Explore life on Telegraph Avenue and in People’s Park.

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Host Wayne Jones spends his days patrolling Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue and Downtown.

With unemployment reaching new highs and the rate of foreclosures showing no sign of slowing, stability becomes a fleeting concept for families who find themselves out of work and out of a home. For children, this instability and impermanence could potentially jeopardize their education. Since 1987, a federal program has been in place to help assist these children and as their numbers rise, these services have become increasingly pertinent.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act was put in place in 1987 to ensure that homeless children and youth have equal access to a free public education. According to Jan Steed, the McKinney-Vento coordinator for the Fremont Unified School District, homeless children are registered for the free breakfast and lunch program and receive free school materials, backpacks and PE uniforms.

“We try to ensure that the student has the same opportunities for things like field trips, school dances and sports teams, even if they don’t have the money for it” said Steed.

Along with financial assistance, Steed said the Act requires that school districts provide homeless students with free transportation to and from school.

Over the past year, Steed said she has seen a rise in the number of homeless students due to the foreclosure problems. The Tri-City Homeless Coalition has also observed this increase.

Louis Chicoine, the group’s executive director, said, “There has been a five to ten percent increase over the past year resulting from chronic housing problem and the nation’s economic state.”

As these numbers continue to grow, one of the most pressing concerns, according to Steed, is the reluctance of families to identify as homeless.

This is something that Toni Adams, the director of special programs for Alameda County, said she has been struggling with during her nine-and-a-half years in the position.

“People have to self-identify and people don’t always do that. We work with the shelters and the school districts and have posters there, but you can’t make people do what they don’t want to do,” said Adams.

Steed said that in her district, she is working with school administrators to create a relaxed environment where families do not feel afraid or ashamed to come forward and identify as being homeless. “We’re really decreasing the level of fear of humiliation and misunderstanding by saying that regardless of circumstance, ‘come on in,’” said Steed.

In establishing an open atmosphere, Pete Murchison, the principal at Irvington High School, said the best approach is one of anonymity. According to him, the majority of students, teachers and administrators do not know who the homeless students are.

“I see the paperwork, but I don’t really know them. I work best to support them as quietly as I can. It’s really about trying to pull all our forces together so that student can have as normal an experience as possible,” said Murchison.

For many of these students, being homeless can bring with it a myriad of problems, academically and emotionally. According to Amanda Carlson, the head counselor at Irvington, this is just what school counselors are trained for.

In dealing with homeless students, Carlson said that her main concern is the well-being of the student.

“There’s always going to be some anxiety on the part of the student. It’s hard to keep up with your studies if your worrying about your family, living in a shelter, have no private room or desk to get your work done,” she said.

Carlson said that, while the school counselors may not know who the specific homeless students are, they strive to reassure all the students that the counselors are a confidential source to turn to if help is needed.

“When we [counselors] do find out that a student is homeless, we become a sort of liaison for that student. We keep in contact with the district, we work with the homeless shelters and if there’s a parent, we try to maintain contact with them,” said Carlson.

Communication is a key component to the McKinney-Vento program. For her, Steed said communication means continuously training school staff, reaching out to the community and bringing awareness to the school district about the presence and needs of homeless students.

Steed went on to say that people need to realize that homelessness is unpredictable and not just chronic. Perhaps the harsh losses in this economic crisis will help de-stigmatize homelessness and show that it can happen to anyone.

Hours out of jail, Zachary Solomon Miller, 25, searched through the contents of a beige-colored sac, which he dubbed his “Santa Rita suitcase.”

Zachary "Solo" Miller poses on the UC Berkeley campus hours after being released from the Santa Rita Jail.

He chuckled after finding his hot pink, Kaiser Permanente T-shirt in which he was arrested 10 days ago. Miller, known as Solo by friends, was ordered to stay away from People’s Park, UC Berkeley’s homeless sanctuary, as a condition of his probation, resulting from a September arrest and drug conviction, according to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. Berkeley Police arrested Solo again in the park, where he’s lived for a number of years, on Oct. 6.

How Zachary Solomon Miller, an Ivy League student with a promising football career, came to be “Solo,” a homeless drug addict, segregated from his community by the law, is an all too common story among Berkeley’s homeless population, say homeless experts and Solo’s friends, full of bad luck compounded by even worse decisions.

Devin Woolridge, the university’s site coordinator at People’s Park, said Solo’s story isn’t a whole lot different from the other homeless at the park.

“Drugs, alcohol and mental illness — the three are a problem in the park,” he said.

At six foot three inches tall, Solo towers over most people. His thick, brown beard matches the locks on his head, which, most of the time, he contains in a torn-off T-shirt sleeve.

Somewhere between Santa Rita County Jail and Telegraph Avenue, Solo came across a blue, button-down shirt. Within an hour of arriving back in Berkeley, he tore off the shirt’s right arm to display the tattoo he got in New York, where he spent a year at Columbia University. Years later, Solo also attended UC Berkeley.

Miller graduated from Tamalpais High School in Marin County near the top of his class in 2001, he said. He played middle linebacker on his high school football team, where he said he was recruited by Columbia University. At that time, Miller said, he weighed 235 pounds and could bench press 377 pounds.

Columbia doesn’t give out athletic scholarships, Miller said, so he was given an academic scholarship.

In preparation for his promising football career, Miller said he spent his free time studying tapes of famous linebackers and mimicking their moves. He knew he was going to make it to the NFL. He said he wanted to be one of the best linebackers to ever play the game.

He arrived at football camp at Columbia in the fall of 2001, and he stuck with it for a while, he said.

Then one day during camp, while running a drill, he decided he just couldn’t take it anymore.

“They (went) really hard on me, because they were trying to mold me,” Miller said.

He said he had been through hard practices, but nothing ever like this. The guys were much bigger, and he was getting hit harder than ever before.

He finished out practice, and he never played football again, he said.

“I said ‘I’m leaving.’ And I left,” he said. “I gave up on football.”

Miller felt devastated. For so long he had focused on football, he thought, and he couldn’t even make it at Columbia, hardly a serious college-football contender.

After losing football, Miller said, he began losing traction and sliding downhill. He started reading heavily, though more for pleasure than out of textbooks. Miller, who was born Jewish, recalls being very interested in Buddhism and not much else, certainly not school.

Robert Hornsby, spokesman for Columbia University, confirmed that Miller was enrolled at the university for two semesters until he withdrew.

Miller said after two semesters of poor performance, the university suspended him.

“I’ve come to terms with the truth, even though there’s a lot of shame for me in the truth,” Solo said, looking back over this dark period in his life.

Miller said he flew back to California disappointed. His parents took him to a psychologist, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. Miller was never convinced by the diagnosis, he said

Miller said he raised some money selling drugs before he left his parent’s house in Marin in June 2002. He took his 1989 Volvo station wagon and just started driving. He meandered his way to Venice Beach and Los Angeles, among other cities, before finally landing in People’s Park, where he’s been ever since. Somewhere along the way, he said he picked up the drug habit that emptied his savings account.

For a while, Solo seemed to get back on track. He enrolled in various Bay Area community colleges, he said, where he earned enough credits to transfer back to a four-year college. He applied for and was accepted to UC Berkeley, where he lasted four semesters, until he decided to drop out again.

UC Berkeley records confirm that Miller did attend the university.

He has no plans of ever going back.

“Cal’s a joke,” he said.

UC Berkeley is everything he hates about universities, full of cookie-cutter education and phony liberalism, Solo said.

While Woolridge said he’s never heard of a student living in People’s Park, Travis Williams, 33 and a park resident, said two to three UC Berkeley students end up there each year.

“Drugs have a funny way of just taking over you,” Williams said.

Shana Mac, another park resident, said she thinks Solo just got sick of the pressure of his life.

“Smart people have a lot of pressure on them,” Mac, 22, said. “A lot of intelligent people do drugs to escape their lives.”

There was a time when she, too, wanted a vacation from her life, Mac said. That’s when she ended up at the park. Unfortunately for her, Solo and most residents those vacations end up lasting longer than they expect.

Solo said, he is six units away from graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in sociology and political science. Four of those units, he said, would come from the thesis he’s supposed to write, if he ever decided to go back.

Solo’s friends, including Mac, are bewildered by the choices he’s made with his life. They say if they had his smarts, they could really do something. But Solo seems to be content with his lifestyle.

“I feel like I’ve always been subject to my potential,” Solo said.

Without any pressure to live up to his potential, perhaps Solo finally feels free from the expectations, he feels, he’s always had to meet.

Fremont, considered the “Gateway to Silicon Valley,” may be an expensive suburb, but it is also home to a hidden homeless population.

The cost of rental properties in Fremont is higher than San Francisco; the city also has a larger number of homeless children than the national average. And the recent economic downturn has caught these homeless in a painful squeeze.

Louis Chicoine, executive director of the Tri-City Homeless Coalition, said that Fremont has between 700 and 1,000 homeless people on any given night.

“There has been a five to 10 percent increase over the past year resulting from a chronic housing problem and the nation’s economic state,” he said.

Bonnie Wilson, the Coalition’s volunteer coordinator, has witnessed this increase at the Sunrise shelter, Fremont’s largest homeless shelter.

“We have rooms for up to ten families and there’s 33 families on a waiting list with people calling everyday,” said Wilson.

Kevin and Sarah Buford and their two children, ages four and six, picked at their food at the Centerville Presbyterian Church, which holds a biweekly free dinner program. This was their first visit to a free meal program.

“I did custom flooring but there’s no work because no one’s building homes. I just couldn’t keep up with the bills, so we were evicted,” said Kevin Buford, 33.

His wife Sarah, 29, wiped mascara from her puffy eyes. She spent an hour talking with the pastor of the church, crying about finding housing for the night.

“He just gave me a list [of shelters] and did a prayer for me,” she said, “All the shelters are closed now. Our stuff’s in our truck so we can’t sleep there. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Sarah Buford said that she is grateful her children are young enough not to fully understand what is going on, and she is committed to keeping them in school to maintain some consistency.

This consistency has been difficult for Bridget (who did not want to be identified by her last name) and Steve Rusher’s three children, a son, eight, and two daughters, 11 and 18.

The family has been in and out of shelters for more than three years, often sleeping in the cab of Rusher’s big rig truck.

“You have to know how to work the system to get any help and the shelters are a joke,” said Bridget.

She specifically referred to the Sunrise shelter’s sister program, Winter Relief, which operates at six different churches from November to April throughout the tri-city region.

Rusher, 47, was frustrated that the family was forced to change churches every 30 days and that there was no communication with the children’s schools.

“I’ve had to pull the kids out of school three times because they [program administrators] said they had to be at a school closer to the churches,” said Bridget.

Bridget said that the shelter never gave her children the school supplies they were supposed to receive as a part of the California McKinney-Vento homeless children’s act. She also said that the children were routinely made fun of at school because she did not have access to a washing machine to clean their clothes.

Out of all these factors, Bridget’s biggest complaint was that “then they [program administrators] made me choose between having a roof over our head or my kids going to the doctor.” Bridget’s said that her ex-husband was abusive to her and her children. As a result, she said that her two youngest children suffer from attention deficit hyper-activity disorder, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We had notes proving that they had doctors’ appointments and would miss curfew. But they didn’t care,” said Bridget, “So we got kicked out because I wasn’t going to jeopardize my kids’ health.”

Sitting on the floor of the church with her five-year-old son, Jane (who did not want to be identified by her last name), 26, is worried about his future. Jane said she became homeless after running away from her ex-husband who was beating her.

One night, the police raided the tent shelter she was living in, arresting everyone. After testing her urine for drugs (which came up negative), “The police came into my cell and told me I was pregnant.”

Jane was in and out of shelters, dodging attacks from her ex-husband, before finally securing a Section 8 apartment. Section 8 provides government sponsored subsidized housing for low-income families and individuals. “I’m proud to take care of my place, proud to be there,” said Jane

Jane is on disability and would like to go to college and have a career one day, but is pessimistic about the status of the economy. Pointing to her son, she said, “I want to see him go to college. So I really hope things brighten up or everyone’s in for it.”