Day care for homeless kids to close

Jake Spavins, director of the Kids Center at St. Vincent de Paul’s First Place Family Development Center in south Eugene, remembers the quote well. That’s because his teacher at the preschool that provides services to homeless and low-income children and their families, wrote it down.

“Once upon a time, everybody loved me,” the boy said during a presentation to his teacher on Sept. 3, 2009, after a summer at the preschool. “They took pictures of me. They colored with me. They enjoyed the sun with me. Everybody smelled flowers with me. Everybody ‘adventure rocks’ with me. Everybody holds hands with me. The end! That’s the whole thing.”

Not bad for a 5-year-old.

“To me, that captures what we did here,” Spavins said Friday. “That’s the kind of thing a kid will take with him for the rest of his life.”

But the youngsters whose parents have been bringing them to the Kids Center on Mondays through Fridays will have to find another place, if there is one, after June 3. The two main funding sources that have kept the preschool afloat since it opened in 2007 have dried up.

First Place, which supports families in transition because of homelessness, job loss, health issues and other problems, lost its United Way funding last fall, about a $36,000 hit, Spavins said. And its funding from the Lane County Human Services Commission this spring was less than usual, said William Wise, director of the First Place shelter.

In past years, the shelter often received more than $200,000 in funding from the county, which pools state and federal dollars with local dollars for human services agencies in the county. This year, the shelter was given $164,000, Wise said. Enough funding from the county would have kept the preschool going, Spavins said. But without it, the school will close after June 3, and he’s out of a job.

Spavins launched the Kids Center in 2007 during his final year in his early childhood intervention masters program at the University of Oregon. He wanted to create a culture with a therapeutically oriented preschool where the lives of less-fortunate children could be “celebrated,” and believes he has accomplished that.

“We’ve built a lot of good relationships with kids and helped them feel good about themselves,” Spavins said. “I want all the kids at First Place to feel like rock stars. They feel awesome, and you can see that in the way they light up.”

Children at the preschool can get three meals a day, take naps and do activities.

Spavins estimates 200 children have been a part of the preschool since it began, and at least 100 volunteers have lent a hand.

The program also has partnered with local Head Start programs, the federal education and health program for low-income families, to get children from emotionally difficult situations ready for kindergarten in public schools, Spavins said. Some of the children the preschool served will be able to go to other area Head Start programs, Spavins said, but others will have nowhere to go.

Diane Nilan, a documentary filmmaker from Illinois, spent a day last week shooting film at the Kids Center for a documentary called “Littlest Nomads,” about the plight of homeless children. She was so outraged when she heard the preschool was closing, she marched down to Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy’s office. Someone at City Hall told Nilan there was nothing that could be done, Nilan said Friday by phone from Seattle, where she is screening another documentary about homeless women.

So Nilan started an online petition addressed to Piercy. As of Friday, 176 people had signed it.

“I just couldn’t not respond in some way,” Nilan said. “We need to be really uncomfortable when something like this happens.”Piercy, who serves on the county Human Services Commission, said she does not blame Nilan for starting the petition and wishes there was something she could do. But the reality is that the commission had to cut services by about $300,000 to several area nonprofits this year, Piercy said.

“I think First Place plays a very important role in our shelter system,” Piercy said. “I feel very sad that we have $300,000 less to give from our Human Services Commission. If everyone who signed that petition gave something (to the shelter), that would go a long ways.”