Orenda Warren: A Room With a View

Orenda Warren’s (Class of ’01, B.S., Health Science) office has a special view through its silver-coated window. A woman, not knowing she can be seen from the other side of the glass, stops on the sidewalk to wipe her very dirty face. Ten feet way from Warren’s desk, on the other side of the glass, a person drops dirty clothes in the gutter. A minute later, another picks them up and puts them on, right on the sidewalk. This is Skid Row.

A few blocks away is the Gray Lady, the 70-year-old Los Angeles Times building and the Los Angeles City Hall. Almost around the corner is Little Tokyo, with its pricy hotels, thriving arts community, and the Japanese-American National Museum.

One block away is the Union Rescue Mission, and nearby, the Midnight Mission. Most people don’t think of it, but children are on Skid Row. They see what is on the street close up, with its sounds, its smells, its danger. There is no window shielding them.

“We know what the children on Skid Row have seen by what they say and do,” says Warren. “We try to steer them back to being a typical child. We try to tell them, ‘This is just a temporary situation.’”

As the regional coordinator for School on Wheels (SOW) in South Los Angeles, she witnesses the daily struggle of the homeless, including the children that her agency seeks to help.

“People are just trying to survive, including these children,” she continues. “They are exposed to mayhem, violence, and sexual situations in these streets that your typical child would not be exposed to. We know what they’ve seen by what they say and do, and we try to steer them back to being a typical child. We tell them that ‘This just a temporary situation. If you stay in school, it can be the thing that will help you create a lifestyle where you never have to worry about being homeless again.’”

Established in 1993, School on Wheels was the brainchild of Agnes Stevens, a retired teacher who saw homeless children wandering aimlessly in Santa Monica. She began teaching them in a park, encouraging them to stay in school and to keep up with their grades and school activities. Eventually, more tutors were needed to support the growing nonprofit organization, which now serves neighborhoods in the Westside, the South Bay, East L.A., as well as Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. There are also branches of SOW in Massachusetts and Indiana. Warren, who is stationed at the downtown administrative office, oversees five facilities in the South Los Angeles area, an area that has always been her home.

“My family lives in South L.A.,” she says. “I’ve lived my entire life there, and went to public schools there. I love its [cultural] richness. The reason I haven’t moved away is because I feel that people who have come up in the community, and have weathered the storms of drive-by shootings and poverty, have to stay there to set an example. We go to work, we save our money and buy property there. We don’t say, ‘I’ve come up, I’m out of here. I’m moving to Santa Monica or the Westside.’

“I feel a personal responsibility to the neighborhood after surviving my own brother being killed in a drive-by shooting,” she continues. “I’ve been through having family members on drugs. If we don’t address these issues now, we will have to address more serious ones in the future because these children will remain among us, going into gangs and into mental health institutions. We wonder why these social problems arise. It’s because these kids often don’t have anybody telling them, ‘We’re here to teach you how to act.’ But we have to overcome a lot of barriers, and the bottom line is to develop trust.”

The main tutoring room in the downtown SOW facility is bright and airy. Filled with books, computers, blackboards, and the children’s artwork, it also echoes with the sound of its young occupants playing, teasing, sometimes shouting – just getting to be kids. Often they interrupt Warren as she speaks, just wanting attention.

“They can be demanding,” she notes, having been at the facility for a month. “Their moms are so stressed out that they can’t be emotionally there, but they do the best they can. The wonderful thing is that these children respond to you when they see that you care. When I first started here, the kids wouldn’t even say goodbye. But now, they know my name, they expect me to be here every day, and they run up and hug me. They let their guard down because they know they can be kids in here. If they have to leave early, they cry or get aggressive toward their parents, because they want to stay.”

SOW programs depend on volunteer tutors, who commit to as little as one hour a week. Ideally, there would be enough tutors to help the children one-on-one. Warren, who is trying to encourage the community to pitch in, emphasizes the benefits to volunteering as “a way of giving back, of helping to enhance and bring up the community. I know a lot of students at Dominguez Hills are from South L.A., from Gardena, Compton, and Inglewood. Many of them are first-generation college graduates like me. I want to let them know this opportunity is here.”

Along with tutoring, SOW provides services for the parents, many of whom are afraid to approach the system due to their homelessness and lack of ability to provide the basic requirements to enroll their children in school.

“Children who are in homeless families miss a lot of school,” says Warren. “They move from shelter to shelter, or maybe from a car to a shelter, and their moms may not have the proper paperwork. We have a lot of immigrants who end up down here and don’t have school records, or moms who were in domestic violence situations, who had to run out of their houses without getting their children’s birth certificates and immunization records. When they go to the schools to enroll their children with no advocate, it can be a harrowing experience trying to penetrate the system. So we pull that all together by working with the Los Angeles Unified School District to get their child in school as quickly as possible.”

The psychological impact on homeless children is another obstacle for SOW to tackle, in another effort to ensure their academic success by giving them self-confidence that is not usually attainable with their living situation. Part of this is achieved with providing the necessities for school, such as uniforms, school supplies, and bus tokens.

“We have to address whether the child is prepared to learn in the classroom,” says Warren. “The child needs to have the things he or she needs to feel comfortable in class and not feel like, ‘I’m different. I’m embarrassed, I’m ashamed.’ The first thing we ask the moms is if their child has a uniform. In many cases, you can’t get into school without one. We’re dealing with parents who are living in shelters, have no money, and have to come up with papers, uniforms, backpacks, and pencils.”

Another factor in helping the children gain the confidence to be in school with their peers is dealing with their sporadic attendance and how it has affected their skills.

“The kids want to learn,” says Warren, “but they are embarrassed by not knowing everything they’re supposed to at a certain age, like being in the fourth grade, and not knowing multiplication. There is a lot of anxiety and stress, even when it comes to the most basic things in the classroom. For example, there are assignments like, ‘For homework today, tell us about your bedroom.’ So we deal with a lot of self-esteem issues. It’s difficult for them to focus, because of the trauma associated with them living in this type of environment.”

Warren, who plans to take marriage and family therapy courses at Dominguez Hills, maintains that SOW’s mission does not include counseling. However, many of the mothers of her young charges have sought her out to talk about their experiences.

“Some of the women have gravitated toward me and want to start explaining how they got here,” she says, “how they feel it has affected their children, and their guilt about having their children living once more at the Union Rescue Mission or on the street downtown. And the kids blame their parents for being homeless. They don’t want to listen to them. We have to talk to them, and tell them their parents are doing the best they can.”

Warren, who is currently earning her master’s degree in sociology at CSU Dominguez Hills, has worked in social services for 15 years with families, drug prevention and women and children at risk for HIV. Having held positions at Prototypes, the Minority AIDS Project and the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, she understands the importance of a safe environment for homeless children who are beset by their living conditions.

“Kids can get desensitized toward violence,” she says. “The kids are always exposed to mayhem and murder, and they get used to going to funerals. This really traumatizes and damages our kids. Many of them have become desensitized to this environment and consider it normal. That’s pretty scary.”

While issues surrounding youth such as drugs and violence get a lot of attention, the plight of homeless children is relatively ignored. Warren feels that if more people knew about SOW, they would volunteer as tutors.

“When we think about homelessness, we picture men like bums and alcoholics, living on Skid Row. We don’t really think about homeless families, which are mostly women with children. We think, ‘Here’s a mom, and a child, and they’re homeless. They need food, shelter, and clothing.’ But we don’t really think about the fact that 50 percent of the child’s life is spent in school.”

Warren remembers her education at Dominguez Hills as instrumental to her success and adaptable to her busy work schedule.

“I was drawn to Dominguez because it was a smaller school,” she says. “It felt friendly. I was working full time and they had evening programs. The professors were so accessible and would even come out on Sunday to our study groups. I just get chills thinking about it, because they really did care. I’ve never had one professor in all the years I’ve been there that treated me with anything less than respect, because I was a student and they wanted to do everything possible to help me succeed.”

This interaction between students and mentors has rubbed off on Warren, who notes, “I really feel like I accomplished something during the day when I leave here.

"For example, one of the kids can do their times tables a little better. Or they come back and say, ‘I got an A, I got a star!’ or ‘My teacher said, ‘I’m doing so much better.’ That feels so much more fulfilling than just making sure my budgets are correct.”

Click here for more information on School on Wheels.

- Joanie Harmon