Posted on 12/09/2002 10:49:13 AM PST by shezza
Struggle for survival
Homeless woman pursuing goal of college education
By Cindy Chang, Staff Writer
PASADENA -- Sharon Brooms can tell you which buses are best to ride if it's a cold night, you need some sleep and have nowhere else to go.
The 181 goes from Pasadena to Hollywood but stops running around 11 p.m. The 180 travels the same route as the 181 and is your best bet, she says, because it runs all night and you can get some quality shut-eye on the four-hour round trip.
Brooms can also tell you how to breathe from your diaphragm to produce a beautiful singing voice and what GPA is necessary to get from Pasadena City College to her dream school, UC Irvine.
By day, Brooms, 38, is a freshman at PCC with a course load of 17 units and tentative plans to triple major in law, music and languages. By night, she is a homeless person on the streets of Pasadena.
The stabilizing structure of classes and homework helps her get through the long, lonely nights on the move.
"I would be very frustrated if I weren't going to school and church," she said. "Thank God for that structure."
She spreads her books on a bus bench and studies by the light of a street lamp while bundled up against the late fall chill in as many as eight layers of clothing.
Her schoolwork takes her mind off problems that, unlike a tricky algebra problem, have no workable solution - how to get by on a $221 monthly welfare check, how to find an apartment she can afford on that check, how to reclaim her five children from the foster-care system when she is homeless and penniless.
She paid for hotel rooms during a string of rainy days in mid-November, quickly exhausting her budget. Her next welfare check wasn't due until the sixth of the next month.
She gets $3 toward breakfast through a school program and faithfully attends club meetings and university recruiting drives where free refreshments are served. All of this helps but only takes her so far. By the end of each month, she often finds herself depending on handouts from friends to eat.
The story of how a woman who is by all accounts a bright and energetic student ended up homeless and on welfare is a story of how a few bad decisions combined with a certain devil-may-care impulsiveness can set a life off-track.
As a high school student in Memphis, Tenn., Brooms excelled in English and foreign languages. But her math grades were sub-par, and when the college she planned to attend required her to take remedial math courses first, she balked.
Instead of going to college, she fell in with an older man and had her first child at 19. Her father was a cab driver and her mother cleaned houses. Most of the girls she grew up with were having babies, too.
"I was young, naive and not using my judgment," she said. "I wanted to be a wife and mother, but that didn't mean he wanted to be a responsible father."
She found a new boyfriend and had three children by him in quick succession. But he didn't want to marry her, either. In 1989, when she found out that the father of her oldest child was physically abusing the boy, she boarded a Greyhound bus for California with her four children, ages 1 1/2 to 4.
"I had never been there, but I was thinking Hollywood, it would be warm. I didn't know it got cold at night," she said.
She landed in Santa Barbara, hoping to find a job cleaning houses, but eventually ended up on welfare. She found herself frequently at odds with landlords, school officials and other parents.
By the time she moved to South Central Los Angeles in 1992, her three sons were in foster care.
She and her two daughters - Tia, her fifth child, was born in Santa Barbara - were briefly homeless in 2000 after the house they rented was sold.
They moved into an apartment owned by a man Brooms worked with selling incense, bath salts and T-shirts door-to-door. In October 2001, after the apartment was repossessed and they were unable to get relocation money from the county housing agency, they were homeless once again.
Brooms came to Pasadena with Tia after the agency gave her a voucher for a local hotel. Her older daughter, Tiffany, had run away and later ended up in foster care. By April 2002, Tia was also in foster care.
Scouring the want ads, Brooms realized that the jobs she found appealing all required a college degree.
"I was picking out the things that drew me, and they all required that you have a higher education. I thought, why not go? Let me go get this B.A.," she said.
Since enrolling at PCC in July, she has become something of a campus activist, educating other students on the dangers of smoking and founding a club called "Treating the Homeless With Compassion and Humanity."
Her academic interests are many, varied and as yet unprioritized: she envisions a career in either library sciences, law, music, medicine or foreign languages. Her short-term goal is to get all B's this semester and all A's the following semester.
"Now that I'm back to school, I want to go all the way - get my masters and my doctorate eventually," she said.
Charles Clay, director of the Program for Academic Support Services at PCC, said that Brooms has managed to stay a "better than average student" despite often having "no place to stay and nothing to eat."
"She's homeless. We have daily contact with her, and we know the situation," Clay said.
In the five months she has been at PCC, Brooms has gained a newfound self-confidence as she has succeeded academically, become involved in extracurricular activities and made improvements in her dress and personal hygiene, Clay said.
"When she first came to us, she was more inward, reserved," Clay said. "It's like day and night. She's a lot happier, outgoing and that sort of thing."
Brooms is a pack rat by nature, and the four lockers issued to her by sympathetic school officials are not enough to hold all her belongings. She drags the overflow around everywhere with her - a rolling backpack that contains her school books, a shopping bag filled with toiletries, another shopping bag filled with fliers and newspaper clippings. She strides briskly around campus despite the heavy load, greeting friends at every turn.
`'We should tell them to improve the public schools, so we'll keep our children there. If we have to take him to a beautiful island to get his education, we should do it," she tells an administrator whose 8-year-old son is having trouble in school.
"It's Monday, blue Monday," she sighs to a fellow student.
Her tuition and books are fully covered by financial aid. She also received a $400 grant from the state, most of which went to pay off an emergency loan she had taken out early.
Because of an unpaid student loan from an earlier community college stint, she is ineligible for work-study programs. Her food stamps were cut off after the county found out she was a full-time student.
On $221 a month, there are hard choices to make, and Brooms almost invariably chooses the sentimental over the practical.
She pays $130 to $170 a month to a storage facility rather than get rid of the photo albums and personal papers she has accumulated over the years. A monthly bus pass costs $53, leaving less than $50 for food and other expenses.
She recently spent $7 on color printouts of e-mail greeting cards from 11-year-old Tia. The printouts stay in her purse, close at hand, while the hunger pangs from the meal she forewent to pay for them are long behind her.
She is looking for a part-time job to supplement her welfare money. She estimates she has sent out more than 50 resumes so far. She is also on the lookout for an apartment she can afford.
If the weather is bad, or if she receives a windfall - as she did the Monday before Thanksgiving when friends and school staff gave her $60 as a holiday gift - she will spend the night in a hotel room.
Otherwise, she will doze off on a bus bench with a textbook open on her lap until the cold becomes too much to bear and she climbs aboard the 180 for a few fitful hours of sleep as it lurches its way to Hollywood and back.
-- Cindy Chang can be reached at (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4586, or by e-mail at cindy.chang@sgvn.com.
I camped out, snuck into dorm basements, lived in my car, AND even eventually got a job.
Her oldest daughter is 19 and still in foster care?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.