Jessika Miller has a cherubic face, a sandy bob haircut and a toothy grin that in many ways make her a poster child for kindergarten cuteness.
Through the first semester of her school career, she has also shown herself to be a pretty good student.
Jessika knew how to write her name clearly and color neatly within the lines on the first day of school, skills some of her classmates are still learning. In those early weeks at Indianapolis Public School 61, while others were struggling with new routines, Jessika was a tiny island of calm, more interested in pulling books from the shelf to read at her desk than the rebellions being staged around her.
And she kept it up the entire first semester. Except for a special occasion last week, she’s had perfect attendance.
In sum, she’s been as steady as they come — which is especially amazing for a child who is, technically speaking, homeless.
Jessika Miller and her family are not living on the streets. Nor do they spend nights in their minivan — at least not yet. But Jessika, her father, her mother, her 7-year-old brother and her two preschool sisters are living in a tiny $150-a-week motel room.
It is their fourth home in the past six months — a chapter in their lives that has seen Jessika’s father trade a used truck for a month in a rental house, that saw the family spend two months in the home of a friend.
The Millers’ current stint at the Motor 8 Inn on North Shadeland Avenue is a week-to-week proposition. It depends on Jessika’s dad picking up handyman jobs or on the generosity of friends, who have helped repeatedly in a pinch.
But it is an unstable situation that amounts to what experts call the “hidden homeless”: people who aren’t on the streets or in shelters but who stay in motels until the money runs out, or with friends for short periods. In the end, many emerge among the visible homeless living in the shelters.
At School 61, where Jessika is a kindergartner and her brother, Jacob, is a first-grader, educating children who are homeless is part of the job. Last year, there were nearly 3,000 children across Marion County who, like the Miller kids, were homeless.
Homeless children are a wild card in the educational equation schools face each day. The uncertainty of where home is, or where it will be, can leave children stressed out and exhausted. It can prompt behavioral outbursts.
It also can quickly push a child’s education to the back burner for parents more focused on just trying to keep a roof over their heads. Homework and conduct reports that get sent home with the children get lost. Their attendance may suffer. So, too, might their focus, energy and enthusiasm toward schoolwork.
“Just the instability and stress that these children face are unlike what most of us imagine,” said Kate Hussey, vice president of programs for School on Wheels, a nonprofit group that provides tutoring and other services to homeless children.
According to the organization, homeless children are twice as likely to repeat a grade in school. They also are four times more likely to have a learning disability.
Sometimes, though, teachers say evidence that a child’s family is on the brink isn’t quite so obvious.
The Miller children come to school each day with clean clothes, clean faces and combed hair. Jessika’s daily conduct reports come back signed by her mother each day. Her parents, Josh and Jennifer, come to every school function, whether it’s a parent-teacher meeting or the recent Christmas concert.
Shirley Chappell, who is Jessika’s teacher, gives the Millers credit for keeping their children focused on school despite everything going on. She wasn’t expecting them to come up with the $3 for a fall field trip to an apple orchard, but Josh brought in the money.
No matter what’s going on, Jennifer said, school is a priority. When the kids walk through the door to the family’s room at the motel, she asks for their backpacks so she can search for homework. As for perfect attendance, Josh said, “Getting to school on time ain’t nothing. It just takes getting up. But it’s really important.”
Still, the Millers and their children have had a couple of bumps in recent weeks.
As they waited on the curb for someone to help move their things from their last home, someone reported to Child Protective Services that they had no place to live. The family already had paid for a week at the Motor 8, but they still were swept into the vortex of the child protection net. A caseworker came to their motel and questioned Jacob and Jessika.
Whether it was just coincidence or the onset of stress over the move, the very next day Jessika earned her first caution light on her daily red-yellow-green behavior report. Her brother had his worst week as a first-grader.
The CPS case was soon closed, partly because the children’s teachers offered letters describing their stellar attendance and academic records. But it was the low point in an odyssey that began in the spring, when the landlord of the home where they were living decided to get out of the rental business.
When the Millers moved into the Motor 8 last month, Jessika and her siblings did what most kids do when entering a motel on vacation: they bounced on the beds and declared it the greatest place ever. For their parents, the room was a roof over the family’s head with all the essentials — heat, electricity, running water, two full-size beds, a bathroom, a small fridge and a TV.
They’ve tried to make it more livable by bringing in a cooler to store extra food, baby beds for the two youngest children and an electric griddle and a toaster oven for warm meals.
Jennifer gave it some homey touches with family photos, a rug on the floor, a calendar and the kids’ papers from school on the wall. With Christmas coming, they’ve hung stockings on the wall for everyone, put a Nativity set on the dresser and, next to the TV, set up what may be the world’s smallest Christmas tree.
Ask Jessika what she thinks of her home and she simply says, “Great.”
When they get home from school, Jessika and Jacob dive into a mini-fridge and pull out a Lunchable for a snack, or gulp down some chocolate milk. Then they flop on one of the beds and do their homework, with Jennifer supervising. They cook meals on the griddle (Josh made hot ham and egg sandwiches on a recent night). And when the clothes are dirty, Jennifer washes them in the motel’s coin laundry.
As adequate as it sounds, it’s a tight space for six people — even if four of them are little ones. Jillian, who is 13 months old, cruises around the edge of the two beds while Jencyn, who is 2, runs sprints back and forth across the stretch of carpet from the door to the bathroom sink.
There’s no playground nearby, so the most exercise that Jessika and Jacob get is during school recess. In the past month, their teachers have noticed that they have been a bit antsy, a bit wiggly. But since the CPS threat blew over, things have settled down.
Josh, a jack-of-all-trades who has done masonry work, built houses, worked on cars and managed a pizza store, is doing handyman work until he can find a steady job. He’s interviewed at several places, but his criminal record — including cashing a forged check — hasn’t helped the cause. Jennifer worked in medical offices before going to college. A year and a half in, after her father’s death, she dropped out. Soon she and Josh started their family. Lately, she has applied for jobs at drugstores and banks and nearly every fast food joint up and down Shadeland — to no avail.
Their plan is to stay at the motel until they can find steady work and put aside enough money to move into a rental home. Spending $600 a month on a motel room isn’t ideal, they admit. But it’s a roof, and it includes their utilities. They don’t want to venture out only to fall flat and wind up scrounging again for a place to stay.
Michael Hurst, program director for the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, said this story is a familiar one. Losing a job or being unable to get a job is the No. 1 cause of homelessness — far beyond the drug and alcohol abuse that most people imagine as a leading cause. The unusual thing, in this case, is the two-parent family. In most cases, homeless families are led by single parents.
Josh and Jennifer have been together for 10 years, but they got married only in October, in part because they thought it would be necessary for the family to stay together should space in a family homeless shelter open up.
For now, the motel room — tight as it is — is home.
“We are all together. We are all warm and fed and clean,” Jennifer said. “I’d say there’s more good than bad.”
Despite everything, Jessika finished her first semester of school strong.
At the school’s holiday program, she and the other kindergartners donned Santa hats and were armed with jingle bells, elevating their cuteness and noise-making to new heights. And their performance was a smash.
She aced her first unit test (yes, testing has infiltrated kindergarten). And she seems at home in her classroom. She says she likes school, likes dinosaur books and likes connect-the-dots pages. Recess and gym are her favorite subjects, which put her in line with 98 percent of the kindergarten population.
Her perfect attendance mark survived until Wednesday, when a police charity that serves needy children treated her and her brother to an early Christmas — a connection facilitated by School 61. In lieu of school, Jessika and Jacob were treated to breakfast, taken for a ride in a police car and outfitted with new shoes and clothes. It culminated with a visit to Santa, who somehow knew what they wanted for Christmas.
It will be a light Christmas this year, but not as light as it might have been.
Whether it is a Christmas Jessika long remembers — the Christmas the family spent at the Motor 8 Inn with her stockings on the wall above her bed — isn’t clear.
But it’s another Christmas that their family remains together.
“That’s my main goal every day — just keeping the six of us together,” her mother said. “I really don’t go much further than that.”
Helping homeless families
A number of nonprofit groups serve homeless families in Indianapolis. Here’s a look.
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