Kayci is 16 weeks old and her mother Shakayla Bowe is 16 years old — a symmetry of weeks and years that will never come again.
And if those numbers suggest this is a child looking after a baby, the ready smile on the baby’s face shows that this is a child as tender in affection as she is in years.
“She’s a good mom. Kayci is always clean and well fed, and she never stops smiling. Do you?” says Carley Romas, a youth worker with Sir Charles Tupper Secondary’s young parents program, as she tickles the baby’s feet.
It is here in this double-wide portable classroom at the edge of the school’s sports field on Carolina Street that Bowe is trying to get her life on track.
How far she wandered off can be judged by the fact she has had no proper schooling for the past three years.
From the age of 13, her attendance record would show what?
“Hmmm, two days at Eagle High one year,” Bowe says, “and two or three hours at Skyline (alternative school), although at Eagle High, I didn’t really stay, I just went in and left.”
Three hours in three years — what was she doing from September 2010 to September 2013?
“Just meeting friends. Going out. I wasn’t really up for school. It was hard for me to focus. I was more interested in being young than going to school,” she says.
But here she is, baby in her arms, wanting to make up for lost time.
Sometimes, she has trouble getting in in the morning, and sometimes, when Kayci is sick, she can’t come at all. But she’s making an effort and Romas and the program’s two other staff, Colin McLean and Leah Turner, do all they can to encourage her.
“Shakayla’s doing really well. On her first report card she got two Bs and an A,” says Romas.
There are 11 other young mothers (and pregnant girls) ranging in age from 15 to 19 in the school’s program.
Moral encouragement is one thing, providing diapers and baby wipes, formula, or modest gift cards so these girls can get something for themselves as their slender resources — mostly federal child allowance benefits — quickly vanish on baby necessities, is another.
And it’s the need for this encouragement that is behind Romas’s request to The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School campaign for $10,000.
“It’s important for us to be able to help them with the necessities, and it does have an effect on them coming here. We know that,” said Romas.
“These students are under a great deal of stress. We want these girls and their babies to be successful in life.”
Some of the students live in foster homes or, like Bowe, with a parent. Some are on their own, using supportive living benefits from social services to pay the rent and buy food and clothing, and they often need help from the food bank and what’s available at school to get by.
In September, staff were confronted by a 16-year-old who was homeless and six months pregnant.
“She’d come to Vancouver from Saskatchewan, and she came in here to get food, just after Labour Day,” says McLean. “I asked her where she was staying, and she’d spent the weekend sleeping rough. Sixteen, and six months pregnant — it was very disturbing.”
(That young woman has since returned to Saskatchewan.)
While they attend the school, which is a few blocks east of Main on 24th Avenue, the students’ babies stay at Emma’s Child Care, a YWCA daycare next door to the portables.
The idea is to get these young mothers to complete Grade 12 before they turn 19, because that’s their Cinderella Hour.
Once 19, they lose free daycare for their children, foster care vanishes, access to Tupper stops, and the world becomes a less-helpful place.
“When they age-out at 19, a lot of services dry up. All the care they’ve been relying on is gone. It’s a shock, and it’s very difficult for them,” says Romas.
So an incentive program to keep them coming to school is important, she said.
“It’s huge for them. If we couldn’t give them diapers and wipes and formula, maybe they wouldn’t be in school,” she says.
Turner, who has worked in the program the longest, said it doesn’t take much imagination to see how difficult life is for young mothers trying to balance the needs of being a parent with the pressures of attending school.
“These young women are going through all the same things other teenagers experience, but often without the structure and support other kids have,” said Turner.
“Most people can’t imagine how taxing it is for them. They’ll tell you that buses won’t stop for them because they’ve got a stroller, and when they do get on a bus passengers will tell them they are too young to have a child. They feel constantly judged,” she says.
“And yet they love their children and are doing their best for them.”
Students who want to pursue post-secondary education find it difficult as scholarships are few and far between, said McLean.
“If we could get some kind of scholarship support for them it would be a great help to get them to college or trades training,” he says.
It’s not hard to picture the future of a young mother leaving school at 19 with all the supports removed, having to fend for herself. The prospect of an existence on social security seems very real.
That is not a future Bowe contemplates. She wants to become a veterinarian.
“People tried to get me to go to school,” she says of her vanishing act. “It was my choice to come here, and I made the choice for my daughter.”
OUR 2016 CAMPAIGN IS CLOSED. PLEASE SEE OUR MAIN PAGE (https://fundrazr.com/profiles/vancouver-sun-childrens-fund) FOR OUR CURRENT CAMPAIGN.
This province has children who arrive at school each morning hungry, improperly clothed or without adequate footwear.
Not just dozens or hundreds. Thousands.
All they can hope for is the compassion of teachers to help them endure these miseries. To their great credit it is not unusual to find teachers and principals attempting to feed and clothe these children out of their own pockets.
There was a time the education system could do more for children stricken by poverty but budget constraints have dried up most of that funding.
It was for this reason the Vancouver Sun began its Adopt-A-School (AAS) campaign five years ago when it became apparent that some teachers in Vancouver’s inner city schools were buckling under the stress and needed assistance.
So we asked our readers to help.
The help that materialized from individual and corporate donors was astonishing. It is not possible to put an accurate dollar amount on what readers have contributed because in some cases the help goes directly to schools. All we can say is that almost $3 million has been received here every penny of which is designated for schools across the province.
So here we are another year, another appeal for help.
But what else can we do? Hunger is incessant. You are only separated from it by thetime since your last meal. And for the poor that gap is often unmanageable.
In this campaign there will be accounts from teachers who say they see children arriving at school who have not been fed that morning, have no food to last the day and who will be returning home with no prospect of finding anything to eat there either. It is a description of starvation. How can we ignore it?
You will be told of children feeding other children at school splitting their lunches so their classmates won’t be left hungry. This is not something that children should be left to deal with.
Canada has a wonderful international reputation for coming to the assistance of countries devastated by natural disasters or conflict and our United Nations commitment is without peer. But we are the only developed nation that does not have a national food program to feed its hungry school children. Regardless of party perhaps our politicians can explain why it’s necessary for children to be feeding other children. This newspaper asked as much in an editorial earlier this year. No one, it seems, is in a hurry to answer.
Thanks to the generosity of our readers no school that has asked for help to feed children has been refused. Often they have received more than they sought. AAS has set up fully funded breakfast programs, has provided money for clothing, shoes and boots, lice kits, transit tickets, field trips, emergency food vouchers to help struggling families over weekends, helped young mothers attending school with their babies. We have equipped school kitchens with stoves and fridges, dishwashers, cutlery, and washing machines, equipped sensory rooms, rebuilt an abandoned greenhouse so it could grow vegetables for low income families, provided computers and other technical aids to special needs children.
In short done all we could to alleviate the awful effects that poverty inflicts on our children attending school.
This year is no different. Please help.
