Agnes Stevens

On May 10, 1989, Agnes Stevens found home. She was 54 at the time--and had lived in many places. But she had never before felt she truly belonged in a particular spot, she says. Her new place--a double-wide mobile home just a few steps from Paradise Cove, where white sands kiss the Pacific--might seem the perfect spot to wind down a 30-year elementary school teaching career.

On May 10, 1989, Agnes Stevens found home. She was 54 at the time--and had lived in many places. But she had never before felt she truly belonged in a particular spot, she says. Her new place--a double-wide mobile home just a few steps from Paradise Cove, where white sands kiss the Pacific--might seem the perfect spot to wind down a 30-year elementary school teaching career.

A convicted slumlord has been sentenced to contribute $5,000 to School on Wheels Inc., a nonprofit program that provides mobile educational services to children of homeless familes. The contribution is part of more than $9,000 in fines and costs that Raymond Garcen, 48, will have to pay after being convicted on eight violations of housing, building and safety codes at the two-story, 16-unit apartment building he owns at 1674 W. 12th St. in Pico-Union.

It's 6:30 in the evening and most children are hunched over textbooks struggling to get their homework done. They have pens and pencils, notebooks and personal computers, and mom and dad nearby to help out. But for thousands of homeless children in Los Angeles County, the nightly homework ritual is compounded by constant moving, few school supplies and, more often than not, no one to turn to for help.

Nine-year-old Mistyanne Degele has spent the past year moving from one homeless shelter to another and from school to school. Shortly after Misty, her mother, her stepfather and two siblings became homeless in October 1997, her grades dropped. Misty, who had been a good student, was doing poorly. Now she is repeating the third grade. "It broke my heart to see [her grades]," said her mother, Christina Plymesser. But Misty's low reading scores were even more disconcerting.

IF POVERTY AND THE DISSOLUTION THAT ATTENDS IT HAVE A SMELL, it's equal parts dust and must, with a hint of organic sourness from clothes left on bodies for too long. It seems to cry for windows to be flung open, for soap. This smell dogs the children of the Ford Hotel. The Ford is primarily a transitional residence for homeless families on skid row east of downtown. Its apartments are tiny and its toilets communal.

A handwritten cardboard sign that reads "School on Wheels will be here Today" rests in her car's rear window. The seats are covered with books, toys, notebooks, stacks of paper and plastic foam cups. Retired elementary school teacher Agnes Stevens apologizes for the mess. But she has more important concerns. In the past year she has organized School on Wheels, a group of 56 volunteers who visit three Westside homeless shelters to tutor students.

Among the good people accomplishing good things for good causes in recent weeks: Audrey Irmas and Harry T. McMahon were honored by Bet Tzedek at its 26th annual dinner. Bet Tzedek, which means "House of Justice" in Hebrew, is a nonprofit law office that defends the indigent, elderly and disabled free of charge. More than $2 million was raised at the Century Plaza Hotel event.

In a cramped room of the Ford Hotel the Arburtha children one by one rouse themselves for another day of school. At 5:45 a.m., 16-year-old Jamaica is escorted through the dawn darkness by her mother, Grace, past the barred and gated lobby to a bus stop a block away. Later, sister Ankara, 14, sleepy-eyed brother Franklin, 13, and sister Egypt, 11, take the small elevator from the family's fifth-floor quarters.

First Melinda Holquin noticed how new students would appear in her classroom one week and disappear the next. Then she noticed how several unrelated students gave the same home address. Some came to school without shoes. Holquin is a first-grade teacher, not a detective. But it did not take Sherlock Holmes to ferret out the facts: A homeless shelter had opened near Coeur d'Alene Elementary.

November was unseasonably warm. In thousands of Los Angeles classrooms decorated with paper cutout turkeys, children sweated it out in classrooms that, by noontime, felt like furnaces. With the Los Angeles Unified School District dealing with budget cuts of more than a quarter of a billion dollars, air conditioning, like adequate supplies of chalk and textbooks, had become a luxury. Around the Coke machines in their lounges, teachers were talking about another strike, the second in 2 1/2 years.