By Isabelle Taft and Jolie Jones

It’s 6 a.m. on Monday morning, and senior Michelle* is already awake. Over the next 41 minutes, she will prepare both herself and her 5-year-old brother for school. At 6:41 a.m. she will catch MARTA bus #73 to the Hamilton E. Holmes station. From there, she will get on a train that will take her to the Five Points station by 7:15 a.m. Yet another train will take her to the Midtown station. Finally, MARTA bus #99 will drop her off at Grady by 8 a.m., giving her just enough time to get to her first period class. This afternoon, she will complete the entire process in reverse.

“It’s still dark when I get on the train and dark when I go home,” Michelle said.

Michelle’s challenging commute is a product of a difficult situation: for five years she and her family have been homeless. When Michelle was in the eighth grade, she, her mother and her brother were evicted from their apartment on Boulevard because the family fell behind on rental payments. They began moving from home to home, staying with relatives and friends.

“It was horrible,” Michelle said. “Nothing’s ever your own when you’re in someone else’s house.”

At one point the family stayed with a great aunt, whom Michelle described as bipolar, in a home on Centennial Olympic Park Drive.
“She told my mom she hated me and didn’t want me in her house anymore,” Michelle said.

After the disagreement, a different aunt helped the family find its current residence in a hotel on Fulton Industrial Boulevard in May 2011. Michelle said they pay $210 for each week they spend in the suite, which consists of two rooms with a kitchenette and a bathroom. Michelle’s mother works with a temp agency that provides her with eight to 10 hours of work per week, for total pay of about $70, which she spends on rent and groceries. They live with an aunt who pays the rest of the rent.

“I just make the best out of the worst situation,” Michelle said. “I just feel like God puts you through things he knows you can handle.”

Although living in the hotel can be difficult, Michelle and her family like having their own space. They feel secure because their landlord has never threatened to evict them if they are late on payments and because the hotel employs security guards.

“It’s all about how you act on the residence,” Michelle said. “[My mom] was really paying [the landlord] nightly at one point, and he didn’t have a problem with it because she never made problems.”

Michelle said her family relies on food stamps for groceries, but sometimes they don’t have enough stamps to buy all the food they need.
“Sometimes we went days without eating because we didn’t have food,” Michelle said. “It’s just something you have to get used to.”

As she moved from house to house, Michelle also changed schools frequently. In sixth grade, after being written up for 132 disciplinary offenses, she was kicked out of Inman Middle School. She said she spent the next three years transferring between an alternative school called Forest Hill Academy and Inman, frequently being punished for disciplinary offenses.

After one particularly serious fight at Forest Hill, Michelle said she was expelled and transferred to Therrell High School.

“At Therrell, every time you turn around, there are people who are pregnant or fighting,” Michelle said. “I didn’t feel successful.”

She decided to come to Grady at the beginning of her junior year.

Elesha Williams, a social worker at Grady, said APS is one of the best districts in the state for homeless students because it allows them to enroll in any school in the district. Williams said most students choose to come to Grady.

Williams said a federal law called the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act requires public schools to provide free lunch, school supplies, clothes and transportation for their homeless students. For transportation, Grady offers MARTA Breeze cards to homeless students.

“It’s hard to say [how many homeless students there are], because if the parent doesn’t say they need transportation, I don’t know that they’re here,” Williams said. “We’ve had at least 21 students who need transportation this year.”

At Grady, Michelle has formed close relationships with several faculty members, including Williams and math teacher Eboni Anderson-Johnson, and has had no disciplinary problems.

“Last year and this year have been the most positive years of my life,” Michelle said. “No one has said anything bad about me, and I haven’t had in-school suspension or detention.”

Despite her overall positive experience at Grady, Michelle feels that, in some cases, she hasn’t received the same opportunities as other students.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m not getting enough because of my background or where I stayed,” she said. “My classmates mainly consist of people I grew up with in the hood.”

Michelle is on track to graduate with the class of 2012 in May. She would like to go to a four-year college to get a degree in nursing but worries the resulting debt would be too large for her family to handle. For now, even a two-year school is too expensive. She plans to start working after graduation and go to college as soon as possible.

“I see my mom’s life, and it’s hard,” she said. “I know that to be better I have to graduate high school and get a career.”

Anderson-Johnson, who has gotten to know Michelle while teaching her Math IV, said she is an extremely bright student but sometimes lets her attitude get in the way of her academics.

“She’s not at school all the time, but her performance on quizzes and tests compared to students who are here everyday is exceptional,” Anderson-Johnson said.

Anderson-Johnson believes Michelle will be able to graduate from high school and college.

“If I won the lottery, I would definitely be willing to pay for her to go to school,” Anderson-Johnson said. “She is the kind of student I’d want to help if I could.”