Jasmine Walker details her life, from a homeless teenager in San Diego to a standout basketball player. Tears flow freely down her face. Walker has just been given the news that she has not made the women's basketball team at Bethune-Cookman University. Coach Vanessa Blair-Lewis had watched Walker try out and then explained to her that she already had too many forwards on her roster. There was no more room. Walker dries her face on the sleeve of her still-sweat-soaked T-shirt and slowly picks up her head.
The tears? They're actually tears of joy. She smiles. She is triumphant. She has just been handed perhaps the first break of her life. But it also has the fourth-largest homeless population in the United States, including more than 1, who are minors. For nearly a decade, Jasmine Walker was one of them.
When Walker was 9 years old, her father left his family. Then Walker's mother, Shelly Jamison, lost her job at a day care. The family was later evicted from its home. Eventually Jamison ran out of housing options. She is not apologetic or embarrassed about it.
Jamison and her four children wound up at homeless shelters, but age and gender rules meant that Jasmine and her three siblings were separated. Surrounded by strangers, Jasmine was alone. Over the next several years, Walker was in and out of shelters, in tents, on the streets. She estimates that she lived in 20 different places. She used buckets as toilets, begged for money, often went to sleep hungry or cold or both.
Walker says it was frightening asking people for scraps of food and scrounging for change. When she was 12, Walker enrolled at a school for homeless children, Monarch School, in the shadows of million-dollar condos and Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres. Monarch annually schools K students and offers programs from computer science to gardening and woodshop and is locked down tight for security.
