The job was taken. “Let me come down and talk to you anyway,” Jacqueline Hanlon said to Windsor County Youth Services founder Viola Wynne. It was 1996, DVDs and EBay were new, and Windsor County Youth Services (WCYS) had been providing shelter to homeless teenagers at a house on a Ludlow side street for about a year.
Back then, the teenagers the organization served were called runaways. Mostly they were kids who had pushed back too hard against adult authority. They were staying out too late, not going to school, and either running away from their parents’ rules or getting kicked out of their homes for not following them.
Hanlon drove to Ludlow from Rutland. She had returned to Castleton State College in her 30s to become a social worker after raising her family. After a decade at her first job, though, she was doing too much paperwork and too little helping people face-to-face. She was ready to sign up for missionary work in Africa when something stopped her.
One of her daughters had a baby, and she didn’t want to be “grandma in Africa.” It was then that she saw the help-wanted ad for Mountainside House, WCYS’s teen shelter in Ludlow.
It’s hard to say who was the winner in that conversation between Hanlon and Wynne. Hanlon volunteered to be the second adult sleeping in an attic bedroom to watch over the shelter’s eight residents overnight. She did not get paid. A job at Stratton’s daycare let her to make ends meet.
But she loved her work at Mountainside House. “Grassroots work,” she calls it. She got her hands dirty. She helped things grow. When a staff job became open, she got it.
Back then, the goal was to reunite a teen with her or his parents. On the day that happened, the family would meet in the Mountainside House’s living room to sign a contract. The teen would agree to be a little more obedient and the parents would agree to be a little less strict.
The program doesn’t see teenagers like that anymore.
The attic room where Hanlon once slept is now part of a transitional living apartment for young men between the ages 16 and 22. (State law says homeless teenagers over 16 must learn to live on their own.) The girls’ residence is now down the highway in Proctorsville, with its own transitional living apartment. Between the two buildings, the organization houses up to 12 teens and typically has five staff members on duty.
It’s the only shelter dedicated to teens in the state.
About 120 teenagers find shelter with WCYS each year, Hanlon says. Statewide, the number of teens seeking shelter has remained steady at 850 to 1,000 for the last five years, says Calvin Smith, director of the Montpelier-based Vermont Coalition of Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs. Most of those are sheltered temporarily in host homes, he says. Of course, no one knows the number of homeless teenagers who never come into the system.
And teens will avoid the system whenever they can, Hanlon says. At Mountainside House, there are chores, a shower and laundry schedule, and lights out at 10 PM. There’s no drinking, no drugs and no smoking.
These rules mean that teens do not come to the shelter until they have used up every other possibility. They have slept on their friends’ couches until their friends’ parents have had enough. They have spent summers in campgrounds.
These days, though, teens have one more, potentially devastating, option, Hanlon says: the state’s drug culture.
The drug culture these homeless teens are embraced by is far harsher than the Volkswagen bus piled with Grateful Dead heads or even the safety-pin pierced punk rocker selling pot behind the middle school of decades past.
What’s strikingly different today, Hanlon says, is the involvement of adults and the life-long addictions. One family may have two generations of addicts or dealers. The children of addicts grow up traumatized. Teenagers on the street find a ready market for what they have to offer. Boys end up as dealers, Hanlon says. Girls prostitute themselves for drugs.
Today, when a teen is ready to leave Mountainside House, a meeting takes place in the house director’s sunny office. It involves assessments, referrals and plans for continued support services for the parents as well as the teen. Sometimes, Hanlon says, the family can’t be reunited. That’s not necessarily a failure.
She recalls the comforting success story of a girl who went from the shelter to job training and college, but never lived with her family again. It was a triumph when she spent Thanksgiving with them.
The kids who haunt Hanlon are the ones who never get another chance. They are sentenced to prison, die in car accidents, or take their own lives.
Today, Hanlon is the executive director of WCYS, where she has worked for 19 years. She’s the one who gets the phone calls from people with a mission to make a difference in the lives of teenagers.
“It takes a special personality,” Hanlon says. “You have to love teenagers, and I do. Every kid who comes here has a story that is really sad or they wouldn’t be here. You have to be able to let it go.”
Hanlon has let go of over 2,000 kids who have found shelter with WCYS since she spent her first night in that attic bedroom. And it’s still hard to say who was the bigger winner.
(This article and these photos are protected under copyright. Please contact Madeline Bodin for republication information.)
