Homeless students challenge schools [View All]

[NVMojo]

:cry:

When Jim Walker's daughter, Amy, was in third grade at Hollingsworth Elementary School, the small family was homeless, living sometimes in weekly rental motels, with friends or in an unregistered motor home parked near Bonanza Road and 11th Street.

"It was kind of bad because we were living where all the gunfighters are," Amy, 9, said.

Walker, a disabled single father who at the time was addicted to drugs, would take his daughter to school each morning, then spend the day hustling for food money.

"We hopped from place to place, struggling real hard to try to make it," he said. "It was hand-to-mouth every day."

Their story isn't unusual to Doug Wilson, the principal who oversees the school on Ogden Avenue near Stewart Avenue.

He has heard parents talking about how they have no place to sleep at night. He knows at least one 10-year-old boy who never has had a stable home, instead living his entire life in motels. Many of his students come to school hungry.

"These stories happen all the time," Wilson said.

Because Hollingsworth is near a downtown cluster of cheap daily and weekly rental motels, the school is one of several in the Las Vegas Valley that has a large population of homeless students.

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http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Dec-17-Sun-2006/news/11434973.html