The Invisible Student

Ambrose doesn’t smoke or drink. In that way, his stubbornness has served him well. “If I wasn’t hardheaded I would do drugs or something stupid,” he says. He has avoided many of the other pitfalls as well. Still, Markham–Cousins wishes she knew more about his situation so she could know what he needed and how she could reach him. But he shut her out.

Ambrose doesn’t want the school principal or anyone else feeling sorry for him. Their well-intentioned sympathy or charity can put him in a position where he feels beneath them. That’s not what he wants. He wants to fit in, like any high school kid. “I feel like I’m a regular student,” he says. “Some people feel sorry for me because I’m out on my own. Don’t treat me like that. I joke around with others, I lift weights, I go to class. I’m the same as everybody else, equal.”

Ambrose’s determination to go it alone and efforts to conceal his situation ultimately work against him. It keeps away those who can help if he’d only let them. “They [kids like Ambrose] are so fragile, but they come across completely opposite,” Markham–Cousins says. “They show a tough exterior because they have to survive, but they are so vulnerable.”

If you mess up in a class at Washburn, you wind up in the office of Giovan Jenkins. That’s where Ambrose found himself near the end of the football season. Jenkins, the dean of students for ninth and eleventh graders and an assistant football coach, is a guy with a heart three times its normal size. The kind of guy who gives kids the shirt off his back. He stocks his office with his old clothes and shoes—still in perfectly wearable condition—to pass out to kids in need.

When Ambrose responded defensively to Jenkins’s request for his mom’s phone number—“I don’t have a mom. She doesn’t care about me”—Jenkins shifted from disciplinarian to advocate mode. He learned Ambrose was sleeping in an empty house and needed a place to stay.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Jenkins asked.

“I didn’t think you’d care,” Ambrose said.

 Jenkins notified the assistant principal, who called in a county social worker the next day to meet with Ambrose. She gave him information on resources available to kids, ranging from food stamps to apartments. Ambrose wasn’t interested in foster care.