Pols — Please Protect Our Children

By Kami-Leigh Agard

I’m sure most, if not everyone, on the Rockaway peninsula know about the numerous homeless men’s shelters being planted locally. Why am I making this the focus of my column about parenting a child on the autism spectrum? Well, expressly because I am a parent of a special-needs child residing blocks away from a facility that is warehousing homeless men.

Now, first, I am not condemning homeless people. Life does throw us some unexpected hurdles, and we never know where we will end up. Many of us are a paycheck away from being homeless. That reality is one of my greatest fears, thus, I dare not look down on people who fall on hard times, as a result of losing a job, falling prey to an addiction or even losing one’s home in a superstorm like Hurricane Sandy or the wildfires consuming southern Los Angeles, CA.

That being said, I am against establishing men’s shelters in residential areas and schools. Thousands of students attend schools here in Rockaway. On any given day, you see swarms of students walking on the street, waiting for a bus, heading to the subway, or popping into local food shops for a snack. If the day is warm, you’ll see them happily laughing with their friends, heading to the beach.

Many young adults on the autism spectrum, who have proudly completed their independent travel training course, also walk along this strip heading home.  Sometimes I would see a few with anxious looks on their faces as they trepidatiously weave through the streets flooded with youth, some whom I have noticed look at these autistic individuals with a curious look, some even crudely making fun. As I sometimes hurriedly walk on Rockaway Beach Boulevard on an errand, unbeknownst to these autistic young people, I would hang back and watch to make sure none of the school children bothered or harassed them. I have a 16-year-old daughter on the spectrum, and my heart would hurt as I observed, and thought about my own little girl, wondering if this is the kind of bullying she would face.

Now as for these shelters, I believe it is asinine to the max. As astutely stated years ago by Rockaway Times Managing Editor Katie McFadden on a Friends of Rockaway Beach Facebook post regarding the shelter on Beach 101st Street: “To those who are defending this homeless shelter, saying it will be for veterans because it’s attached to the Black Veterans for Social Justice…don’t be fooled. This home isn’t for veterans. If it were, DHS would have said this outright to try to curb some of the backlash. All they said was that this will be for 120 homeless men.”

I’m not assuming that all of these homeless men will be social deviants, but if the population resembles those at the Pamoja House, which is also run by BVSJ, we’re in trouble. The BVSJ website explicitly states: “Pamoja House specializes in managing a homeless population that was refused from other shelters in NYC … approximately half of our residents are formerly incarcerated or had some contact with the criminal justice system.”

Also, shelter residents usually are not allowed to stay inside all day as they are mandated to be out proactively looking for work, which means we see a lot of drifters standing on corners, panhandling, whilst our children are walking by. I’m not saying all these men are suspect, but we can deduce there will be quite a few bad apples. Also, not to mention the potential for crime. Just recently, after a NY Daily News exposé, DHS was forced to release thousands of pages of incident reports, documenting everything from assaults to drug dealing to arrests inside homeless shelters, which they had been concealing for years.

Local politicians, please step up and fight to make sure these shelters are removed from areas near schools and residential homes. In a Facebook post, someone posed the question, “Where is a good place to put a homeless shelter?” My opinion is that all depends on the kind of shelter. If it’s a facility providing services for families to get back on their feet. Great. However, as for crudely warehousing men with a criminal history —definitely not in a neighborhood with families and schools.

Feel free to share your sentiments by emailing: kami@rockawaybeachautismfamilies.org or follow Rockaway Beach Autism Families on Facebook/Instagram.