LEARNING ON THE MOVE KIDS GET PERSONALIZED ATTENTION.Byline: David R. Baker Staff Writer NORTH HOLLYWOOD - For children at the Sydney M. Irmas Transitional Living Transitional Living for Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Transitional living is a restructuring of an old concept. The early centers for living were known as Halfway or Three-Quarter houses and usually were in existence for the provision of shelter for people who were Center, home is temporary, and so is school. Families rarely stay more than six months at the North Hollywood homeless shelter Homeless shelters are temporary residences for homeless people. Usually located in urban neighborhoods, they are similar to emergency shelters. The primary difference is that homeless shelters are usually open to anyone, without regard to the reason for need. . Their children switch schools or just drop out, whenever they move. So on Thursday, a group dedicated to tutoring homeless children opened a privately funded classroom at the Irmas center that will provide a base for tutors give the center's children something constructive to do with their evenings. ``This ain't the Ritz Ritz elegant and luxurious hotel opened in Paris in 1898 by César Ritz; hence, ‘ritzy, putting on the ritz.’ [Fr. Hist.: Wentworth, 429] See : Luxury ,'' said Bill Davis For the artist, animator, creative director, see . For the baseball player, see .
The group, which tutors about 1,000 children a year at 38 shelters throughout Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. County, hopes to use the North Hollywood classroom as a model for other shelters. The entire project - complete with five IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) computers laden with programs - cost just $2,500. Davis said more such classrooms are needed to help what he said is a growing number of homeless children. The high cost of housing in Los Angeles has forced many families to constantly shift from place to place. ``There is no `low-cost' anymore,'' said School on Wheels volunteer Laine Altman. School on Wheels volunteers said the center has already been visited by representatives of a homeless shelter in Pasadena interested in creating a similar program. Davis said tutoring outside of school helps provide continuity for the children and gives them the one-on-one attention they need. ``The tutoring is so important, because a lot of these kids have been to a half-dozen schools,'' he said. ``They need a lot of remedial REMEDIAL. That which affords a remedy; as, a remedial statute, or one which is made to supply some defects or abridge some superfluities of the common law. 1 131. Com. 86. The term remedial statute is also applied to those acts which give a new remedy. Esp. Pen. Act. 1. work, and they have low selmage.'' School on Wheels tries to tutor children as they move between homes. Children receive an 800 phone number allowing them to contact the group and arrange for tutoring sessions wherever they are. Children testing out the computers Thursday said they had changed schools several times. Some couldn't name all the schools they had attended. Keydy Amaya, 8, had already left the center, moving with her family to Hollywood. She was back to visit a friend, she said. Until the move, several weeks ago, Keydy had been in the third grade at Arminta Street School. Now, she wasn't sure where she would be going to school. ``I've been moving a lot,'' she said, deftly deft adj. deft·er, deft·est Quick and skillful; adroit. See Synonyms at dexterous. [Middle English, gentle, humble, variant of dafte, foolish; see daft. assembling brightly colored shapes on a computer's graphics program. Changing schools, she said, was hard. ``We'll have to study the same stuff over again,'' she said. School on Wheels volunteers say they can't mend all the damage constant moving causes. But they can provide a stable influence in the children's lives, working with them as they shift from one neighborhood to another. And they can try to keep them focused on learning while their lives change. The center is ``a place where the tutors and the kids can feel comfortable,'' Davis said. CAPTION(S): photo Photo: From left, Maricruz Arvisio, Joseline Rodriguez and Silvina Hernani work on computers thanks to the School on Wheels. Phil McCarten/Staff Photographer |
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