Volunteers brave the cold for homeless students

With the thermometer reading 19 degrees and a fresh coat of snow outside, Sunday morning was perfect for curling up in bed just a little longer. But when you don’t have bed or a home to stay warm inside, a morning like that has a different feeling.

For the more than 80 volunteers who spent the night outside St. Peter Lutheran Church Saturday until Sunday, they got a chance to understand the hardships faced by homeless high school students in the Flathead Valley.

Participants spent the night sleeping in tents, sleeping bags, cars and cardboard boxes for Sparrow’s Nest of Northwest Montana’s “When the Night Comes” fundraiser. Those who participated were sponsored by donors, with each person trying to raise $100, and cash donations were also accepted. Sparrow’s Nest is a nonprofit organization based in Kalispell that has a home for homeless high school students in Whitefish.

Jerramy Dear-Ruel, executive director of Sparrow’s Nest, said he and others did their best to fight off the cold during the night. This was Dear-Ruel’s first time participating in the third annual event, which has been previously been held in Kalispell.

“We stayed warm, relatively, through the night,” he said. “At least my tent was warm.”

While participants could go home after and catch up on sleep in their own homes, this isn’t an option homeless students have, Linda Kaps, vice-chair of the Sparrow’s Nest board, said.

“I was warm, but it’s miserable and I was in my car. It’s just uncomfortable and hard,” she said. “At the end of the day the kids get up and go to school and teachers are asking why they’re sleeping in class. Well, that’s why.”

Marcia Bumke, board chair, agreed.

“We all get to go home and get a shower and go warm up some place. There’s no way to describe it or explain it until you’ve actually tried to sleep, and then you have to get up,” she said.

The event began at 7 p.m. the night before and lasted until 7 a.m. the next day. Though everybody who was able to sleep was up earlier than 7 a.m. A quick breakfast was offered at the church before everyone began packing up their tents and sleeping bags and headed home. Twelve people participated in the event’s first year, and it has continued to gain popularity since. Last year 54 people participated and about 80 joined this year.

More than 318 homeless students were under the age of 18 in 2013, or 30 percent of the total homeless population in the valley, according to a study done by Flathead Homelessness Interagency Resource and Education.

As a teacher at Columbia Falls High School, where more than 30 kids are homeless or struggling, Kaps said help is often hard to give because the students avoid showing any indication of what’s really going on.

“They don’t self identify. They’re really good at keeping it undercover,” she said.

Sparrow’s Nest recently opened a home in Whitefish for five homeless students, and a similar project is in the works for Kalispell. While there’s no way to address the needs of every student in the Valley, Kaps said events like “When the Night Comes” help to spread awareness of the issue, especially to their friends and classmates at school.

“They’ll go home and crawl into their beds, and then two or three days from now they’re going to be thinking, ‘Wow, this is a realistic thing for some of my friends, for some kids in my school. This is what they’re doing.’ And they’ll process it and they’ll get a different perspective. It does create an awareness,” she said.

For more information on Sparrow’s Nest, visit sparrowsnestnwmt.wordpress.com or call 406-309-5196.