by middle school students.

In each case projects must have a committed “adult ally” who works with the grantees to meet deadlines and complete the projects successfully. For Keiran, that ally is Laurie Davis, with whom Keiran once lived while in between official foster care placements.

Teen Homelessness: Frequent and Hidden

Until that time, Davis said, “I had always naively assumed that there were enough foster care homes for foster kids.” But when Keiran’s then-foster mother decided she was getting out of the business, Portland child welfare workers weren’t able to come up with a new placement in time. Keiran “lived with us for about a month or so until they found a foster home for her,” said Davis. “Once she was in a home, things settled down, and she began to understand the journey she had been on. We saw this Youthink grant opportunity and thought, hmm, maybe we can do something.”

According to Ainsley Wallace of Portland Partnership Inc., which helps administer the Youthink program, Portland has high levels of teen homelessness. “There are virtually zero placements for foster care within the city of Portland,” said Wallace. Because teens are reluctant to leave the city, they often wind up homeless, she says.

Or, as Keiran put it, “Unless you’re willing to go live in the boonies, you’re screwed.”

Keiran and Davis decided to interview homeless Portland teens to find out more about the barriers they faced to succeeding in school, so that they could better understand what teachers needed to know about this group. One surprising finding, for Davis: “Many of these kids didn’t think of themselves as homeless. It’s just that when they described how they were living, it turned out they were sleeping on friends’ couches. But they didn’t necessarily see that as homeless.”

Students and teachers both, said Davis, need to understand that “Homelessness doesn’t mean you are sitting on a street corner. There are a lot of gradations.”

The High Price of Feeling Different

But the overriding message from the teens Keiran and Davis interviewed was that simply “feeling different” was a major impediment to staying in school and doing well.

“A lot of them spoke about a feeling of not being very welcome, of being very different from the other students, generally feeling out of place in an environment where most kids are living with their parents, and most of those parents have some money,” says Keiran. “Some kids who left school and then tried to go back found that they just couldn’t do it. They found that their teachers weren’t very helpful in some cases. Some teachers respond negatively when they find out a student is homeless or in foster care. They have particular ideas about those kids and what they are capable of as students.”

“One young man described a point when he was living in a shelter,” says Davis. “He would walk out of school, and walk down the street to the shelter, and it just was too strange. He just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Hard to Open Up

Clearly, says Keiran, if teens could be open about their living situations, it would reduce the powerfully distracting awareness many of them have of living a double life. But students’ reluctance to open up about being in care or not having a safe home is both understandable and based on the real stigma they face.

“In general, I do think it is better if people know what you are going through,” says Keiran. “But it needs to be the students’ decision…It can really be going out on a limb.”

Meanwhile, Keiran and Davis say, they hope that teachers can learn to be more sensitive to the sheer logistical burdens faced by homeless teens, or teens in unstable foster care situations.

“When you have nowhere to live and you are bouncing around couch surfing, it is difficult to focus on schoolwork,” says Keiran. “You don’t have a computer. You don’t have the stuff you need to make a poster. You don’t have a ride to somewhere you need to go. Small things can become really difficult.”

She hopes that by raising awareness among teachers, she and Davis can reduce the stigma, and perhaps make it easier for teens to come forward to adults they trust in school. “You can get some real cheerleaders in school once you open up,” says Keiran, “But the initial opening up is very difficult.”

A Field Trip for the Teachers

Keiran says she and Davis are still working out the final details of the training sessions they are planning for Portland High teachers later this spring. But there will be four main elements: a field trip to the Portland Street Academy alternative education center, where many homeless teens eventually go to finish their high school studies or earn a GED; a Q & A session with homeless teens; a role-playing exercise with teachers playing the roles of homeless students trying to meet the requirements of school; and a presentation of the data the two have collected on Portland’s homeless teens.

Teachers and administrators at the school have been supportive, and are open to the idea of the training sessions, says Keiran. “Most teachers have been very cool, very accepting,” said Keiran. “The problem is really a lack of knowledge. They don’t know anything about it, what it’s like, and why would they?”

Resources:

• Learn more about how Kids Consortium is working to encourage youth leadership.
• The National Service-Learning Partnership has information on the YouThink project in Portland, Maine, as well as spotlights on eight other sites across the nation.