It’s an awkward phrase — “at-promise” — but I sort of like it.

 “At-promise” is how the public schools here in Alexandria, Va., refer to students who previously might have been labeled “at-risk.” I learned about this nomenclature yesterday from The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, whose Class Struggle blog harkens back to a July 23 newspaper column by Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman explaining the district’s rationale.

“We use the term ‘at-promise’ in Alexandria City Public Schools to describe children who have the potential to achieve at a higher rate than they are currently achieving,” Morton wrote in the Alexandria Gazette Packet. “Really all children are at-promise because we, as educators, have made a promise to each and every child that we will work toward higher achievement for all…”

“At-risk” means at risk for failure, and it’s an important designation. It tells adults who work with these children that they have special needs, in the broadest sense, and deserve extra support. Two years ago, I wrote an ASBJ series called “Children at Risk,” which looked at some of the reasons why disadvantaged children are more likely to fail, reasons that include inadequate nutrition and health care, dysfunctional family life, and childhoods spent in violent or drug-prone neighborhoods.  By the time I reached the end of the series, however, I wanted a more positive name for these students. So the last story (so far) uses a kind of hybrid label: “Children at Risk/ Children of Hope.”
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If you didn’t know better, you’d think the cars and trucks parked outside South Potomac Church in Waldorf, Md., one weekday night meant there was some kind of church social going on. Actually, it was something quite different — the last evening of Safe Nights, Charles County’s seasonal shelter program for the homeless.

I was at the church off a busy state highway in this Washington, D.C., exurb to do a story on how the Charles County Public Schools are helping homeless students and their families.

I’d talked to school officials at length. Now I had to find homeless students, which isn’t necessarily easy. Safe Nights rotates between various churches throughout colder months, and finding out where it was this particular week was harder than you might think.

Sometime in the 1960s, when I was in either high school or middle school, I read a book for an American history class called The Other America, by Michael Harrington, about poverty in the United States. It made a big impression on me, and one of the things the author said that has stuck with me all these years is that poverty is “invisible.” The poor are, by nature, separated from the mainstream, both physically, to be sure, and in other ways as well.

You could say the same about families that are homeless. Driving the 45 miles from my office to Waldorf, past sprawling shopping centers and endless subdivisions, I wondered, “Is there really a story here? If I have to drive this far just to find a homeless student, how big a deal is this?”

It is a big deal; we just don’t see it. Once inside South Potomac Church, I found a small, cordial community of about 50 people. Adults talking softly, sharing an evening meal. Children playing, laughing, drawing pictures, and running among the cots set up in the church hall. And, to be sure, it really did have the kind of warm atmosphere of a church social — albeit one with a backdrop of shared hardship.

Read my story, and you’ll meet two members of that community, Adrian Barbour and his 8-year-old son, son, Dubois, who goes to a Charles County Elementary School, where his father meets him every day for lunch when he’s not out on a job interview. They are remarkably accepting of their current predicament, but hope it will be temporary.

“We’re just trying to get to ‘next,’” Barbour told me. “We’re not asking for that much.”

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

Six years ago, I wrote a story about homeless children in the June issue of ASBJ. I visited a city I love, New Orleans, to interview children and their parents, as well as school administrators, on the challenges of educating children without permanent addresses.

In those pre-Katrina days, the intractable poverty of children was crushing the New Orleans school system.  Homelessness was just one symptom of that poverty. I was hoping to find examples of student who were stigmatized by living in shelters.

Instead, the children I spoke with were happy to be in the shelter, where they received regular meals, tutoring sessions, and counseling. Their parents were getting treatment for their drug and alcohol abuse problems and their mental health issues. 

Many of the children didn’t want to leave the shelter when their time was up, wondering if they were again facing hunger and uncertainty.

In 2003, when I wrote that piece, the number of homeless families was on the rise, with the high cost of housing being one of the factors. This year, those numbers are growing again,  as more middle-class families are being hurt by the mortgage crisis and rising unemployment.

This month, my colleagues Naomi Dillon and Lawrence Hardy take a look at how schools are working to keep homelss children on track academically and emotionally. Their articles are online and free to nonsubscribers for a limited time.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor