As a reward for good behavior, the Wai'anae first-grader had his pick of merchandise from the school store.

There were colorful stickers, decorated pencils, small toys and an assortment of other flashy items most 6-year-olds would grab in an instant.

This one chose a can of tuna.

"That really put into perspective what these children must go through," said Paul Kepka, the boy's teacher last year.

Just the fact that Kamaile Elementary School offers canned food as a choice at its campus store underscores the difficulties a growing number of Wai'anae Coast students face today in juggling homelessness and the responsibilities of being a student.

For them, eating a decent meal, taking a hot shower, finding clean clothes or getting a good night's sleep can be just as elusive as finding a quiet, comfortable place to study.

"When your main focus in life is survival-type needs, obviously school's not going to be your first priority," Kepka said.

Many of the issues homeless students face are incomprehensible to those who have the essentials of a secure place to sleep every night, much less the tools for a good education.

Josephine Lopez, a fourth-grader at Makaha Elementary School, got the typical beginning-of-the-year assignment to draw a map of her home.

She lives in a tent.

Not sure what to do, Josephine, 8, ended up drawing a rectangle for each sleeping tent in her family encampment and labeled them bedrooms. She drew a larger rectangle for where her family erected a large tarp and labeled that the living room. She sketched a walkway leading to what she labeled her home's bathroom. It is the public restroom at Kea'au Beach Park.

The map didn't indicate she lives on the beach.

"I left that up to her," said her mother, Caroline Soaladaob.

BIGGER CHALLENGES

Even as homeless students like Josephine try to make the best of a lousy situation, the coast's 11 schools face an even larger challenge.

Those institutions have long had to deal with the widespread poverty that has contributed to the region's high jobless rates, serious health issues and other social indicators of a community in distress. That poverty and its far-reaching effects help explain why nine of the 11 schools have failed to meet the federal government's annual progress benchmarks and are being restructured.

But the recent surge in homelessness has added a new set of challenges for the schools at a time when they already are under intense pressure to improve performances.

Students are showing up hungry, tired, sick, dirty or generally ill-prepared to hit the books.

"They literally walk out of the bushes and from under the bridges to come to school," said Pua Gomes, parent community coordinator at Kamaile, one of the coast schools most affected by the homeless crisis.

One boy came to school in clothes so dirty and smelly that teachers found him lying on the ground, face down and embarrassed, refusing to budge. He eventually was coaxed to get up, and the Kamaile staff got him cleaned and gave him a pair of new shorts and a T-shirt that had been donated to the school.

No one knows for sure how many homeless students are attending the coast schools, and some schools are affected much more than others.

The Department of Education's most recent count from May totaled 261 homeless students along the coast.

But Judy Tonda, the agency's resource teacher for homeless concerns, acknowledges that the number vastly understates the problem, partly because it is dated, doesn't include the "hidden homeless" (those living in other people's homes) and doesn't reflect the many students who are reluctant to acknowledge being homeless.

Since the May count, Tonda said, the homeless population has surged, and she is becoming increasingly concerned about how the schools are going to handle the growing numbers.

"I'm getting worried the more I'm hearing about it," she said.

Kamaile Elementary, with an enrollment of about 650, is a good example.

Last academic year, the school estimated that 30 percent of its student population was homeless, mostly the hidden kind. The first-grader who took home the can of tuna was in that category.

This year, Kamaile staffers estimate the homeless population has swelled to about 60 percent, double last year's total. Again, the vast majority are the hidden homeless.

Gomes, the parent-community coordinator, said she's never seen the problem as bad as it is today.

'SCHOOLS ARE A HAVEN'

Whether the kids live at the beach, in abandoned vehicles, under bridges or crowded into houses with multiple families, their environments are hardly ideal for learning.

In the more crowded encampments, distractions abound, such as arguing couples, barking dogs and pesky red ants and rats. The wind, rain and heat don't help.

On the beaches, drugs and alcohol are prevalent, according to healthcare providers who treat the homeless. A child's trip to the bathroom — even in the middle of the day — can be interrupted by ice addicts smoking in the toilet stalls.

Under conditions like these, schools become places of refuge, where students can temporarily escape the grittiness of their everyday world.

"For many of these homeless kids, schools are a haven," said Levi Chang, principal of Nanakuli High and Intermediate School, where roughly half the students don't have working home phone numbers and three-quarters don't have home computers.

Chang said only 16 of the school's 1,200 students were identified as homeless in a recent count, but he acknowledged the actual number is likely higher. "When they get this age, they don't say anything," he said.

Most of the homeless students, Chang and others believe, are at the elementary schools.

The schools are dealing with the homeless problem without any extra funds from the state. That puts additional financial pressure on the schools, according to Hawaii State Teachers Association President Roger Takabayashi.

The education department, with roughly 21,000 employees and a $2 billion-plus annual budget, devotes more than $250,000 — all of it federal funds — each year to Tonda's office, which deals specifically with homeless issues. Tonda is the only person assigned exclusively to the homeless situation, and none of the money from her office goes directly to the schools.

Last year, Tonda's office purchased close to $30,000 worth of school supplies and distributed them to homeless shelters and service agencies statewide. It also provides part-time teachers to help students with homework at transitional shelters and supplies city bus passes to Oa'hu homeless students who can't get to their schools on a regular school bus, according to Tonda.

Mamo Carreira, the complex area superintendent who oversees seven Wai'anae schools, said funding is provided to schools to ensure, among other things, that students are fed and can get help with class work. But that money, which includes funding linked to student poverty levels, can't be spent on personal items, Carreira said.

Addressing the personal needs of students who lack even basic things is more of a societal issue, she added. "It sounds like that's a bigger problem than only education can take care of," Carreira said.

SOURCES OF HELP

Without extra resources to deal with the homeless, teachers, staff and parents are turning to the community, nonprofit groups and businesses for donations. They also are dipping into their own pockets to help purchase food, clothing, shampoo, toothbrushes and other essentials — all of which can be tapped without having to navigate a time-consuming bureaucratic process.

Getting help quickly to the most needy students is critical, educators say, otherwise the students tend to return to their temporary quarters and may not show up at school again for days or weeks.

Some school-age homeless children don't go to class on a regular basis anyway. For the ones who do, just getting homework done can be an ordeal.

Jamal Lopez, 12, Josephine's brother, says he gets home from Wai'anae Intermediate School around 2:30 p.m., the hottest part of the day.

By then, the tents in his family's encampment are like ovens. Flies usually are everywhere. Kids are running around.

"It's hard to concentrate," said Jamal, a seventh-grader, on a sweltering afternoon recently as swarms of flies buzzed about. "You don't feel like doing your homework because it's so hot. But you can't wait too long or nighttime comes."

Nightfall presents its own set of difficulties. One is lack of adequate lighting. Some children do homework on the hood of cars parked under street lights.

The Lopez family has lanterns, but that light isn't suitable for studying. One of Jamal's brothers complains of dizziness if he reads under those conditions.

"To do homework in this tent is ridiculous," said Soaladaob, Jamal's mother. "It's real hard on my kids."

Soaladaob, her husband and their nine children have been on the beach since early August, shortly after the new school year began. They're trying to get off the beach, but their search for an affordable rental so far has been unsuccessful.

EXTRA MEASURES

To deal with the homeless problem, some coast schools have taken extra measures in hopes of minimizing the impact in the classroom.

Kamaile used donations to purchase a washer and dryer so any student who shows up with soiled clothes can get them cleaned. It allows students to shower when they arrive in the morning. The school store has a section with basic food items, such as canned tuna.

Kamaile also has obtained waivers from parents so that if a child arrives at school with 'uku the school can wash the lice out of the student's hair using a mix of shampoo and Listerine. Normally, such students would be sent home for treatment. But that practice doesn't work well if a school has a large homeless population. Kamaile's anti-'uku program includes monthly checks of the students' heads.

If teachers or counselors at Kamaile and other coast schools need to contact a parent of a homeless child, they usually have to walk the beaches or venture into other parts of the region to locate the parent.

Randall Miura, principal at Leihoku Elementary School in Wai'anae, recalled the time he took a sick little girl to her home deep in a valley.

She lived with her family in a shacklike structure that basically was patches of plyboard attached to some wood planks. A large piece of clothlike material hung over the entryway, and the dirt was their floor.

It was sad, Miura said, but many of the homeless parents are doing the best they can, given the circumstances, to try to provide for their children.

"My experience with each of these families is they're trying their hardest to take care of their kids," he said. "Sometimes, you've got to give the kids credit for just being in school."

Because the parents sometimes have their own personal problems to deal with, teachers often become surrogate parents or close friends of the homeless students.

These faculty members give up their sack lunches if a homeless child doesn't bring one for a field trip or they cover the cost of going on the field trip if the student has no money.

"Our teachers out here are not only educators," Miura said. "They become social workers, counselors, advocates for the kids ... They end up handling the full spectrum of childcare."

One of the biggest homeless-related challenges faced by the schools deals with student turnover. Some homeless families tend to move frequently, going from one place to another because of job changes, police sweeps along the beaches or other factors.

At Kamaile, student turnover — counting when a student enrolls or leaves during the school year — has averaged more than 300 in recent years, or close to half its enrollment. Two years ago it topped 500.

Myron Brumaghim, principal at Nanaikapono Elementary School, recalled one child last year who enrolled in three different schools in three months because the student was placed in different foster homes.

Each time a student moves, which requires having to adjust to a new school, teacher and classmates, the child's education typically is set back four to six months, according to Tonda, the resource teacher for homeless concerns.

If a student moves several times in a school year, "you don't make any academic progress," she said.

Teacher turnover also is an issue along the coast, presenting yet another challenge to a school system straining to deal with the homeless situation.

Last academic year, the two coast school complexes — Nanakuli and Wai'anae — had the highest and third-highest teacher-turnover rates, respectively, in the state, just as the ranks of homeless were surging in that part of O'ahu.

The time and resources principals have to spend to train replacements are time and resources they can't devote to other parts of their operations.

SIGNS OF PROGRESS

Despite the huge challenges the schools face to boost performance levels of all students, including the homeless, encouraging signs of academic progress have surfaced here and there, even if the overall picture remains dismal.

At Kamaile, for instance, the percentage of third- and fifth-graders scoring below average in math and reading in the Stanford Achievement Test fell this year, compared with two years ago.

At Nanakuli High, the graduation rate this year hit 66 percent, compared with the high 50s in recent years.

Such progress was made even as the population of homeless students along the coast increased.

The key to long-term solutions not only for the homeless problem but for the many other social ills plaguing the community involves tackling the underlying poverty that links them all — and the key to that is the kids, according to those who work with Wai'anae's low-income population.

What's needed, they say, is a strong economic base that creates decent jobs along the coast, and students who embrace education as a ticket to advancement. Students need to develop a sense of hope and possibility, so they can see beyond the homelessness, joblessness, substance abuse and poverty all around them. Only then, according to the advocates, will change be lasting.

To underscore that point, Gomes, the Kamaile staff member, told the story of a group of mostly homeless students she taught in an after-school dance program. They became so proficient that the group was featured in two television programs and an international magazine published in Japan.

"Once given a chance," Gomes said, "these kids can soar."

Reach Rob Perez at rperez@honoluluadvertiser.com.