It's been 10 months now since I had a phone call to go get my sister. That phone call has changed my life. At 31, I became the guardian of a 16-year-old who was soon to enter her senior year of high school. An amazingly smart, extremely independent 16-year-old, whom I had rarely seen and didn't have much of a relationship with. She and her mother were being evicted, and the option if she stayed was to go to school out of a homeless shelter, which is no real option at all.
Of course, I went to her, we packed her up, and moved her in with me. Her life changed, too. She was to began her senior year in a new school, away from everyone and everything she knew. We were only an hour away, but it might as well have been a different world. She's adaptable but there's only so much a teenager should be expected to handle with grace, but she defied expectations.
Enrolling a child in school is a messy proposition when you don't have legal guardianship. I had (have) power of attorney over her giving me permission to make legal decisions on her behalf. What I do not have is legal custody. The school system was refusing to allow me to enroll her without charging tuition (over $2,000 a year) until I could provide guardianship or proof that she was homeless. So that's what she was according to her school .... homeless and unaccompanied.
