On a broad commercial drag in rural Fort Morgan, Colo., there’s an aging roadside motel with a yellowed sign out front advertising vacancies at daily and weekly rates. But it’s no longer a functioning motel in the traditional sense, so much as a pay-as-you-go refuge for locals who have nowhere else to call home.
Marygrace Lankhorst and her husband, Lonnie Walker, are among the residents.
By the time a major cold snap hit the region in mid-January, they’d been living at the motel for about two and a half months. Their room was small and crammed full of possessions – suitcases, boxes of food, bags of clothing and various treasures rescued from the alleyways of Fort Morgan. A microwave next to the TV served as the kitchen.
They paid $380 a week for the room, and they weren’t sure how much longer they could afford to stay.
Eight years ago, the couple lost their family home – the permanent one, where they were raising their 6 kids - after Lankhorst fell ill, racked up medical bills and became too weak to keep her job.
“We went through $32,000 worth of savings in three months.” Lankhorst said.
That loss marked the start of the family’s long, tumultuous history of homelessness and housing insecurity. Lankhorst’s three youngest children are now 18, 14 and 11, but they were just little kids at the time, which means they’ve struggled with housing for most of their short lives.
“I've been in and out of homelessness,” their son, Anthony Lankhorst, the 18-year-old and a high school senior, said.
Over the years the family has lived in trailers, slept in vehicles, and stayed with relatives. One memorable night found them in a heated carwash.
Along the way there were a couple glorious stretches of stability – a house at the edge of town, another in neighboring Brush. But those times didn’t last.
Anthony recalled living for a spell in a wooden shack that had electricity, but no running water. “That's where we stayed for a while,” he said. “And then we went back to hotels, and it was just hotels from there on.”
Throughout everything, Lankhorst says she's tried to make her kids' education a priority.
"It's important for me that my children do good in school," she said. "They've got one job in life at this point. And that's schooling."
The reality of living in a constant state of crisis, makes that difficult in practice. There were times Lankhorst had to balance competing desires: keep the family together or let the kids continue in their established schools. For the most part, she chose stability for her kids' education. But as the family moved around and circumstances changed, they've been in and out of school districts a couple of times.
When it comes to kids experiencing homelessness in rural Colorado, the Lankhorst family is hardly unique. According to state data, more than 16,000 K-12 students in Colorado experienced some form of homelessness during the 2021-22 school year. Under federal law, that includes students living apart from a legal guardian, in hotels and spaces unsuitable for human habitation, or whose families are doubled up due to economic hardship, in addition to students staying in shelters or on the streets.
Many rural parts of the state have exceptionally high rates of youth homelessness. In Fort Morgan, for instance, more than one out of every ten students experienced housing insecurity during the 2019-20 school year. Several school administrators and service providers told KUNC those numbers are likely an undercount.
But experts say it’s precisely in those hard-hit rural areas, where resources are few and far between, social stigma is heightened and transportation is limited, that kids often struggle to get help a lot more than their urban peers .
“More Hidden”
Youth homelessness has been described as an “invisible” problem, and that’s particularly the case in rural areas.
“Even though youth homelessness is just as prevalent in rural communities as it is in urban communities, it's much more hidden in rural areas,” said Erin Devorah Carreon, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall. “People are less likely to see it. Not as many young people stay in shelters, they're more likely to be on couches, inside of vehicles or outdoors and more secluded spaces.”
In fact, research has shown that rural youth are more than twice as likely to be couch surfing and less than half as likely to live in a shelter as their urban peers.
Not only are rural communities less likely to recognize youth homelessness when they see it, but they’re also less likely to be willing to talk about it.
“In a smaller community, everybody knows each other, a lot of the times a lot of people are related. And that can make it a little more scary to disclose your homelessness status,” Carreon said. “That lack of anonymity in rural areas can be really a deterrent for folks to share their struggles with each other.”
And sparsely populated areas typically don’t have many resources available to help struggling kids and families, giving them less reason to ever come forward, meaning many unhoused kids remain unidentified.
Of course, this dynamic feeds a negative resource spiral. A dearth of resources means unhoused kids remain unaccounted for. The undercount justifies a continuing lack the resources. And nothing changes.
Rural resource deserts
Cindy Reyes is one of just a small handful of people who make up the threadbare safety net for kids experiencing homelessness in Sterling, Colo., about 50 miles northeast of Fort Morgan. She’s the Family Community Advocate for the Sterling school system, a rural district of about 2,000 kids.
Part of her job is to look out for the district’s unhoused kids and get them help, which is no small task in a region with no youth shelters and very few resources.
Reyes said right now she has a roster of 40 to 60 kids currently experiencing homelessness, and she’s constantly identifying new ones – sometimes 2 or 3 kids in a single day.
“We have a lot of kiddos that live with other family members, not with [their] parents,” she said. “A lot of our high schoolers couch surf. Elementary age, sometimes they’re with their parents, and they just stay in their vehicles. Those are rough.”
In a region that lacks housing support, getting those kids into homes is simply not on the table. Instead Reyes makes sure they have things – whatever small items increase their chances of staying safe and returning to school another day.
“We try to keep clothing at school - extra clothing for them,” Reyes said. “We make sure that they have the food that they possibly need, the blankets, those kinds of things. Sleeping bags, backpacks full of necessities.”
She's even bought graduation caps and gowns for some of the kids she works with
"That is the most awesome thing to see them actually graduate," she said. "You don't have a lot of them that do that."
Unfortunately, the tools at her disposal for even that minimal level of help are extremely limited. Her annual budget for provisioning all those kids is just $50 - the minimum required by federal law. That’s not a per-student amount, but the total allocation for the entire year, which means she effectively has no budget. Out of necessity, Reyes has become an expert at piecing things together from nothing.
“I start calling around, trying to find resources when I can,” she said. “Sometimes that's not easy. Trying to find money is really hard.”
There are two or three local charities and nonprofits that she leans on regularly, as well as a regional Board of Cooperative Educational Resources that distributes pooled resources to dozens of rural school districts, but she frequently just uses her own money or even begs her own friends and family for personal donations. Last fall she put together a spur of the moment fundraising campaign that helped fill the gaps.
For all its ad hoc energy, Reyes’s jockeying for resources is not reflective of a malfunctioning system, but rather the system working as designed.
A federal law – part of the McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act - protects unhoused students and requires local school districts to appoint a homeless youth liaison to connect them with resources, make enrollment easy for students experiencing homelessness and provide transportation for them to get to school. It does not provide funding, nor does it call for direct housing assistance for unsheltered kids.
Paula Gumina, the state coordinator for the education of homeless children and youth at the Colorado Department of Education, said that districts are required to follow the federal requirements whether they have funding or not.
“For many districts, that means a coordination of services across the community, running coat drives, connecting with other government agencies connecting with other services through the school,” Gumina said.
Some grant money is available for school districts to support unhoused youth, but it usually takes some resources to get more resources. Larger, wealthier school districts have the staff and know-how to apply for those grants, but very little trickles down to the small, rural districts that do not.
There is a bright spot, though. This spring, a pair of new federal grants will unleash a small stream of new funding in to address youth homelessness in rural Colorado. Kippi Clausen, co-director of the Colorado Rural Collaborative for Runaway and Homeless Youth, who advised on the grants, says together they will fund a seamless and consistent homelessness prevention and support system for rural youth and young adults – a rarity in the often fractured and red tape-heavy world of social services.
A $2.9 million Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development will help launch a new youth-oriented homeless services system that makes it easier for young people to navigate resources in rural areas. An additional $1 million dollar grant from the Family Youth Service Bureau will fund direct cash transfers to rural kids and families for the purpose of preventing homelessness.
“That is more than this state has ever had in its history to address rural homelessness for youth,” Clausen said. It will be shared among 45 counties across the entire state of Colorado.
Homelessness complicates education
On a frigid January evening, Marygrace Lankhorst’s younger son, Lukas Moody, sat hunched on the back of a metal chair. Perched above the boxes and clutter in his parents’ motel room, he looked tired – worn out from an afternoon playing basketball with a friend.
A quiet kid who wears his hair long and hidden under a dark hoodie, Lukas was just six years old when their struggles with housing began. Now he’s almost 15.
Lukas was just visiting for the evening because at that point, he was living full-time at a friend’s house about a mile away from his parents’ motel. The internet connection was just better over there - an important consideration given that Lukas, a high school freshman, does all his schooling online.
Housing instability complicates education. Kids who experience homelessness are significantly more likely to be disconnected from the education system. They are much less likely than their peers with stable housing to graduate from high school. The reasons for education disruptions range from frequent relocations to mental health issues.
For Lukas it was the bullying, which started in middle school.
“It was about me,” Lukas said. “It was about the homeless stuff.”
He started to hate school and wanted to leave.
In Fort Morgan’s small school district, there's only one middle school, so transferring wasn't an option for Lukas. Instead, Lankhorst was hesitant to pull him from the local middle school, but he was getting severely depressed.
"I really honestly think some of those kids were trying to break his spirit," Lankhorst said.
She enrolled him in online-only learning and later did the same for his older brother, Anthony.
The boys both say they prefer online learning, but the experience has been anything but smooth. In rural Fort Morgan, reliable internet access isn’t always available. At times, both boys have had trouble logging in to their virtual classrooms.
"I ended up losing internet so I wasn't able to do my schoolwork," Anthony said. "So they kicked me out."
That disrupted his education for months.
Even so, Anthony said he’s on track to graduate in the spring. But he'll have a little more on his plate before he crosses that finish line: he just got a new job at the big meatpacking plant in town.
“I go to work at two and then school ends at two,” he said. “So what I'll do is after school, I go straight to work.”
That double shift will mean very long days and a divided focus for the teenager. But the pay is good, and while he's determined to graduate high school, he hopes the job will allow him to address his more pressing concern: stable housing for his family.
“If I can help out my family and get them in a safe place and keep them out of hotels for good, it'd be good for me,” he said.
