Richard Riley Award
Community Learning Centers for the 21st Century
Presented by:
Project Hope
While outside the usual model of a school as a center of its community, Project Hope is nevertheless a school of distinction, providing a sense of community to homeless children. Because of their admirable mission and demonstrable results, the school has received a special recognition for their service to the community from the 2008 Riley Award jury.
Project Hope is an outreach school for homeless children located in the First Presbyterian Church of Orange County, California. The school began in 1989 when a local alternative education teacher began teaching local homeless children from the back of her car. Out of this initial individual effort became an organized initiative named Project HOPE, "Homeless Outreach Program in Education."
An estimated 13,000 children in Orange County are homeless, and in 2007-2008, Orange County school districts identified 16,422 homeless children and youth (pre K – 12th grade) out of the county’s population of nearly 3 million people. Project Hope is the result of a close knit partnership with ACCESS (the largest alternative education school system in California), and is now a county-run school designed to help homeless children transition into the mainstream educational system. The First Presbyterian Church leases its facilities to ACCESS at the cost of $1 a year in addition to giving students and their families access to a free food pantry and “The Closet” program which provides free clothing as needed.
The school currently serves approximately 60 students fifty weeks a year, and provides each with a half-day educational program. There are four classrooms in the school and students are separated by grades K-8, with multiple grade levels grouped within each classroom. Approximately sixty-five percent of the students are sibling.
Each morning, children are bused from motels and shelters in Buena Park, Santa Ana, and Anaheim to the school for breakfast and a half day of academics led by four full-time teachers (along with several aides, special-needs educators, and volunteers). Three times a week volunteers provide art and music lessons.
In the afternoon, students are transported to the Tustin Boys and Girls Club for tutoring, sports and enrichment programs until 5pm when they are transported back to their motels and shelters. Like other schools, Project HOPE issues regular progress reports and successfully graduates 90% of its eighth graders to local high schools.
In the past county government agencies and non-profit agencies found it difficult to reach transient homeless families. Project Hope, over time, has become one of the only consistent locations for agencies to provide information and resources to homeless families. This has included sending the school nurse to visit with families to address student health care needs. Funding for the school comes from various sources. The HOPE foundation, founded in 2001, provides between $60,000 and $80,000 annually to fund the buses used to pick up students at various shelters while ACCEESS provides funding for the four school teachers on site. Additionally, breakfast and lunch are provided by established federal programs, and after school and support services are funded through a variety of government, foundation and private grants. This September, the school began a new initiative which will allow a local non-profit agency to provide every HOPE student with a backpack full of food every week for a year.
As a result of its success, the Project Hope School has begun a $2 million fundraising drive to transform its current administrative complex into a new state of the art “One Stop Shop” for the homeless, allowing parents access to clothing, social services, and child care while their children are in school. This new complex is modeled after the PATT mall design in Los Angeles that currently serves as an all inclusive homeless resource mall. The new facility, when built, will also be energy efficient and LEED certified.