Homeless students' club finds a home at SF State

For students who live out of their cars and on friends' couches, life is a constant emergency situation.

Aside from finding ways to stay clean and keep up the appearance that everything is OK, many have to figure out how many meals they must give up to buy expensive textbooks.

These are just a few of the issues homeless students have to resolve every day, while struggling to get their education next to peers who whip out cellular phones and flash credit cards with ease.

According to Roma Guy, SF State professor and director of the Bay Area Homelessness Program, homelessness is a reality many people at SF State choose to ignore.

Although life can seem idyllic on campus, with young fresh, agile bodies exchanging ideas and planning for the future, there are many students who are struggling just to stay awake in classes because they have no place to rest outside of class, Guy said.

There are no statistics that document the number of homeless students on campus, but with the cost of living in San Francisco rising and a shrinking job market, Guy said many SF State students are at risk of poverty and homelessness.

According to Guy, three or four of her students each semester report being homeless or speak of recent bouts with homelessness.

The professor teaches an urban studies class, titled "Homelessness and Public Policy," which is developing an organization for students who are homeless, or on the edge of homelessness, to get resources, motivation and rest.

"The hardest thing about homelessness is exhaustion," Guy said. "It's hard to solve your problems when you spend a lot of your time trying to figure out where to get a good meal, where to study or even figuring out where to rest."

The organization, Students for Safe and Stable Homes will sponsor its first event on Oct. 16, which Guy said will bring the issue of homelessness out of the closet at SF State.

The event will feature a panel of educators and social workers who deal with homeless people. Among the panelists is Paul Groth a professor at UC-Berkeley who wrote "Living Downtown" about people who live in single occupancy hotels.

Aside from raising students' awareness to the realities of homelessness, the club will provide a place specifically designed for homeless students to get counseling, career development and rest.

Although there are some students at SF State who are living on the edge of homelessness, many more homeless students are enrolled in community colleges because of the cheaper tuition, Guy said.

At San Francisco's City College, Students United Against Homelessness formed last year to deal specifically with homeless students' issues. Its aim is to help students achieve higher education while struggling with homelessness.

The group's founder, Paul Hansen, is a former SF State student who took Guy's class last year.

Lisa Gonzalez, 36, is a member of SUAH. She is currently enrolled in 12 units at City College and works as a library technician there.

Although she has had good jobs in the past, homelessness and poverty are not new struggles for Gonzalez. She has lived in cars and single occupancy hotels in the past and she has stayed up all night at 24 hour diners when she had nowhere else to go. When she lost her good paying video technician job three years ago, she knew she had to break the cycle.

This time, she said, she felt she could not bounce back like she had in the past because she was getting older and health problems were taking their toll.

"Regardless of what my fears were, I figured I had three options: suicide, just leaving town, or going to school," Gonzalez said. "They all looked equally good at that point."

She chose to go back to school with the help of her friends, but her time since enrollment has not been easy.

According to Gonzalez the hardest part of becoming a student again is learning to deal with the bureaucracies of financial aid and general assistance. SUAH is an organization that helps students navigate those waters.

"To be on any program (like financial aid) requires maintenance," Gonzalez said. "It can be physically and emotionally wearing. Any snag can set you back and I've seen lots of people just give up."

Along with the problems of dealing with bureaucracies there are practical problems many financially stable students don't have to deal with.

The most pressing problems are food and textbooks. One of SUAH's objectives is to establish programs with the hospitality management department at CCSF and book publishers to provide free meals and books for homeless students.

Another problem is attitudes.

"People seem to think there must be a reason, that it's not as easy as falling into bad circumstances for people to be homeless," Gonzalez said. "They figure we gotta' be drunks or drug users. Homeless people are the same as we are, but they just don't have a place to live."

An ongoing study by the San Francisco Department of Human Services found that 18 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women who went to homeless shelters in the city last year had some college experience or had received a college degree.

According to Claudia Anderson, the education coordinator at Central City Hospitality House, a shelter for homeless youth in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, despite the challenges facing them, homeless students can change their situations.

"A lot of young people are challenged by issues of drug abuse to numb the pain," she said." But the successes are really phenomenal. It speaks to the resiliency of the human spirit."

[ Golden Gater Online October 3, 1996 ]

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