Cda Shelter Rules: No Boys Allowed Rule Leaves Homeless Teens With Nowhere To Go

Go away. Take care of yourself.

That’s Coeur d’Alene’s message to homeless teenage boys.

It doesn’t matter if they’re altar boys still glowing from an inspirational morning at church. If they’re male teenagers, they’re not welcome at most shelters.

“Our license doesn’t allow us to co-mingle the genders after the age of 14,” said Tinka Schaffer, director of Children’s Village. The village shelters children who, for any number of reasons, can’t live at home for awhile.

“A lot of boys have figured out how to use the streets, network with other homeless boys, rent apartments together,” she said.

Once boys reach adolescence, they’re often man-size, dealing with hormones and unpredictable - a potentially explosive combination most shelter managers aren’t prepared to handle.

No one knows how many boys end up on their own in Coeur d’Alene, or where they go. Shelters turn away a few now and then. Some end up in foster care. What happens with the rest is a mystery that shelter operators would like solved.

Schaffer said families used to call the village to ask for temporary shelter for their sons. But word got out the village couldn’t help and the calls stopped.

Anchor House is a group home that employs people trained to work directly with teen boys. But it’s typically for boys in trouble who have gone through the court system. It doesn’t offer emergency shelter care, said director Paula Neils.

“There is a need for emergency shelter for those boys, but who’s going to pay for it?” she said.

Shelter managers are sympathetic, but adamant about their rules.

“There’s a conflict between sheltering maturing young men, and women who have been sexually abused and raped by significant others,” said Holladay Sanderson, Women’s Center director.

Only a handful of women with teenage sons seek help each year from the Women’s Center’s secret shelter, she said. Each experience is gut-wrenching. The women may stay, but their sons must go.

“Women are frightened when they come to us, very vulnerable,” Sanderson said. “But sometimes, the mother isn’t willing to split up the family.”

In such cases, Sanderson’s staff helps women find friends or relatives to shelter them. But then, the women’s abusers usually know where to find them, which puts the women in danger as well as the families who shelter them, Sanderson said.

“If you have a really dangerous batterer and a mother with teenage children, no relatives here and no friends - then what do you do?” she said.

No matter how bad the situation, the Women’s Center won’t bend its ban on teenage boys, she said.

Their presence threatens the battered women, and studies show that boys who grow up in a violent home often become abusive, she said.

When boys come to Children’s Village needing emergency shelter, Schaffer often calls the police. She can offer shelter during the day, but no beds overnight.

Only the police can decide that a boy needs emergency shelter. Usually, the boy must be in danger, but Schaffer has convinced officers that homelessness is a danger.

Then the state Department of Health and Welfare is called and a foster home is found.

But foster homes for older boys aren’t easy to find, said Dennis Coe, the state worker who oversees foster care licensing in the five northern counties.

Teenage boys “are difficult to manage,” he said.

The paucity of foster homes means that a boy may be sent dozens of miles from his family, school, community.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society will shelter boys as long as they’re with their family - and there is room. If they’re on their own, they must be 18 to stay there, said shelter director Michal Critchfield.

All shelter operators agree that something is needed for teenage boys. But not all agree that the boys are trouble.

“I’m sure someplace along the line there was a problem, but no one has been able to tell me an actual incident,” said Sue Smith, who manages a small emergency shelter for battered women in Post Falls.

In the year the Post Falls shelter has operated, Smith has accepted a woman with teenage sons. She said she also has counseled a woman who had to put her two sons in foster care while she stayed in Coeur d’Alene’s shelter.

“I think it’s just terrible to have to turn women away or say, ‘You can come but not your children,”’ Smith said. “These women already are in crisis.”

Shelter managers agree that Coeur d’Alene needs a home for teenage boys who are “between” homes.

Neils calls such a place an emancipation home, where boys live in apartments, learn independent living skills such as budgeting and cooking, and are supervised. Older boys probably would prefer an emancipation home to foster care, she said.

The home also could offer boys short-term shelter in emergencies.

A group that formed last fall, the Kootenai Alliance for Family and Children, has identified an emancipation home as a priority, Schaffer said. But without money, it’s nothing more than a dream.

Meanwhile, boys not interested in foster care face life on their own.

“They lose their childhood, fall through the cracks, hook up with the wrong people,” Schaffer said. “That’s why gangs form. They need the support.”

, DataTimes