At Boomtown Cafe, students learn lessons of poverty, homelessness

It wasn't like Max to complain. At 11, he was one of the youngest and smallest kids in his class, but he was one of the toughest, too.

But here he was on the morning of his first visit to Seattle's Boomtown Cafe, whining that his stomach hurt, that he wanted to stay home. By the time he and a few classmates at Northgate's Alternative School #1 (AS1) caught the bus heading downtown, he was nervous, anxious. He barely said a word the entire way.

For him, the Pioneer Square luncheonette serving homeless and low-income customers pulsed with menace and uncertainty. So what if Punji Leagnavar, the school's VISTA volunteer, was leading this weekly expedition? Someone was going to pull a knife on him, he just knew it. Every passing glimpse of gritty alleyway, every news-at-6 crime scene he'd ever seen coalesced in a great knot in his belly.

He was going to get stabbed. That was it. Goodbye, Max.

But when they got there, everyone seemed, well, nice. They put him to work as a waiter. And one of the guys there — his name was Kip, but he looked like Andre 3000 from Outkast with his big Afro. Joking around and everything. He took to the fifth-grader like a beloved uncle.

Since fall, through Leagnavar's pilot efforts, Max and his AS1 classmates have been learning about homelessness and poverty firsthand. By getting up close, rubbing shoulders with and hearing the personal stories of those who've called the streets home, they're challenging preconceptions and even creating bonds.

"(Kip) loves that this little kid really looks up to him," says Melissa Lee, Boomtown's volunteer coordinator. "Think about what that means to somebody on the streets."

By lunch's end on his first visit, Max was Mr. Social, talking to people, making friends. "He was one of the ones who was really intimidated," says his mom, Michele Basener. "Now he says if he ever makes a million dollars, he's going to donate it to Boomtown."

Getting a street education

Like many Seattle district schools, AS1 had seen its share of benefit drives for the needy before Punji Leagnavar came along. Homelessness? Poverty? Sure, most middle- and high-school social-studies discussions end up there in some fashion during the school year. But it's unlikely any group has more thoroughly embraced such issues than the 16 kids in AS1 teacher Sharon Mason's core class.

With Leagnavar showing the way, Mason's fifth-through-eighth-graders have toured Marra Farm, a South Park community garden that donates produce to immigrant and low-income families, and scoped out a downtown photo exhibit featuring life-size shots of street youth.

They've read the book "Nickel and Dimed" — a journalistic account of the working poor — and heard from a vendor for Real Change, Seattle's homeless newspaper.

One activity involved a role-playing scenario mimicking the red-tape labyrinth of the welfare system.

"Everyone got really frustrated," Leagnavar says. "But it sparked a lot of discussion. We talk about what things lead to homelessness, why it's hard to get out."

Wait a minute. Aren't these kids a little young to be dealing with this stuff? They're just kids, after all, a mishmash of pigtails and hoodies whose teacher sometimes needs to bark "One, two, three — look at me" to instill quiet.

But along the way, they've learned to discuss and question programs, bureaucracies and pressures of society.

"You develop respect for everybody, not just people who have money and cars and stuff," says seventh-grader Michelle Euster, 13. "Everyone deserves to be treated fairly."

"Instead of shielding them from it, why not have them understand each person on a personal level?" Leagnavar says. "It's not until you get a personal level of understanding that you can be part of change."

Experience is the teacher

You don't come to AS1 if you're a one-size-fits-all kind of kid. Founded in 1970, it's a place where learning-through-experience is a mantra, curriculum is shaped by the whole school community and grown-ups look at you funny if you call them by their last names. Differently graded students mix as easily in hallways as in classrooms, and parent volunteers abound like marshmallows in a bowl of Lucky Charms.

"They have classes on folk songs for peace," Leagnavar says. "They have a class on yoga. I went to a faculty meeting and one issue was whether they should let kids run around barefoot."

A product of traditional, north-Chicago schools focused on college preparation starting in sixth grade, Leagnavar, a sunny Illinois native, had the same reaction many do upon their first visit to AS1. "I thought it was crazy," she says.

But as a participant in the national AmeriCorps* VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) program, her assignment at AS1 was to tie the interests of the school's 260 kindergartners through eighth-graders to volunteer opportunities.

When the kids in Mason's class said they wanted to learn more about homelessness, she recalled another VISTA volunteer working at Boomtown — what if they could put some time in there?

"They just loved it," she says. "It was so cool to see kids interested in this without me pushing it."

Recently, the class and other interested students watched "City Without A Home," a documentary about Seattle's roving homeless encampment, Tent City (currently in Lake City).

In the film, they meet Dave, whose self-proclaimed upscale upbringing didn't make him happy; afterward, they wonder why, in their situation, Dave and his girlfriend would spend $300 apiece on jackets that end up stolen. That prompts a revelation — that their principal, Ron Snyder, was himself homeless once. Not for long, he says, but "long enough to learn some lessons."

"Imagine you've been in the desert," he tells them, wearing a purple school sweatshirt and a gray ponytail. "You find a little bit of water. The smart thing to do would be to save a little bit of it. But you drink it all because you're so thirsty. For a lot of people, I think that's what happens when they find a little bit of money, because they've been without it for so long. It's gone."

When you give money to someone on the street, you can't know where it goes. Mason asks filmmaker Dee McDonald: What can her students do to take direct action?

"This is what we all have to give," McDonald says. "Eye contact. Acknowledgement. A smile. You have no idea how much that means."

Boomtown flare-up

There's a lot of reasons people end up on the streets or that they stay there, and sometimes those reasons follow them into the Boomtown Cafe.

Occasionally they'll brandish short-fuse, what-are-you-looking-at exteriors and fits of anger. One guy came in and wouldn't leave. When he finally pulled a knife, Max says, Kip intervened. That's not cool, man. Don't do that. There's kids here.

"I was really scared Kip was gonna get hurt," he says. "But he didn't."

Even though his initial fears had come to pass, it was different now: He was surrounded by people he trusted. It wasn't such a big deal. "I think it empowered him to see there was a situation and that it was dealt with," says Michele, his mother.

Today, Max and another AS1 group spill off the Metro bus and into the rain where a line of hardscrabble faces is already waiting for Boomtown's doors to open.

The kids get to work, busing tables, serving up hot plates of spaghetti or stroganoff, refilling coffee thermoses. Along with Max, who wears an elfin tiger-stripe hat and Boomtown T-shirt, there's Euster and Ariel Wilson, both 13; and Paul Bartell, 10.

"The kids are a breath of fresh air in here," says Mark Foott, a homeless artist and poet whose lilt betrays his Liverpool roots. "Other kids, if you asked them to come to the likes of here, they'd run a mile."

The incoming line is constant for 90 minutes — hard glares and weary expressions, thrift-store caps, missing teeth. Customers pay what they can afford. The kids shout order-numbers above the din while a heavy-jacketed man conjures Clapton from an old piano near the window.

"It kinda reminds me of an old diner, with the piano going and everybody talking and laughing," Michelle says, completely at ease and light on her feet, even as she diligently squirts dressing on salads.

"The kids are so cheery and pleasant," says Boomtown's Lee. "It rubs off."

"It's been a cool experience," Max says. "I got to know some people I really like. I've made some friends. They're people, just like us."

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com