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Focus Questions for Weekly Socratic Seminar

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Focus Questions for Weekly Socratic Seminar

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Photographs (selected from Invisible Child)

Photo Analysis Questions (provided by instructor)

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Journal (notebook or digital document)

Reflection Questions (provided by instructor)

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SPENT Challenge @  http://playspent.org/

Research meaning of provided terminology

Internet/Digital Device (for research on poverty)

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Real World Literacies and Circuits of Power within Schools Presentation

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Real World Literacies and Circuits of Power within Schools Presentation

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Real World Literacies and Circuits of Power in Schools

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Real World Literacies and Circuits of Power within Schools design by Dóri Sirály for Prezi Our imagined class is an upper-middle class, 10th grade honors English course. Our goal, prior to reading Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott, is to give students some experience with budgeting money in a low-income family.

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Our target class, is an upper-middle class, 10th grade Honors English class.

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The New York Times

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ANDREA ELLIOTT

She wakes to the sound of breathing. The smaller children lie tangled beside her, their chests rising and falling under winter coats and wool blankets. A few feet away, their mother and father sleep near the mop bucket they use as a toilet. Two other children share a mattress by the rotting wall where the mice live, opposite the baby, whose crib is warmed by a hair dryer perched on a milk crate.

Slipping out from her covers, the oldest girl sits at the window. On mornings like this, she can see all the way across Brooklyn to the Empire State Building, the first New York skyscraper to reach 100 floors. Her gaze always stops at that iconic temple of stone, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise.

"It makes me feel like there's something going on out there," says the 11-year-old girl, never one for patience. This child of New York is always running before she walks. She likes being first - the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to make the honor roll.

Even her name, Dasani, speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn's bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. It hinted at a different, upwardly mobile clientele, a set of newcomers who over the next decade would transform the borough.

Dasani's own neighborhood, Fort Greene, is now one of gentrification's gems. Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.

It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

Nearly a quarter of Dasani's childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and seven siblings. As they begin to stir on this frigid January day, Dasani sets about her chores.

Her mornings begin with Baby Lele, whom she changes, dresses and feeds, checking that the formula distributed by the shelter is not, once again, expired. She then wipes down the family's small refrigerator, stuffed with lukewarm milk, Tropicana grape juice and containers of leftover Chinese. After tidying the dresser drawers she shares with a sister, Dasani rushes her younger siblings onto the school bus.

"I have a lot on my plate," she says, taking inventory: The fork and spoon are her parents and the macaroni, her siblings - except for Baby Lele, who is a plump chicken breast.

"So that's a lot on my plate - with some corn bread," she says. "That's a lot on my plate."

Dasani guards her feelings closely, dispensing with anger through humor. Beneath it all is a child whose existence is defined by her siblings. Her small scrub-worn hands are always tying shoelaces or doling out peanut butter sandwiches, taking the ends of the loaf for herself. The bond is inescapable. In the presence of her brothers and sisters, Dasani has no peace. Without them, she is incomplete.

Today, Dasani rides the creaky elevator to the lobby and walks past the guards, the metal detector and the tall, iron fence that envelops what she calls "the jail." She steps into the light, and is met by the worn brick facade of the Walt Whitman projects across the street.

She heads east along Myrtle Avenue and, three blocks later, has crossed into another New York: the shaded, graceful abode of Fort Greene's brownstones, which fetch millions of dollars.

"Black is beautiful, black is me," she sings under her breath as her mother trails behind.

Dasani suddenly stops, puzzling at the pavement. Its condition, she notes, is clearly superior on this side of Myrtle.

"Worlds change real fast, don't it?" her mother says.

In the short span of Dasani's life, her city has been reborn. The skyline soars with luxury towers, beacons of a new gilded age. More than 200 miles of fresh bike lanes connect commuters to high-tech jobs, passing through upgraded parks and avant-garde projects like the High Line and Jane's Carousel. Posh retail has spread from its Manhattan roots to the city's other boroughs. These are the crown jewels of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's long reign, which began just seven months after Dasani was born.

In the shadows of this renewal, it is Dasani's population who have been left behind. The ranks of the poor have risen, with almost half of New Yorkers living near or below the poverty line. Their traditional anchors - affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage - have weakened as the city reorders itself around the whims of the wealthy.

Long before Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio rose to power by denouncing the city's inequality, children like Dasani were being pushed further into the margins, and not just in New York. Cities across the nation have become flash points of polarization, as one population has bounced back from the recession while another continues to struggle. One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania.

This bodes poorly for the future. Decades of research have shown the staggering societal costs of children in poverty. They grow up with less education and lower earning power. They are more likely to have drug addiction, psychological trauma and disease, or wind up in prison.

Dasani does not need the proof of abstract research. All of these plights run through her family. Her future is further threatened by the fact of her homelessness, which has been shown, even in short spells, to bring disastrous consequences.

Dasani's circumstances are largely the outcome of parental dysfunction. While nearly one-third of New York's homeless children are supported by a working adult, her mother and father are unemployed, have a history of arrests and are battling drug addiction.

Yet Dasani's trials are not solely of her parents' making. They are also the result of decisions made a world away, in the marble confines of City Hall. With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline.

But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani's found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever - a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered "a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before."

Just three days before the mayor made that comment at a news conference in August 2012, an inspector at Auburn stopped by Dasani's crowded room, noting that a mouse was "running around and going into the walls," which had "many holes."

"Please assist," the inspector added. "There is infant in room."

Dasani was about to start sixth grade at a promising new school. This would be a pivotal year of her childhood - one already marked by more longing and loss than most adults ever see.

A tangle of three dramas had yet to unspool.

There was the question of whether Dasani's family would remain intact. Her mother had just been reunited with the children on the condition that she and her husband stay off drugs. The city's Administration for Children's Services was watching closely. Any slips, and the siblings could wind up in foster care, losing their parents and, most likely, one another.

The family's need for a home was also growing desperate. The longer they stayed in that one room, the more they seemed to fall apart. Yet rents were impossibly high in the city, and a quarter-million people were waiting for the rare vacancy in public housing. Families like Dasani's had been leaving the state. This was the year, then, that her parents made a promise: to save enough money to go somewhere else, maybe as far as the Pocono Mountains, in Pennsylvania.

Dasani could close her eyes and see it. "It's quiet and it's a lot of grass."

In the absence of this long-awaited home, there was only school. But it remained to be seen whether Dasani's new middle school, straining under budget cuts, could do enough to fill the voids of her life.

For children like Dasani, school is not just a place to cultivate a hungry mind. It is a refuge. The right school can provide routine, nourishment and the guiding hand of responsible adults.

But school also had its perils. Dasani was hitting the age when girls prove their worth through fighting. And she was her mother's daughter, a fearless fighter.

She was also on the cusp of becoming something more, something she could feel but not yet see, if only the right things happened and the right people came along.

Dasani is a short, wiry girl whose proud posture overwhelms her 4-foot-8 frame. She has a delicate, oval face and luminous brown eyes that watch everything, owl-like. Her expression veers from wonder to mischief. Strangers often remark on her beauty - her high cheekbones and smooth skin - but the comments never seem to register.

What she knows is that she has been blessed with perfect teeth. In a family where braces are the stuff of fantasy, having good teeth is a lottery win.

On the subway, Dasani can blend in with children who are better off. It is an ironic fact of being poor in a rich city that the donated garments Dasani and her siblings wear lend them the veneer of affluence, at least from a distance. Used purple Uggs and Patagonia fleeces cover thinning socks and fraying jeans. A Phil & Teds rain cover, fished from a garbage bin, protects Baby Lele's rickety stroller.

Dasani tells herself that brand names don't matter. She knows such yearnings will go unanswered, so better not to have them. But once in a while, when by some miracle her mother produces a new pair of Michael Jordan sneakers, Dasani finds herself succumbing to the same exercise: She wears them sparingly, and only indoors, hoping to keep them spotless. It never works.

Best to try to blend in, she tells herself, while not caring when you don't.

She likes being small because "I can slip through things." In the blur of her city's crowded streets, she is just another face. What people do not see is a homeless girl whose mother succumbed to crack more than once, whose father went to prison for selling drugs, and whose cousins and aunts have become the anonymous casualties of gang shootings, AIDS and domestic violence.

"That's not gonna be me," she says. "Nuh-uh. Nope."

Dasani speaks with certainty. She often begins a sentence with "Mommy say" before reciting, verbatim, some new bit of learned wisdom, such as "camomile tea cures a bad stomach" or "that lady is a dope fiend." She likes facts. She rarely wavers, or hints at doubt, even as her life is consumed by it.

When strangers are near, Dasani refers to Auburn as "that place." It is separate from her, and distant. But in the company of her siblings, she calls it "the house," transforming a crowded room into an imaginary home.

In reality, Auburn is neither. The forbidding, 10-story brick building, which dates back almost a century, was formerly Cumberland Hospital, one of seven public hospitals that closed because of the city's 1970s fiscal crisis.

In 1985, the city repurposed the former hospital into a shelter for families. This was the dawn of the period known as "modern homelessness," driven by wage stagnation, Reagan-era cutbacks and the rising cost of homes. By the time Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, New York's homeless population had reached 31,063 - a record for the city, which is legally obligated to provide shelter.

Among the city's 152 family shelters, Auburn became known as a place of last resort, a dreaded destination for the chronically homeless.

City and state inspectors have repeatedly cited the shelter for deplorable conditions, including sexual misconduct by staff members, spoiled food, asbestos exposure, lead paint and vermin. Auburn has no certificate of occupancy, as required by law, and lacks an operational plan that meets state regulations. Most of the shelter's smoke detectors and alarms have been found to be inoperable.

There are few signs that children live at Auburn. Locked gates prevent them from setting foot on the front lawn. In a city that has invested millions of dollars in new "green spaces," Auburn's is often overrun with weeds.

Inside, prepackaged meals are served in a cafeteria where Dasani and her siblings wait in one line for their food before heading to another line to heat it in one of two microwaves that hundreds of residents share. Tempers fly and fights explode. The routine can last more than an hour before the children take their first bite.

Sahai is the middle school's valedictorian. A breathtaking dancer, she has long silky hair and carries herself like a newly crowned queen. She is a girl with enough means to accessorize elegantly. When Dasani looks at Sahai, she is taking the measure of all she is not.

You can be popular in one of three ways, Dasani's mother always says. Dress fly. Do good in school. Fight.

The first option is out of the question. While Dasani clings to her uniform, other students wear coveted Adidas hoodies and Doc Marten boots. In dance class, Dasani does not even have a leotard.

So she applies herself in school. "I have a lot of possibility," she says. "I do."

Her strongest subject is English, where a poem she writes is tacked to a teacher's wall.

By October, she is on the honor roll, just as her life at Auburn is coming apart.

It is something of an art to sleep among nine other people. One learns not to hear certain sounds or smell certain smells. ■ But some things still intrude on Dasani's sleep. There is the ceaseless drip of that decaying sink, and the scratching of hungry mice. It makes no difference when the family lays out traps and hangs its food from the ceiling in a plastic bag. Auburn's mice always return, as stubborn as the "ghetto squirrels," in Chanel's lingo, that forage the trash for Chinese fried chicken.

Dasani shares a twin mattress and three dresser drawers with her mischievous and portly sister, Avianna, only one year her junior. Their 35-year-old stepfather, Supreme, has raised them as his own. They consider him their father and call him Daddy.

Supreme married Chanel nine years earlier, bringing two children from a previous marriage. The boy, Khaliq, had trouble speaking. He had been trapped with his dead, pregnant mother after she fell down a flight of stairs. The girl, Nijai, had a rare genetic eye disease and was going blind. They were the same tender ages as Dasani and Avianna, forming a homeless Brady Bunch as Supreme and Chanel had four more children.

Two of Dasani's half-sisters, 7-year-old Maya and 6-year-old Hada, share the mattress to her right. The 5-year-old they call Papa sleeps by himself because he wets the bed. In the crib is Baby Lele, who is tended to by Dasani when her parents are listless from their daily dose of methadone.

Chanel and Supreme take the synthetic opioid as part of their drug treament program. It has essentially become a substitute addiction.

The more time they spend in this room, the smaller it feels. Nothing stays in order. Everything is exposed - marital spats, frayed underwear, the onset of puberty, the mischief other children hide behind closed doors. Supreme paces erratically. Chanel cannot check her temper. For Dasani and her siblings, to act like rambunctious children is to risk a beating.

By late fall, Chanel and Supreme are fighting daily about money.

It has been years since Supreme lost his job as a barber and Chanel stopped working as a janitor for the parks department. He cuts hair inside the shelter and sells pirated DVDs on the street while she hawks odds and ends from discount stores. In a good month, their combined efforts can bring in a few hundred dollars.

This is not one of those times. Supreme is keeping tight control of the family's welfare income - $1,285 in food stamps and $1,122 in survivor benefits for his first wife's death. He refuses to give Chanel cash for laundry.

Soon, all of Dasani's uniforms are stained. At school, she is now wearing donated clothes and her hair is unkempt, inviting the dreaded designation of "nappy." Rumors are circulating about where she lives. Only six of the middle school's 157 students reside in shelters.

When the truth about Dasani emerges, she does nothing to contradict it. She is a proud girl. She must find a way to turn the truth, like other unforeseeable calamities, in her favor.

She begins calling herself "ghetto." She dares the girls to fight her and challenges the boys to arm-wrestle, flexing the biceps she has built doing pull-ups in Fort Greene Park. The boys watch slack-jawed as Dasani demonstrates the push-ups she has also mastered, earning her the nickname "muscle girl."

Her teachers are flummoxed. They assume that she has shed her uniform because she is trying to act tough. In fact, the reverse is true.

A chilly, November wind whips across Auburn Place, rustling the plastic cover of a soiled mattress in a trash bin outside the shelter. ■ Chanel and Supreme stand nearby, waiting for their children to come from school. They are still short on cash. The children had pitched in $5.05, from collecting cans and bottles over the weekend.

Chanel inspects the mattress. Clean, it might fetch $10. But it is stained with feces. Janitors wearing masks and gloves had removed it from a squalid room where three small children lived, defecating on the floor. Their mother rarely bathed them, and they had no shoes on the day she gathered them in a hurry and left.

"You can smell it?" Chanel asks Supreme.

"No, I can see it," he says, curling his lip.

"Those are the people that they need to be calling A.C.S. on," Chanel says. At the shelter, the abbreviation for the Administration for Children's Services is uttered with the same kind of alarm that the C.I.A. can stoke overseas.

"Nasty girl," Chanel says, scrunching her nose.

Gracie Mansion is something of an oddity. In a city with a 2 percent vacancy rate and a shortage of public housing, the mayoral residence sits uninhabited on 11 pristine acres of the Upper East Side. ■ It has been more than a decade since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg chose to remain in his opulent townhouse, consigning Gracie Mansion to the status of a museum and venue for civic events.

Dasani knows none of these particulars when she steps through Gracie's doors on a school trip in February. She is looking for the mayor. She wants to see him up close, this mysterious "Wizard of Oz" figure who makes decisions about her life from behind a curtain of political power.

It never occurs to Dasani that the mayor does not live there. Who could have a mansion and not live in it?

"Look at that fireplace!" she marvels as her classmates step into the parlor where Mr. Bloomberg has given news conferences. The tour guide, a woman wearing gold-clasp earrings and tangerine lipstick, moves the children along, reminding them not to touch.

They shuffle into the library. Still no mayor. Dasani scans for clues like the F.B.I. agents of her favorite television show, "Criminal Minds." She inspects a telephone. "His last call was at 11:15," she whispers.

The tour guide opens French doors onto the veranda where New York's mayors have entertained dignitaries from around the world. "It's a very gracious way of living," she says. "Very elegant."

What impresses Dasani most are not the architectural details or the gold-bound volumes of Chaucer and Tolstoy, but the astonishing lack of dust. She runs her hand lightly over the top of a Steinway piano.

"I tell you," she says. "This house is clean."

Dasani was still an infant when Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002. Declaring Gracie Mansion "the people's house," he gathered $7 million in private donations - much of it his own money - to rehabilitate the pale yellow 18th-century home, which overlooks the East River. In came new plumbing, floors, lighting and ventilation, along with exquisite touches like an 1820s chandelier and a four-poster mahogany bed.

Facing that same river, six miles away on the opposite side, is the Auburn Family Residence, the squalid city-run homeless shelter where Dasani has lived for more than two years.

On the Brooklyn block that is Dasani's dominion, shoppers can buy a $3 malt liquor in an airless deli where food stamps are traded for cigarettes. Or they can cross the street for a $740 bottle of chardonnay at an industrial wine shop accented with modern art.

It is a sign outside that locale, Gnarly Vines, that catches Dasani's notice one spring afternoon: "Wine Tasting Tonight 5-8."

Dasani is hardly conversant in the subject of libations, but this much she knows: A little drink will take off her mother's edge. Without further ado, Chanel heads into the wine shop on Myrtle Avenue, trailed by four of her eight children. They are lugging two greasy boxes of pizza and a jumbo pack of diapers from Target.

The cashier pauses. The sommelier smiles.

"Wanna try a little rosé?" she asks brightly, pouring from a 2012 bottle of Mas de Gourgonnier. "I would describe it as definitely fruit forward at the beginning."

Chanel polishes it.

"But really crisp, dry, refreshing --"

"Not refreshing," Chanel says. "I just think dry."

"No, it's very dry," says the sommelier, a peppy blonde in wire-rim glasses. "It's high acid, a little citrusy."

Chanel sticks out her tongue. She finds the woman's choice of words unappetizing. To the side of the wine display is a large, silver vase that recalls the family urn, prompting Chanel's son Khaliq to ask if it contains the ashes of a dead person.

"Oh my gosh, for cremation?" the sommelier asks, shaking her head. "We just use it for spitting in."

"For spitting?" Chanel says with horror.

"Yeah, it's got rejected wine in it," the sommelier says.

Chanel scoffs. She might not like the wine, but she sees no reason to spit it out. She moves on to a Tuscan sangiovese.

Ignoring the spectacle, Dasani scans the room, frowning at a sign on the wall: Liqueur. "They got liquor spelled wrong," she yelps victoriously.

Actually, the sommelier interjects, that is the French word for the delicate, liquid spirits derived from fruits such as pomegranates and raspberries. "But you're very right," she offers sweetly. "That is not how you spell liquor."

"Not the hood liquor," Chanel says.

Dasani's neighborhood is one of the most unequal pockets of New York City, the most unequal metropolis in America. ■ Fort Greene occupies less than one square mile. On the map, its boundaries form the shape of a pitcher tilting at the northwestern edge of Brooklyn.

Just north of Fort Greene Park are the projects and, among them, the homeless shelter where Dasani lives.

Just south of the park are some of Brooklyn's finest townhouses and cultural gems, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where theatergoers were lining up to see "Julius Caesar" on the day that Dasani led her mother to the wine shop.

If one thing distinguishes Dasani's New York from that of her antecedents, it is a striking proximity to the wealth that eludes her.

She routinely walks past a boho-chic boutique on Lafayette Avenue where calfskin boots command $845. Heading north, she passes French bulldogs on leashes and infants riding like elevated genies in Uppababy strollers with shock-absorbing wheels. Three blocks away is an ice cream parlor where $6 buys two salted-caramel scoops.

Like most children, Dasani is oblivious to the precise cost of such extravagances. She only knows that they are beyond her reach.

Nor can this 11-year-old girl be expected to grasp the subtle gradations of Fort Greene's elite, whose creative class feels pushed out of a neighborhood it once considered more gritty than tony.

Dasani sees the chasms of Fort Greene more plainly, reasoning that wealth belongs to "the whites" because "they save their money and don't spend it on drinking and smoking."

Such perceptions are fed by the contrasts of this neighborhood, where the top 5 percent of residents earn 76 times as much as the bottom quintile. Dasani spots addicts gathering outside a food pantry a block from $2 million brownstones. She notes that few people in the projects use the Citi Bikes stationed nearby. The celebrated bike sharing program, unveiled this year, requires a credit or debit card for a $101 security deposit.

Dasani also knows that not everyone in the projects is poor. Her Uncle Waverly, who lives in the Walt Whitman Houses across from her shelter, the Auburn Family Residence, works as a supervisor for the parks department and has a Lexus S.U.V. When he drives past Dasani and her siblings, he pretends not to know them.

Dasani charts the patterns of Fort Greene Park by skin color. The basketball courts are closest to the projects, drawing black children to that northwestern corner. On the rare occasion when Dasani ventures to the opposite quadrant, she sees white women sunbathing in bikinis or playing tennis near a water fountain outfitted for dogs.

She never finds those women at the nearby Bravo Supermarket for Values, where thieves are photographed in Polaroids that fill the store's "Wall of Shame." Wearing naked expressions, they are forced to pose with their stolen items - things like Goya beans and Kraft cheese. A woman named Mary holds a can of tuna in a photograph titled "Catch of the Day."

Dasani is more likely to encounter shoppers of another stratum at the local Target, where they can save on items that for her family represent a splurge.

Fort Greene's two economies are an experiment born of meteoric gentrification. In the last decade, the neighborhood has been remade, with the portion of white residents jumping by 80 percent as real estate prices more than doubled despite the recession.

Just the word "gentrification" is remarkably divisive. It derives from the Middle English word "gentrise," which means "of noble descent." The word has become shorthand for an urban neighborhood where muggings are down and espresso is roasted - a place that has been "discovered," as though no one had been living there.

Dasani's Fort Greene reaches deep into the last century. Her grandmother Joanie grew up in the Raymond V. Ingersoll Houses, next to the Walt Whitman Houses. Both projects opened in 1944, an era of New Deal reforms that gave rise to white flight and urban decay. Fort Greene, like other black areas, was redlined, allowing banks to disinvest and property values to plummet.

The neighborhood's prospects started to change in 1978, after the city declared part of Fort Greene a historic district. By the time Dasani was born there in 2001, a billionaire was preparing to run for mayor. A year after taking office, Michael R. Bloomberg announced an ambitious redevelopment plan for Downtown Brooklyn.

Fort Greene's transformation came swiftly. Through aggressive rezoning and generous subsidies, the city drew developers who, in the span of three years, built 19 luxury buildings in the surrounding area that catered - across racial lines - to the educated elite.

Dasani and her siblings routinely pass the Toren, a glistening, 38-story glass tower on Myrtle Avenue offering a 24-hour concierge, gymnasium, pool and movie theater. In June, a condominium there sold for $1.4 million.

Just blocks away stand the Ingersoll and Whitman projects, which engulf Dasani's shelter and, like Auburn, have fallen into disrepair.

It is the juxtaposition of these neglected time capsules to Fort Greene's luxury towers that seems to mock the neighborhood's effort at ascension. For the arriviste investor, the projects present a rude visual interruption, an inconvenient thing to walk around, but never through.

For Dasani, these faded buildings hold a legacy so intricate and rich it could fill volumes were it ever told.

The homeless shelter where she lives is the very building where Grandma Joanie had been born, back when it was Cumberland Hospital. Just across the way is the fifth-story apartment where Joanie grew up, helping her own mother raise seven other children in the clasp of poverty.

Three generations later, little has changed. Even as the fortunes of this neighborhood rose, Dasani's matrilineal line, from her great-grandmother to her mother, has followed a trajectory of teenage pregnancy, addiction and violence.

Fort Greene is now a marker. For one set of people, arriving signals triumph. For another, remaining means defeat.

Dasani will do better, she tells herself. "People don't go nowhere in Brooklyn," she says. Chanel promises they will move this spring, after the tax refunds arrive.

Yet as Dasani walks through her grandmother's streets, it is not with the sense of imminent departure so much as melancholic return.

Chanel was 8 when she found her mother's crack pipe in a jewelry box. She held it up to the light and showed it to her brother. ■ We gonna toss it, he said. ■ They opened the window and watched as the brown glass vial soared through the air, crashing onto the sidewalk.

It was the mid-1980s, and crack had swept the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, where Chanel's mother, Joanie, now lived. Chanel visited on weekends. The rest of the time, she stayed with her godmother, Sherry, who had been the common-law wife of Chanel's father. Chanel's mother was his lover.

Stranger things had happened in Brownsville, and now that Chanel's father was dead, the two women made peace, despite their differences. Joanie relied on welfare to support her habit. Sherry ran a day care center and shunned drugs.

"It was like two different people trying to raise one kid," Chanel says.

At Sherry's rowhouse in East New York, Brooklyn, Chanel minded her chores and did her homework.

At Joanie's, the child watched dance parties meld into a predawn haze.

Worried that Joanie would unduly influence Chanel, Sherry sent the 10-year-old girl to live with a relative in Pittsburgh and attend Catholic school. But Chanel longed for her birth mother and began to act out. Within a few years, she returned to New York and moved in with Joanie. They soon wound up in a shelter in Queens, where both were exposed to tuberculosis.

Over the next few years, they drifted apart.

Joanie turned her life around after President Bill Clinton signed legislation in 1996 to end "welfare as we know it," placing time limits and work restrictions on recipients of government aid. She got clean and joined a welfare-to-work program, landing a $22,000-a-year job cleaning subway cars for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "This is the happiest day of my life," she told Chanel.

By then, Chanel had dropped out of high school and was addicted to crack. She had joined a sect of the violent Bloods gang, tattooing her street name, Lady Red, in curly letters across her right arm. She was a regular in the crack dens of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Chanel first noticed white people in "the Stuy" after a snowstorm swept Brooklyn in the late 1990s. Out of nowhere, two cross-country skiers appeared along Franklin Avenue like "a pair of aliens." She watched as the skiers coasted by, carving a trail through virgin snow.

She sensed that Brooklyn was on the cusp of change. But she could not have imagined that just five blocks from that spot, people would one day line up to buy blood orange and hibiscus doughnuts at an artisanal shop called Dough.

The first commercial signs of Brooklyn's transition were simpler. In 2001, Chanel spotted a new brand of bottled water - Dasani - on the shelves of her corner store. She was pregnant again, but unlike the miscarriages of her teens, this baby was surviving. Chanel needed a name.

For a 23-year-old Brooklyn native who had spent summers cooling in the gush of hydrants, the name "Dasani" held a certain appeal. It sounded as special as Chanel's name had sounded to her own mother, when she saw the perfume advertised in a magazine. It grasped at something better.

Dasani was born on May 26 at Brooklyn Hospital Center in Fort Greene. The doll-faced infant weighed only 5 pounds 6 ounces. She was strikingly alert and had, the nurse noted, a "vigorous cry." Three days later, Chanel left her with Joanie and took off.

Even as a baby, Dasani was awake to the world. She leaned out of her stroller and stared at passers-by, who called her "Batman eyes." She was tiny, but never frail, and began walking at only 8 months.

Chanel would surface from time to time, but Dasani latched on to Joanie. A year later, Chanel had a second daughter by the same man, naming her Avianna, inspired by the more expensive brand of Evian water.

Joanie had hit her limit, so Chanel turned to the city's shelter system. With both babies, she reported to the Department of Homeless Services intake office in the Bronx. They were sent to 30 Hamilton Place, a family shelter in Harlem.

Down the hall, a single father had moved in with his own two children. He called himself Supreme. He had sad, knowing eyes that made him look older than his 26 years. He never talked about the past.

Supreme was born to heroin addicts in the Cypress Hills projects of East New York. By age 7, he knew how to shop with his mother's food stamps and cook grits for his four younger siblings. When the pantry was empty, he made sugar sandwiches.

He was 9 when he came upon the lifeless body of his baby sister. She had been left near the entrance of the projects, wrapped in a blanket. Supreme stroked her head and kept saying her name, Precious. "She didn't wake up," he says.

Investigators for Child Protective Services thought the 2-year-old girl had swallowed sleeping pills, though the medical examiner concluded that she had died of sudden infant death syndrome. The father had left Precious alone when she died. When her mother found her, Supreme recalled, she panicked, leaving the girl's body outside as she ran for help.

Later that day, the agency's workers removed Supreme and his siblings from the home. For the next three years, Supreme bounced from foster care to group homes. He soon dropped out of school and left for North Carolina to join the crack trade. By 17, Supreme had a felony drug conviction and was serving time at a maximum-security prison in Walpole, Mass.

It was there that he discovered the Five Percent Nation, a growing movement whose followers believe they are the chosen "5 percent" of humanity. The Five Percenters were shaping urban culture and music, while spreading the word that the black man is God.

That message - that God was within him - filled Supreme with a sense of power over his destiny, one that until now had been steered by outsiders.

Supreme left prison in 1997 with a high school equivalency diploma. He married and moved to Washington, finding work as a barber. Six years later, his wife - pregnant with their third child - had a heart attack and fell down a flight of stairs to her death.

Chanel took pity on this solemn widower, who came to the shelter a few months after his wife's passing. Dasani and Avianna were the exact same ages as his children. He seemed different from the other men. He was always reading, and had a way with words.

"I fell in love with his brains," Chanel says.

Two incomplete families soon became one.

Chanel embraced the Five Percent, wrapping her head in a scarf and vowing to stay off drugs. They married at the city clerk's office on Feb. 4, 2004.

For Chanel, it was a moment of triumph. Women in her family almost never married.

"We were the product of split-up families," she says. "We always wanted a big family. One family. One full family."

Children are not the face of New York's homeless. They rarely figure among the panhandlers and bag ladies, war vets and untreated schizophrenics who have long been stock characters in this city of contrasts. ■ Their homelessness is hidden. They spend their days in school, their nights in shelters. They are seen only in glimpses - pulling overstuffed suitcases in the shadow of a tired parent, passing for tourists rather than residents without a home.

Their numbers have risen above anything in the city's modern history, to a staggering 22,091 this month. If all of the city's homeless children were to file into Madison Square Garden for a hockey game, more than 4,800 would not have a seat.

Yet it is the adult population that drives debates on poverty and homelessness, with city officials and others citing "personal responsibility" as the central culprit. Children are bystanders in this discourse, no more to blame for their homelessness than for their existence.

Dasani works to keep her homelessness hidden. She has spent years of her childhood in the punishing confines of the Auburn shelter in Brooklyn, where to be homeless is to be powerless. She and her seven siblings are at the mercy of forces beyond their control: parents who cannot provide, agencies that fall short, a metropolis rived by inequality and indifference.

The experience has left Dasani internally adrift, for the losses of the homeless child only begin with the home itself. She has had to part with privacy and space - the kind of quiet that nurtures the mind. She has lost the dignity that comes with living free of vermin and chronic illness. She has fallen behind in school, despite her crackling intelligence.

She has lost the simplest things that for other children are givens: the freedom of riding a bicycle, the safety of a bathroom not shared with strangers, the ease of being in school without stigma. And from all of these losses has come the departure of faith itself.

God "is somewhere around," she says. "We just can't find him."

To trust is to be caught off guard.

Dasani is unmoored by her recent suspension from the Susan S. McKinney Secondary School of the Arts. For months, this new school was her only haven. She had grown so attached to her principal, Paula Holmes, that she expected a measure of tolerance despite her outbursts, the kind of forgiveness she never gets at home.

Her forced departure from school overlaps with spring break, plunging Dasani further into the morass of her family's troubles. Her parents' resolve to leave Auburn has vanished now that their savings plan fell apart, yet the shelter is pressing the family to leave while offering no assistance in finding a home. Meanwhile, the Administration for Children's Services has stepped up its scrutiny of Dasani's parents, who are increasingly despondent.

As pressure mounts from all sides, Dasani braces herself. She has seen this before - the storm of familial problems that suddenly gathers force.

"It's a tsunami, just spinning around, nothing going right," she says. "And I'm like, 'Put my life back together!' and it doesn't happen. Your life doesn't go the way you want it to go."

On April 3, Dasani climbs up the steps of McKinney wearing her best cardigan. She lingers in the hallway, keeping an eye on Principal Holmes's door. She is eager to try out the script her mother has drilled into her. ■ How was your spring break, Miss Holmes?

(Pause, wait for Miss Holmes to ask the same question.)

Oh, it was good. I'm staying out of trouble!

(Wait for Miss Holmes to laugh and then head for the door, showing new determination.)

Gotta get to class!

Instead, Dasani hangs back. Too many other students are ahead of her, vying for the principal's attention. In class, she is quiet and focused. "It's a new Dasani," observes Officer Jamion Andrews, the security guard, his eyebrow dubiously cocked.

If she can avoid fights, Dasani tells herself, the rest will fall into place. It is the taunts that she cannot resist. Her body gets "hyped." She loses control. And that is precisely the behavior that Roxanne, her counselor at school, is trying to disrupt.

In those moments, Dasani must learn to breathe in for 10 seconds through her nose and then breathe out for 10 seconds through her mouth. Roxanne demonstrates.

Dasani practices on her walk home from school.

The two blocks of sidewalk between McKinney and the shelter can be a minefield. This week, one of Dasani's classmates, Sunita, begins to stalk her along the way. Sunita is a foot taller than Dasani and easily twice her 70 pounds. Their rivalry dates back three years to fourth grade, when Sunita, who lives in the projects, began teasing Dasani about living at Auburn, prompting Dasani, then 9, to throw her first punch.

For days, rumors have been flying that the two will fight again.

As school lets out on April 9, Dasani steps onto the sidewalk and is surrounded by a sea of girls.

"You gonna fight her?" one of them asks breathlessly.

"No!" Dasani yells loud enough for Sunita to hear. "Miss Holmes says if I get in another fight I get suspended."

Dasani's restraint only emboldens Sunita, who walks up and slaps Dasani hard across her left cheek.

The crowd is hushed. Dasani tries to breathe.

"You think that hurt? I eat those," Dasani says, using one of her mother's put-downs.

The girl glares at Dasani.

Breathe in 10 seconds.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Dasani's 10-year-old sister Avianna jumps between them. "You better back up off my sister's face before I hurt you," Avianna yells.

The girls might as well be twins. They share the same pillow, the same dresser, the same absent, biological father. It is usually Dasani who comes to Avianna's rescue, carrying her up four flights of stairs to their room when her asthma strikes.

But today, Avianna rises to the occasion, mouthing off fiercely at Sunita as the crowd disperses.

Dasani is soon surrounded by all of her siblings, a familial force field. Their bond presents itself physically. When they walk, ride the bus, switch trains, climb steps, jump puddles, cross highways and file into Auburn, they move as a single being. In all things, they are one.

The sheer size of the family draws the notice of strangers, who shoot looks of recrimination at the mother, Chanel.

Yet she sees fortitude in this small army of siblings, something she and her husband, Supreme, never had growing up. "That's why the street became our family," she says. "I didn't want the street to become their family, too."

The children's solidarity is striking enough that social workers frequently make note of it. "Family close knit," reads one social worker's report in March.

They live in dread of the Administration for Children's Services. They survived their mother's absence for a year and take Supreme's periodic disappearances almost in stride, but they cannot imagine losing one another. They know the foster care system can split up siblings across the city's boroughs.

The 11-year-old girl responds with the instinct of a mother but not the training. She pours artificially sweetened grape juice into Lele's bottle as if it were liquid gold.

What would happen to Lele in the hands of strangers?

"Some people don't know how to take care of babies," she says.

The children have heard their father's story - how Supreme was torn from his siblings and years passed before he was reunited with them in the Marcy projects, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Supreme soon left home to join the crack trade.

By then, another child of the Marcy projects had also escaped. She chose an alternate path.

"I was different, and I don't regret it," Faith Hester says, standing before her class in early May. ■ She is not one to dwell on the past. But today, a student prompts Miss Hester to talk about her education. She was only 16 and living in the Marcy projects when she won a scholarship to SUNY Cortland.

She packed a large orange suitcase. Her mother refused to take her to the train station. Girls married their way out of the projects. Going to college, the neighbors sneered, was trying to "be white."

So Miss Hester left alone that day, dragging her suitcase along Park Avenue. In college, she cleaned houses to help pay her way. Her mother did not speak to her for six months. "Sometimes you have to be alone," she says, looking around the room.

"I don't regret it for one second," she says, slamming her hand down on a desk. "That was the path!"

The class is motionless.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" Miss Hester continues, her voice trembling. "There are going to be some places in your life where you feel bizarre. You feel outstanding. And remain that way. Stay just as you are."

Dasani stares at her teacher, mesmerized.

"It takes a lot of courage to be different," Miss Hester says.

When Dasani looks into the future, she sees who she won't be. She won't be a dropout. She won't do drugs or smoke or drink. She won't get married, unless she finds "a gentle man, not a harsh man."

She won't have children unless she can support them. She won't end up on the street.

"Spare some change?" she says, mocking a panhandler. "Nuh-uh. Not me."

It is harder for Dasani to imagine who she might become. She has been told she must reach for college if she wants a life of choices, but who will pay? Her mother is quick to ask that question whenever Grandma Sherry tries to encourage Dasani with the shining example of a niece who graduated from Bates College in Maine on scholarship.

Other children talk of becoming rap stars or athletes, escaping their world with one good break. Dasani subscribes to the logic of those fantasies. Her life is defined by extremes. In order to transcend extreme poverty, it follows that she must become extremely rich or extremely something. What exactly she cannot see. To dream is, after all, an act of faith.

"I don't dream at all," she says. "Even when I try."

She believes in what she can see, and Miss Hester is real. Her lecture that day leaves Dasani feeling uplifted.

As she walks home with a classmate later that afternoon, they talk about a coming history project on ancient Egypt. Dasani does not see Sunita coming.

"I'm gonna fight you!" Sunita calls out from the underpass, shedding her sweatshirt.

Dasani pivots and starts walking against the traffic along Tillary Street. This time there are no siblings to come to her rescue.

Get back on school property, she tells herself. She crosses over toward McKinney as Sunita charges up behind her.

"Move before I punch you!" Dasani says. But Sunita grabs Dasani's shirt and pulls as Dasani takes a roundhouse swing. They fall to the ground, biting and scratching.

A mob of spectators presses in, trying to see the tiny girl. Rap stars circle. The cameras roll. The crowd chants her name. ■ "Da-Sa-Neee!" ■ Her heart is racing. She looks up at the sky and extends her fingers, but cannot reach high enough to grasp the metal bar. A powerful man hoists her up by the waist.

In an instant, she is midair, pulling and twisting acrobatically as the audience gasps at the might of this 12-year-old girl.

"She's a giantess," the man had announced to the audience. "She's tomorrow's success, I'm telling you right now."

Dasani blinks, looking out at the smiling faces. She cannot make sense of the serendipity that has brought her here to Harlem, on this sparkling July day, to make her debut as a member of an urban fitness group teamed up with Nike.

But there is her beaming mother, Chanel; her father, Supreme; and all seven siblings. They are cheering and clapping as well.

"I thought it was a dream - make believe - like this wasn't happening," she says. "You know, like in movies, people pinch themselves like this ain't real."

It was only two months earlier that Dasani stood at the bus stop as her mother wept in the rain. Summer was fast approaching, a season that, in this family, always brings change.

The markers of Dasani's life - her first months in the care of Grandma Joanie, the day her family moved into their first real home, the loss of that home two years later, when they landed in the Auburn shelter - these all came in summertime.

There was no telling what this summer might bring. Dasani could no sooner predict landing a spot on the Harlem team than she could foretell the abrupt changes that still lay ahead.

Already, the court-mandated supervision of the family by child protection workers had run its course. Chanel's nine-month trial period was suddenly over, leaving her custody secure, just as new problems came along.

School was winding down when the children learned that their only other refuge - Grandma Sherry's rowhouse in East New York, Brooklyn - had gone into foreclosure. Sherry could end up homeless as well, at a time when New York's shelter population had surpassed a historic 50,000.

As the days grew hotter, Dasani and her family remained stuck in the same miserable room at Auburn.

And yet summer, no matter how stifling, also carried a certain promise, the kind that comes of chance encounters on the street.

It is a muggy night in Harlem, but the children do not care. They savor any chance to visit. ■ This is the place where, a decade earlier, Chanel and Supreme fell in love. They have returned over the years, pulled by the Five Percent Nation, the movement spawned 50 years ago by a contemporary of Malcolm X who broke from the Nation of Islam.

Tonight, people swarm into the Harriet Tubman Learning Center on West 127th Street for the organization's annual gathering, pushing past security guards and a vendor with pins that declare, "I ♥ being God." Supreme mills about in the foyer, greeting old friends with tight hugs.

The uncertainty of Dasani's life is deepening. Supreme is now gone, having checked into a residential treatment program to try to get off methadone.

Right before school starts in September, Chanel uproots Dasani from McKinney, reasoning that she will be less likely to fight in the company of Avianna and Nijai at a neighboring school.

Dasani is unsettled. Every afternoon, the three sisters turn up at McKinney like stray puppies, passing the time with Miss Holmes and Miss Hester. The principal offers to enroll all of them. Finally, on Sept. 25, Chanel relents.

"Oh my gooney goo hoo," Miss Hester squeals as Dasani, Avianna and Nijai skip up the hallway. "I've been praying on this."

Back at Auburn, residents begin to notice small changes. In the wake of Casshanae's death, the shelter is providing a steadier supply of formula, diapers and other items to mothers, and the cafeteria has a few more items on its menu.

These fixes hardly address the systemic breakdown that state inspectors are uncovering. On Oct. 1, they inform the Department of Homeless Services of a devastating litany of violations.

The fire safety system is virtually inoperable. The shelter has no certificate of occupancy. Its record-keeping is a mess. The registration cards of 25 of its security guards are expired or missing. Black mold is spreading in the shelter's bathrooms, many of which spew exhaust thick with dust and debris.

During one visit, inspectors see an asthmatic 3-year-old child coughing and vomiting so much that 911 is called. With no air-conditioning, the rooms reach dangerously high temperatures. A month before she died, Casshanae was living in a room where temperatures reached 102 degrees.

The state's conclusion: No child with chronic breathing problems should be at the shelter, and no children under age 2 should live there at all "due to the lack of amenities for this young and vulnerable population."

In other words, Dasani's family - with a 1-year-old, two asthmatic children and another who is legally blind - should never have been living at Auburn in the first place.

In the early afternoon of Oct. 17, Chanel is summoned to the office of the shelter's administrators. ■ They have stunning news: The family can finally leave Auburn. A space has opened at another shelter - an apartment with a kitchen. But they must go today. They have a few hours to pack. Other families are also moving, and the Department of Homeless Services has arranged for vans.

Chanel has longed for this moment. But now that it is here, she feels wholly unprepared.

Supreme is still in rehab. Her food stamps have been stolen. She has $9 in cash. How will she instantly produce three meals a day for eight children? She has no frying pans, dishes, utensils or toilet paper. She does not even have the address of this new shelter.

"I don't know what to do," Chanel says.

She returns to Room 449 and tells the children.

Dasani is in shock. Chanel rushes them off to therapy. Whatever happens, she needs the cash.

It is drizzling out, and Dasani's head is spinning. All she can think about is her school. Just after willing her way back to McKinney, she is poised to lose it again.

It is strange, this feeling of heading toward an address they don't yet have, while having to say goodbye - in the span of a few hours - to the place where they have lived for years.

After therapy, it is getting dark. The shelter's lights blaze from within. Chanel orders the children to pack only the most essential things. Auburn has given them 20 clear plastic bags. That is the limit. They will have to come back for Turtle.

At 9:26 p.m., Chanel and her children board the last van just before it pulls away. An hour later, the van approaches their new residence.

They are in Harlem.

Of the 152 shelters where Dasani's family could have landed, they have somehow wound up at a six-story brick building on West 145th Street.

It is one block from the Bartendaz base.

"I am right next to the park," Dasani tells Giant on the phone, enunciating each word. "I'm here! I'm in Harlem!"

Chanel grabs the phone, eager to hear his reaction.

"You see?" Giant tells Chanel. "The Lord sent you right here next to me."

The children wait on the front steps as Chanel fills out paperwork in the office.

It feels different here. The block is awash in streetlights and teeming with pedestrians. There are fewer trees. But in other ways, Harlem is like Fort Greene. Nearby is a new bistro called Mountain Bird that offers a foie gras soup and a shrimp-bisque mac and cheese.

One by one, the children peek in on their mother, anxious for updates.

There are two bedrooms, a full bathroom and a kitchen joined to a living room. Metal blinds hang from the windows, and clean sheets are folded on the bunk beds.

Fresh, home-cooked meals again, Dasani thinks to herself as the children race about maniacally. Hada opens a closet to find a diaper on the floor. Chanel smells it, declares it clean and stashes it for Lele.

She inspects the mattresses, which are in good condition. She opens the refrigerator, looks at the stove and sink, and then turns toward the living room. She clasps her hands in front of her face, as if in prayer.

"Oh, man, I'm happy!" she says, her eyes shining. "I thank God for this. Thank you."

Chanel cannot sleep that first night. ■ She keeps checking the locks as her children lie deep in slumber. The five older girls share two bunk beds alongside Lele's crib. The boys sleep in the living room. Chanel reserves one bedroom for herself and Supreme. It will be their first privacy in years, whenever he comes back.

Chanel is feeling more panicked than celebratory.

"I got to make sure I provide," she says.

The move has plunged Chanel into the ice-cold waters of independence.

She now has $39, counting the money gleaned from therapy. It will be more than two weeks before her next food-stamp allotment arrives.

When the children wake, Chanel drags a rolling cart onto the subway and returns to Auburn to retrieve more of their belongings. Thankfully, the room has still not been cleared. Chanel leaves with Turtle hidden in an empty baby-wipes container.

By the next morning, Supreme has left rehab and rejoined the family. Now they are almost broke. Chanel can think of only one solution. She heads downtown to Macy's, where she tries to steal a stack of men's Polo briefs and undershirts, planning to sell them on the street for quick cash.

A security guard intervenes, leading Chanel to the store's private jail, along with Nijai, Avianna and Baby Lele, who toddles about the small, enclosed cell saying, "Out, out." After Supreme collects the children, Chanel is arrested by the police and spends the night in jail.

When she comes home, Supreme declares that the stealing is over. If they have to, they can beg.

"Better to ask than take," he says.

It doesn't quite feel like "begging" to Dasani, the way she has seen it in the movies, with peasants holding out hands for coins. It is a little more dignified, how Supreme stands outside the local Pathmark, his children silently lined up next to him.

As shoppers enter the store, he asks them to buy a few extra groceries "so I can feed my babies." Dasani runs in with a woman who pays for Froot Loops and Corn Flakes. And so it goes, until a particularly generous man tells them to just "get what you need," and they fill up the cart.

Back in the apartment, the family's spirits begin to lift. It is easy to forget they are still homeless as Supreme hovers at the stove, making corn bread from scratch, popcorn shrimp, honey-barbecue wings and glazed turkey bacon. He has joined a new methadone program in Harlem.

"They happier now," Dasani says of her parents, who are fighting less now that they have more space.

Miss Holmes is worried. ■ Dasani and her sisters have been absent for days. Under federal legislation, homeless children are granted the right to stay in one school even as their families move around. But in practice, there are no guarantees.

Even if the girls were old enough to ride the subway alone, the trek from Dasani's new shelter to McKinney takes at least an hour. When Chanel requests a bus pickup, only Nijai is approved because of her blindness.

Chanel has already found new schools for four of her other children. She thinks it best that Dasani and her sisters switch to a Harlem school.

If this happens, Dasani will be starting her third school in six weeks.

"No, Mommy," she protests.

Her sisters also plead. They are learning to play an instrument at McKinney. If they make enough progress, Avianna can keep her trombone, and Nijai, her clarinet. She shows her mother the march she is learning for the school band, holding her invisible clarinet aloft as she stomps her feet.

Chanel is persuaded when she hears that Miss Holmes and Joshua Goldfein, a lawyer for Legal Aid, are pressing the Education Department to approve a bus for all three sisters.

In the meantime, Chanel decides that she will take the girls herself.

Early on Nov. 4, they board the No. 2 train, hurtling back to Brooklyn. In Fort Greene, the children walk along North Portland Avenue, passing Auburn and the projects, where they used to be called "shelter boogies."

See? Dasani thinks to herself. I'm gone and you are still in the projects.

Minutes later, they enter the warm corridors of McKinney.

"Hi, Miss Holmes," Chanel squeaks to the woman who always makes her feel like a schoolgirl again, back in the principal's office.

Dasani flies into Miss Holmes's arms. She feels safe again, "like I was made to be there."

The principal is shocked to see them. She did not think it would happen without the bus. As the girls are handed new backpacks and sent to class, Miss Holmes makes Chanel an offer: She can volunteer at the school during the day, whenever she needs shelter. She can even bring Baby Lele.

"We always need plenty of help," Miss Holmes says.

"That will work out nice," Chanel says.

"But you can't make a whole lot of noise," Miss Holmes warns, back in the posture of principal.

At the end of the day, the girls gather in Miss Holmes's office to wait for their mother.

"You have come home," Miss Holmes says. "Everybody here is fighting to get you girls back here. There are certain things you have to do. Homework."

Soon, Chanel has arrived and is chiming in with the principal. No more bad behavior, she tells her daughters.

"We not gonna have that, you understand?" Chanel says. "Because soon I'm about to be volunteering here."

The girls are silent.

"So it's gonna be a totally different song this year," Chanel says.

As they leave, Dasani turns and races back into Miss Holmes's office. She leans in for another hug before darting out.

"Goodbye, Dasani," Miss Holmes calls after her. "And do your homework."

"Yes!" Dasani shouts over her shoulder.

The child skips down the hallway toward her mother and sisters. The front door swings open, bringing a rush of air. Together, they step out into the cold.

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ANDREA ELLIOTT She wakes to the sound of breathing. The smaller children lie tangled beside her, their chests rising and falling under winter coats and wool blankets. A few feet away, their mother and father sleep near the mop bucket they use as a toilet.

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Our goal, prior to reading Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott, is to give students some experience with budgeting money in a low-income family.

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Urban Ministries of Durham serves over 6000 people every year who struggle with poverty and homelessness. Spent is an interactive game created by McKinney that challenges you to manage your money, raise a child and make it through the month getting paid minimum wage after a stretch of unemployment.

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Fly Away Home by Even Bunting

Handout - literacies in book and literacies in Dasani’s life)

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Somewhere in America
By Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen

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Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen recited a jaw-dropping poem called "Somewhere in America" on the since-canceled The Queen Latifah Show. The young women, part of the L.A.-based nonprofit Get Lit, called to attention the information passed along unintentionally in this country's classrooms. Spoiler alert: it gets pretty real.

The trio of teenage girls start the poem ominously: "The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you won't even remember." From there, they jump into fairly controversial, dark topics like rape, race, gun control, socioeconomics, and censorship. Emotions rage so hard in the three-and-a-half-minute piece, occasionally you can spot a small vocal crack in the performance, but that just lends more validation to the truth they kept spouting. "Somewhere in America," ushers in the hard-to-hear stuff, "Women are killed for rejecting dates, but God forbid I bring my girlfriend to prom." Another: "The preppy kids go thrifting because they think it sounds fun. But we go 'cause that's all we've got money for."

The episode, also guest-featuring feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem, was meant to highlight female empowerment. However, the young voices seemed to lend strength and raise serious questions across the board, regardless of gender identity. Get Lit says they hope to "change the world, one word at a time." We believe, given this performance, that's entirely possible.

Escobedo, McGavin, and Allen have performed their poem in front of thousands of people, including a coveted opening slot for a sold-out John Legend concert at the Hollywood Bowl last fall. They cite real-life, personal experiences and Jay Z's social commentary as inspiration for the piece. "I think poetry is the best way to express emotions..." McGavin says, "It's an amazing way to help people, especially teens." Hear hear.
Image: The Queen Latifah Show

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Belissa Escobedo, Rhiannon McGavin, and Zariya Allen recited a jaw-dropping poem called "Somewhere in America" on the since-canceled The Queen Latifah Show. The young women, part of the L.A.-based nonprofit Get Lit, called to attention the information passed along unintentionally in this country's classrooms. Spoiler alert: it gets pretty real.