Married at 16, a cancer survivor before 30, Stacey Bess is no stranger to struggle. Small wonder her first teaching job was in a tin shack under a freeway viaduct, and that her pupils were homeless.
"There are some things I can share with these people. That's why they don't reject me," she says. "I don't come here without life experience."The School With No Name, as it is called, has since been moved to the family shelter on Rio Grande Street. But the role Bess has had for seven years remains the same. She is teacher, friend and champion to the children she can't leave.
"Every time I think about quitting, I worry someone will come back looking for me," she says.
And they do. All the time.
"For this assignment I want to know where you would go if you were going to run away," she tells a group of students in grades 3 through 6. "And no fair coming to my house. I have enough naughty kids."
The students laugh and begin the assignment. The cramped room smells faintly of old cigarette smoke and the rabbit cage in the corner.
"I would go to my unkles," one child writes.
"I would find my dad," says another.
Bess jumps in.
"When I was little, my parents were divorced and my dad lived in another state. I used to think about running away to him, too," she says.
Bess was the third teacher hired after the Salt Lake City School District started the nation's first public school in a homeless shelter in 1984.
In the mornings, she would knock on doors to rouse her students. The dingy surroundings, the heartbreak, the hopelessness, all of it got to her. She couldn't wait for her half-year contract to run out so she could flee to a tidy classroom, a brick schoolhouse, a clean neighborhood.
But by then she was hooked.
"I don't think there's any other place like this one," she says. "It's like the first day of school and the last day of school every day here. We feel all those emotions all of the time."
Bess teaches part-time now, along with an instructor and a full-time teacher. She needs the time to travel because of a book she's written.
Bess has chronicled her experiences in "Nobody Don't Love Nobody: Lessons on Love from the School With No Name."
The book, which has taken her from San Diego to New York for speaking engagements and book signings, was the product of sleepless nights with her newborn two years ago.
Bess had planned to stay home with the baby but would wake up and feel the need to write - and to go back to work.
"I didn't know why I was writing, if I was just writing it down so my family would remember the lessons these people teach us or what."
The stories are wrenching. Her own is among the most compelling. At 16, Bess married her husband, Gregory, who was 17. They finished high school, then college, and had three children along the way.
Two bouts with thyroid cancer soon after starting to teach didn't prevent her from opening her home to children needing temporary care. Her mother adopted one infant; others stayed with relatives.
"I've had a really rough life. The gray in my hair is warranted," she says. "I've always climbed uphill."
But Bess, 31, has learned to dye her hair and let go of her life at school when she gets home. Still, she isn't happy if she is too long away from the two-room school at the Traveler's Aid Society Shelter.
Two years ago, with a newborn daughter strapped to her chest, Bess returned to the classroom because she couldn't stand being away.
"Nothing really bothers me. I'm very proper by nature and filth used to really startle me, but it doesn't anymore," she says. "I just adore the people.."
With a 4 p.m. appointment to make, Bess rushes out the door of the school and is stopped by a man who is visibly drunk.
"I'm not stupid," he says, grabbing her arm while he launches into a discourse on Nietzsche. "I've just had some hard times."
"You don't have to tell me you're not stupid," Bess said. "I know."
She hands him a book to read and explains she must go.
"Can I have your phone number at home?"
"No," she says firmly. "That's against the law."
At the end of her book, Bess offers the reader some advice - get involved. She lists agencies to contact: the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, American Red Cross, PTA and Little League.
"I wanted you to know these people. I wanted to move you," she wrote. "But here are lots of ways to help."