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“A lot of our kids love their school," says Langley Secondary's principal Dawne Tomlinson (shown above). "They might not always love being in class, but this is their safe place. If they are hungry, they will get fed, if they need help, they’ll be helped, and if they are homeless, we will work with them."
Many students have moved out of the school’s catchment area due to poverty or a breakdown at home. But they want to keep coming to Langley Secondary where they have found a home and success.
"We have kids living in Surrey, Abbotsford, Aldergrove — and Langley’s a pretty big place itself,” says Tomlinson. "We want to remove all these barriers so kids can graduate and have a chance at a quality life. But first we need them to get here. And lack of a bus ticket is a major barrier."
Most homeless teens are invisible because they wear all the right things because if they look homeless, they're more vulnerable in school and way more vulnerable on the street.
"So the key is to hide it,” said Tomlinson. “These kids could be couch surfing for months before we find out. We had two kids living in the parking garage at a casino. They just found themselves a little parkade so they had shelter and were sitting on the floor. Fourteen year olds.
“I had another 14-year-old who couldn’t go back home. It was Friday and the ministry (Children and Family Development) couldn’t step in fast enough. He said he was going to stay with friends but then he texted a counsellor saying his friends couldn’t take him and we were panicking because we didn’t want him out on the street.
“I kept texting him all weekend saying, ‘I’ll come and pick you up and take you to your grandparents.’ He did stay somewhere but we are not quite sure where.”
As for the rate of homelessness, Tomlinson says, “Sometimes we don’t have any but sometimes we have eight or 10. It’s an invisible epidemic. It’s all around us."
Why are they homeless? Because they don't feel safe at home. They're fleeing family violence, parents who are addicts and parents who can't look after themselves let alone their children.
OUR 2015 CAMPAIGN IS CLOSED. PLEASE SEE OUR MAIN PAGE (https://fundrazr.com/profiles/vancouver-sun-childrens-fund) FOR OUR CURRENT CAMPAIGN.
THE 2011 SCHOOL YEAR had barely begun at Admiral Seymour elementary when teacher Carrie Gelson, frustrated after a difficult day at work, wrote an impassioned open letter to Vancouver residents questioning whether anyone cared about her inner-city students who were coming to school with empty tummies and holes in their shoes.
On the day The Vancouver Sun published her letter, when she arrived at the East Vancouver school, “People had already dropped off thousands of dollars in cash by that time.”
So we told her story, introducing readers to her children. And because you began donating money, clothing, school equipment and field trips, by the spring of 2013, the donations were close to $1 million to Adopt-a-School. The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund matched some of those donations for a total of $1.3 million.
Because of you, hundreds of Vancouver-area schoolchildren now have boots to wear in the rain, warm breakfasts and are experiencing things they would never have otherwise.
For more than three decades, you have enabled The Vancouver Sun Children’s Fund to raise than $11.5 million, of which more than $7 million has been distributed to nearly 1,000 non-profit children’s charities in B.C.
The season of giving is once again upon us, and we're hoping you'll contribute to Adopt-a-School to keep alive this great legacy that we both started so many years ago.
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