New Workers Swamp Calgary's Homeless Agencies

Families drawn by the economic boom can't find housing

Kim Guttormson, CanWest News Service

Published: Saturday, July 08, 2006

CALGARY -- Some workers who have moved to Calgary looking for a piece of the Alberta advantage are finding themselves out in the streets.

Agencies that deal with homelessness are overwhelmed by families who have arrive in the city without lining up housing first.

"I've never seen it like this," said Inn from the Cold executive director Diana Segboer. "It's a new trend that's got us very concerned. And it's going to get worse, a lot worse.

"It's the downside of the boom."

The agency, which helps find temporary shelter for parents and children, received 10 calls in one day last week from people preparing to come to Calgary, but needing somewhere to stay. And in some cases, people are arriving at their door straight from the bus depot.

Analysts say Calgary is starting to reach a critical point, where the labour market will absorb as many bodies as arrive, but housing and infrastructure are becoming stretched to the limit.

The average house price has soared past $400,000. City transit is at capacity. Affordable housing is especially hard to come by, with 2,300 people now on the city's waiting list for a spot and rent rising with demand.

Segboer classifies most of her clients as working poor -- those who have jobs but can't keep up with the increasing cost of living in the city.

Calgary's need for workers isn't going to ease any time soon.

Segboer said the city needs a permanent shelter to handle the specific needs of families.

The Back Door Guides Youth

By: Sarah Urbanowski
Calgary Journal Wed. October, 24, 2007

When James Hamilton was 14 years old, he wasn’t exactly playing on the streets, instead he was living on them. He turned to the street just shortly after his parents split up.
At 17, he found himself at the Back Door, a place he had heard about from friends he had met on the street. The Back Door is an organization that helps youth transition away from living on the streets.
“I realized the street life wasn’t for me,” he said. Hamilton is now 20 years old and has been working hard to get off the street, develop career skills, and support his three-year-old daughter.

He is currently working through an apprenticeship to become a heavy-duty mechanic.
Marilyn Dyck, 63, is the executive director of the Back Door and has helped many other young Calgarians get off the street.
“Kids don’t have enough adults that care, we are just adults that want to help,” said Dyck.
This was the Back Door’s 20th year and it was also their first annual walk/ run in support of their cause.
Their “Steps off the Street” walk and run took place on Oct. 28 to raise awareness about youth on the streets and nearly 80 people were in attendance.
Hamilton was there to help set up the route and to lead the group along the five-kilometer path. Hamilton said that he left home for the streets because living with his mom’s new boyfriend was hard.
Dyck has seen her fair share of kids on the streets for the same reason as Hamilton. She explained that a lot of the kids come from broken homes, blended families, and it just doesn’t work. The Back Door stresses that it is a safe daytime community, not a shelter.
“We don’t want people to depend on the Back Door, we want them to figure it out for themselves,” she said. The concept behind the Back Door is that young people have learned to live on the street, Dyck said.
“And so community people at the Back Door act as cross-cultural interpreters to help them understand what they need to know to make their lives work.”
The Back Door doesn’t offer a place to stay, however it does offer a place for guidance.
It’s a place where youth can develop a planning tool, “a business plan for your life,” Dyck added. It is conversational, each person is an equal player.
“There is nothing clinical about it, just people helping people,” she said.
There have been over 800 “graduates” from the Back Door and seven out of ten succeed using the program, Dyck said. The program requires each youth to commit to 24 months and participants can’t get kicked out, she added.
And although the Back Door doesn’t offer young people on the streets a place to stay, they do offer a cash incentive. For every step that they get closer to their goals, they get $15 and they can do that eight times a month, Dyck said.
Dyck feels that it takes times to build a life back up. “It doesn’t just happen before your funding runs out in six months.”
There were also many other volunteers from the Back Door at the Oct. 28 walk/ run including project manager, Jaime Leslie, 29. Leslie started working at the Back Door after hearing Dyck talk about the program at the University about five years ago.
“The walk was symbolic because it’s where a lot of participants [of the Back Door] start making their steps off the street,” Leslie said.

Participants Making Change

What is Servant-Leadership?

Servant-Leadership is a practical philosophy which supports people who choose to serve first, and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions. Servant-leaders may or may not hold formal leadership positions. Servant-leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment.

Robert Greenleaf, the man who coined the phrase, described servant-leadership in this way.

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifest itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer , is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”

Taken from the Servant As Leader published by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.

Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

Published in N: October 16, 2007

LOS ANGELES — As the director of high schools in the gang-infested neighborhoods of the East Side of Los Angeles, Guadalupe Paramo struggles every day with educational dysfunction.

For the past half-dozen years, not even one in five students at her district’s teeming high schools has been able to do grade-level math or English. At Abraham Lincoln High School this year, only 7 in 100 students could. At Woodrow Wilson High, only 4 in 100 could.

For chronically failing schools like these, the No Child Left Behind law, now up for renewal in Congress, prescribes drastic measures: firing teachers and principals, shutting schools and turning them over to a private firm, a charter operator or the state itself, or a major overhaul in governance.

But more than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.

“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Paramo asked. “Shut down every school?”

With the education law now in its fifth year — the one in which its more severe penalties are supposed to come into wide play — California is not the only state overwhelmed by growing numbers of schools that cannot satisfy the law’s escalating demands.

In Florida, 441 schools could be candidates for closing. In Maryland, some 49 schools in Baltimore alone have fallen short of achievement targets for five years or more. In New York State, 77 schools were candidates for restructuring as of last year.

Some districts, like those in New York City, have moved forcefully to shut large failing high schools and break them into small schools. Los Angeles, too, is trying small schools, along with other innovations, and David L. Brewer III, its schools superintendent, has just announced plans to create a “high priority district” under his direct control made up of 40 problem schools.

Yet so far, education experts say they are unaware of a single state that has taken over a failing school in response to the law. Instead, most allow school districts to seek other ways to improve.

“When you have a state like California with so many schools up for restructuring,” said Heinrich Mintrop, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “that taxes the capacity of the whole school change industry.”

As a result, the law is branding numerous schools as failing, but not producing radical change — leaving angry parents demanding redress. California citizens’ groups have sued the state and federal government for failing to deliver on the law’s promises.

“They’re so busy fighting No Child Left Behind,” said Mary Johnson, president of Parent U-Turn, a civic group. “If they would use some of that energy to implement the law, we would go farther.”

Ray Simon, the deputy federal secretary of education, said states that ignored the law’s demands risked losing federal money or facing restrictions on grants. For now, Mr. Simon said, the department is more interested in helping states figure out what works than in punishment. “Even a state has to struggle if it takes over a school,” he said.

A federal survey last year showed that in 87 percent of the cases of persistently failing schools, states and school districts avoided wholesale changes in staff or leadership. That is why, Mr. Simon said, the Bush administration is proposing that Congress force more action by limiting districts’ options in responding to hard-core failure.

In California, Jack O’Connell, the state superintendent of schools, calls the law’s demands unreasonable. Under the federal law, 700 schools that California believed were getting substantially better were counted last year as failing. A state takeover of schools, Mr. O’Connell said, would be a “last option.”

“To have a successful program,” he said, “it really has to come from the community.”

Under the No Child law, a school declared low-performing for three years in a row must offer students free tutoring and the option to transfer. After five years, such schools are essentially treated as irredeemable, with the law prescribing starting over with a new structure, new leadership or new teachers. But it also gives schools the option of less sweeping changes, like reducing school size or changing who is in charge of hiring.

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