The Catskill Chronicle

Story and photos by Ted Waddell

Deanna Defreese is a single mother of six; of which five live with
her between two cramped rooms. She is pictured here with her 4-year old daughter
Trinity, a student at Head Start.

SULLIVAN COUNTY – If your idea of a homeless person is a raggedy-assed bum sleeping on a heating grate in a big city covered in yesterday’s newspapers, you’re sadly mistaken. Scores of single mothers are looking after their kids while living in deplorable conditions, living situations reportedly inspected and approved by local authorities.

It isn’t a pretty picture.

While some landlords of rental rooms paid for by social services make an effort to keep the places up, others seem to have never painted the walls in decades or even shelled out a few bucks to provide a stove, a fridge or a couple of dressers. A few beds, a broken down dresser missing some drawers. Peeling paint, holes in the wall. A chair or two. Maybe a table, maybe not. Sure, there’s probably an old television set on a box, but in a lot of cases, that’s it.

The Sullivan County BOCES Academic Support for Kids (ASK) program is designed for families in temporary housing, an administrative euphemism for “homeless,” is funded by the NYS Education Department (NYSED) as authorized by the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001.

As outlined in the federal legislation, all children in temporary housing have the right to attend school, and in the local BOCES ASK program, last year student support specialists Jamie Latimer and Patricia Crumley spent countless hours working with 146 homeless students in grades K-12, plus 27 kids age 3-5 not enrolled in kindergarten, for a total of 173 students in the county in dire need of help in staying in school despite often terrible living conditions.

Deanna Defreese, a 28-year mother of six kids lives in two rooms connected by a small doorway with five of her children in the Budget Inn of Liberty.

David is two, Trinity is four and attends Head Start, while seven-year old Yasmin, Jaquain, 9, and 11-year old Andre attend Fallsburg’s Benjamin Cosor Elementary School. Cedric, Defreese’s 8-year old son lives with an aunt in Pennsylvania.

“I came from Rockland County, that’s where I was raised and born,” she said. “We moved up here maybe nine years ago…my mom wanted to get away from the drama and trouble down there, so we moved up here.”

Since relocating to Sullivan County, Defreese and her kids have bounced around in temporary housing from Monticello, Liberty, Woodbourne and Fallsburg, until five months ago they landed at the Budget Inn.

“My building in Fallsburg (located at 73 Laurel Avenue) was closed down, the building got condemned so all the tenants got pushed out…Steve, the landlord, wasn’t a good landlord, he was a slumlord,” recalled Defreese.

Allen Frishman, now in his 24th year as the Town of Fallsburg Code Enforcement Officer (CEO), said in essence the one-month evacuation/closure of the building was a combination of the condition of the building “the living conditions were really bad” along with “some of the tenants were living really rough.”

“In the month’s time that the building was closed, the landlord (identified as Steve Plotkin) made great gains in cleaning up the whole place…[and] at the same time there were tenants that had to come back and clean out their apartments because there were piles of I don’t know what it was, moldy clothes, God knows what laying around on the floors.”

“If you’re in your own house and want to live like a pig, that’s up to you. But if it affects other tenants in an apartment, you have responsibilities,” added Frishman.

According to the town’s CEO, once tenants were allowed back into the building as the renovations progressed, they were put on notice that their living quarters would be inspected periodically and, if warranted, violation notices would be issued if things weren’t maintained by the tenants in their own rental spaces.

“Piles of dirty dishes, and plies and piles of dirty clothes in all the rooms …that’s a great breeding ground for cockroaches,” said Frishman.

Defreese explained that it’s tough trying to find more permanent housing with five young children in tow. “It’s hard because there ain’t nothin’ available…they’re already rented or they ain’t sure in they want five kids.”

For a year and three months, the single mother of six worked at Rolling V
as a bus aid, but had to give it up because she couldn’t get any childcare.

“I was doing good, it was a good job,” she said.

On the plus side of things, her three elementary school kids attend an extended school day program at Benjamin Cosor Elementary School; time that allows then to get their homework done. But, Defreese said, her oldest boy “is having a difficult time” in school because “other kids pick on him, saying he’s homeless…he comes home real upset about it.”

“Kids were making fun of him…he’s a real good boy, don’t bother nobody,” she said.

Defreese said that as a 17-year old attending Spring Valley, she got pregnant with her first child and dropped out of school in the 9th grade. “I don’t have my GED, but I’m going to work on it as soon as I get settled and get a job,” she said.

Asked what it was like for a mother and five young children to live in two small rooms with dim light filtering through the blinds and all their clothes and worldly possessions in plastic trash bags on the floor or on the beds, Defreese replied, “It’s not easy, it’s hard. It’s real stressed out being here, I’m real stressed out every day. We don’t have much, and [other] kids are hangin’ out in the hallway.”

“When the bus drops off my kids, they eat dinner, shower and go to bed, and maybe watch a little TV…but as long as they continue to go to school, it’s okay,” said Defreese.

To view more photos from Homeless in the Land of Plenty: Part 1 of a Series visit the Chronicle on Zenfolio.