HBHA students experience ‘One Homeless Night’

It was just overnight under the lights of the Jewish Community Campus athletic fields, with an Overland Park Police cruiser checking up on them. But the 30 or so Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy students who took part last week in the citywide “One Homeless Night” sleep-out said it gave them more empathy for truly homeless people.

“You don’t realize that the people you see on the street corner holding up signs are just the beginning of the homelessness problem,” said sophomore Hannah Caplan. “It goes all the way from kids who are jumping couches every night to people living under bridges. We don’t realize how hard people have to work to try to find a safe place.”

“One Homeless Night” was sponsored by Kansas City, Mo.-based Synergy Services to generate just that sort of thinking among the high schoolers who took part the night of Nov. 12-13. Synergy, a non-profit agency founded in 1970, provides a variety of services, including shelters, mental-health counseling, community-education programs and legal advocacy. Synergy staff members stopped by to talk to the HBHA students and other sleep-out groups to raise funds and to discuss their work and the problem of homelessness in general. A representative of Veronica’s Voice, a group that helps prostitutes escape the street life, also talked at the HBHA sleep-out.

The event ran from 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, until 7 a.m. Friday, Nov. 13. After they finished the hot chocolate brought by concerned parents, and under the eyes of their teacher chaperones, the students bedded down in sleeping bags inside structures they built from cardboard boxes to keep the cold wind out.

“It didn’t seem like it would be that hard, but it took over an hour just to make a shelter,” said junior Jonathan Edelman. “Every night I can just go home and lie in my bed with no effort. It showed me how hard it is for homeless people to find a safe place.”

The HBHA students woke up last Friday and got to wash up inside the Campus before heading to class. Spending the following day tired and sore was part of the learning experience, which English teacher and project sponsor Cynthia McKnight deemed a success.

“It brings tears to my eyes to hear them reflect and write about their experience,” McKnight said. “It sounds like they got more out of it than even I expected.”

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