At first, the school really had no name. That was 10 years ago, when the classroom was a tin shack under the viaduct and they sometimes had to use night stands and garbage cans for desks.
Soon the lack of a name became the name itself, and after a while The School With No Name at Salt Lake City's homeless shelter started getting famous. Its teacher, Stacey Bess, was given awards and written up in national magazines. Last year she received the National Rescuer of Humanity Award, along with former President Jimmy Carter.But all that, it turns out, may just be the beginning. Now Bess, and the book she wrote about the school, may be on the verge of stardom.
A Cleveland philanthropist wants to send a copy of "Nobody Don't Love Nobody" to every teacher in America.
And Hollywood is on the line, too. The producer of "Schindler's List" has bought an option for the movie rights. He's shopping for a screenwriter now; then he'll look for funds. He's thinking of Sandra Bullock as Stacey Bess.
In some ways, things couldn't be looking better.
Try to guess what kind of fish this is, says the boy, pointing to a photograph in a book about the ocean. He puts his hand over the caption so the grown-up can't cheat. Try to guess, he says again.
The grown-up stares at the photograph of the strange fish. She tries to make up a silly name so the boy will laugh, then sees that he is serious about the fish. It's a shark, the boy says proudly.
He has been a student at The School With No Name since last fall, when he and his mother and his sister's baby moved into a single room at the family homeless shelter. Sometimes it's hard for the boy to sleep because the baby cries all night. And he wonders where his dad is now, and he wonders when they'll be on the move again.
The boy knows this is not the way most children have a childhood. So sometimes the boy is angry, and a good feeling about sharks can easily turn, by mid-morning, into an irritation about spelling.
The boy is tired of the spelling list. Tired of writing each word three times, tired of trying to make his letters neat. The words get sloppier as the list grows. He wiggles in his seat. He looks around the room. "She's a goody-goody," he says about the girl sitting next to him. The girl is writing her words neatly.
"If you don't get to work you'll have to miss science," Stacey Bess tells him.
"I don't care," the boy says.
The boy loves science. He loves the experiments. Today the experiment is on water purification. The children get to pour dirty water through sand filters, creating something pure out of something that looked hopelessly like sludge.
"I don't care," he says again. And later, during science, when he is finally allowed to come back to join the group, he still wants you to know he doesn't care, that the activated charcoal sucking up the muddy water is nothing he would have wanted to look at anyway.
Later, Bess explains how it is with a boy like this. "None of the privileges taken away hurts," Bess says. A child who has nothing, who has had one disappointment after another, who expects nothing, will just look at you and say, "I don't care," which is another way of saying "So, what else is new?"
And not caring, of course, is also a kind of power, sometimes the only power a child has left.
But Bess knows that the words are really a code. "That `I don't care,' " she says, "really means `please keep trying.' "
That's why Bess stays at the job she has tried to quit so many times. On her very first day at The School With No Name nine years ago, she was already planning how she would ask for a transfer. The Salt Lake City School District had sent her to the ramshackle classroom as her very first assignment out of college. At the end of her first day on the job she laid her head down on the desk and sobbed. But by June she was hooked.
A few years later, after the birth of her third child, she thought again about leaving. That's when she started writing down some of the stories that eventually became her book. The writing was her way of letting go of her job.
But she couldn't leave then, either. She ended up taking the baby with her to school, strapping the baby to her chest as she taught. And now this year there is baby No. 4. Daddy brings him to school at lunchtime so Bess can nurse.
She teaches only on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, and every other Friday, to make time for what has turned into an extensive speaking schedule. People all over the country - teacher groups, volunteer groups, charities - invite her to speak about the lessons she has learned from homeless children.
She could have quit teaching altogether - husband Greg makes a good living as a commercial appraiser, and there are the royalties from her book - but she is always afraid, she says, that some student will come back looking for her. Sometimes, in fact, they do come back. Occasionally they'll drop by to report a success in their lives. Sometimes they'll call because they need help. Sometimes their families show up back at the shelter looking for another chance to start over.
Mostly, though, they just move on. In the nine years she has taught at the school there have been 2,000, maybe 3,000 children. All those wary little faces, each one afraid of hoping for too much.
As soon as Gerald Molen read "Nobody Don't Love Nobody," he thought "movie rights." Molen has been the producer of "Schindler's List," "Rain Man," "Jurassic Park" and "The Color Purple." Perhaps he knows a blockbuster when he reads one.
It was Bess' tenderness and grit that impressed him. "She's one of those people who so rarely comes along anymore, who sees something that isn't right and does something about it." Just like Oskar Schindler, he adds.
You might think that a man with all those movie credits would have no trouble getting financing right away for a project he believes in. But Hollywood doesn't work that way.
So Molen has come up with a strategy. He has written a letter to Oprah Winfrey (since, after all, he was her producer for "The Color Purple") encouraging her to choose "Nobody Don't Love Nobody" for her on-air book club. Any book Oprah chooses, this strategy goes, is sure to be a success, and any book with that much exposure would surely be bankrolled into a movie.
So far, Molen hasn't heard back from Oprah. He isn't even sure his letter will make it past the letter screeners and into Oprah's hands.
But that's OK, Molen says. He expects it to all work out. He's the kind of man who has learned how to make things happen.
It is snack time at The School With No Name. Fruit drinks and little bags of gummy fruit candy. Orange is the flavor everybody wants, but there aren't enough. Some kids have to drink, yikes, the raspberry flavor. Grumbling ensues.
Bess listens to the complaints and then speaks up. "The next time," she tells them, "I want you to be grateful for what you got and keep going."
Bess is full of tenderness for her students; but feeling sorry for yourself doesn't get you far in her classroom. Neither does a belief that the world owes you anything.
It is this fine line of expectation that Bess tries to help her students walk every day. Yes, you deserve to have a chance, to have a childhood, to be loved, to be noticed for what makes you unique. No, you do not deserve to take and never give.
If you live in a homeless shelter, she tells them, you owe something back to the community. Even if you live in a homeless shelter, you belong to the community. You can grow up to be someone who fits in, contributes, is worthy of respect, can make things happen.
These are the lessons Bess learned from her own mother, who taught her by example that a family is richer if it helps others, if it takes in foster children.
Bess learned life's harder lessons when she got pregnant and then married at 16, got thyroid cancer at 23. Bess's good fortune was that she has been surrounded by people - her parents, her husband - who have loved and encouraged her.
Edward Davidson read "Nobody Don't Love Nobody" on a plane last year. He was sitting in the middle seat, he recalls, wedged in between two University of Washington football players.
By the time he got to Page 10, he recalls, he was already crying.
Davidson stops in the middle of this memory to point out that he is a "hard-core business person." Then he goes on to recount how he eventually had to climb over the football player in the aisle seat and go get wads of toilet paper so he could wipe his eyes as he finished the book.
Davidson, who owns an executive relocation management company and is wealthy enough to be considered a philanthropist, is on the board of a Cleveland charity called the Project Love Foundation. The organization's goal is to teach children how to treat one another with respect and to solve their differences without violence. Last fall, Project Love honored Bess and former President Jimmy Carter. One of its previous honorees was producer Gerald Molen.
Now Davidson wants every teacher in America to read Bess' book. Maybe they'll never take their neediest students home with them for months at a time, as Bess has done. But the book may remind them, Davidson says, that their own compassion in the classroom could serve as an example to their students.
Davidson is starting with a pilot project of 120 teachers. If the project shows good results, as measured by researchers at Case Western Reserve University, "we may be able to get other foundations involved," he says. Maybe there would even be funding for the movie.
In a couple of weeks, Bess will travel to Hollywood to meet with Davidson and Molen to discuss the movie and book projects.
If Molen ends up making the movie, Bess will get about $100,000 for the movie rights. She says she'll donate some of that money to homeless children.
Bess knows, though, that money alone won't make everything right.
In some ways, Bess says, conditions at the family shelter have improved. "I've seen fewer repeats lately," she says. She guesses that this has something to do with the shelter's new policy that allows families to stay longer than the original limit of three months.
But it is only a relative stability. She looks around her classroom and still sees children whose lives are full of uncertainty, who are still at the mercy of an adult's bad choices or bad luck.
At the end of the day, after spelling and science and lunch and math, the boy who doesn't care is getting ready to leave. On the way out the door he takes his teacher's hand.
"You're a good boy," Bess tells him. He gives her a little smile, a look that, to Bess, says, "I'm trying but I'm so exhausted."
You can imagine Sandra Bullock smiling back. You can close your eyes and picture how Hollywood could turn The School With No Name into a movie set. But right now it is 3:30 on an April afternoon. The boy gives Bess his tired smile. Even after nine years of teaching at the shelter, it's a look that can make her cry.
For information about the book "Nobody Don't Love Nobody," call toll free, 888-467-4446.