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Northern light
Through Covenant House, Pat Senner works with some of the most vulnerable – homeless and “throwaway” children in Anchorage, Alaska.
by Melanie Zuercher
Patricia Albrecht grew up in Claremont in southern California. Her parents and grandfather were Bethel alumni – the late Bernice Albrecht ’46, Paul A. Albrecht ’47 and Abraham Albrecht ’28. Paul Albrecht, an academic advisor to Bethel President Harold Schultz, was instrumental in getting the nursing program going at Bethel College following the closing of the Bethel Deaconess School of Nursing in 1974 (Bethel College began offering the bachelor of science in nursing degree in 1980). Pat graduated from Bethel in 1973 with a degree in natural sciences and earned her B.S.N. from The Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
At Bethel, she met her husband, Stan Senner ’73. While they were serving a term of voluntary service in Seattle right after graduation, they met some people from Alaska and, when their term was up, decided to move to Fairbanks to work at the Fairbanks Environmental Center during construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline. They left Alaska in 1979 and spent the next decade in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania before returning to Alaska, this time to Anchorage, in 1990, where Stan worked on environmental restoration following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. They’ve been in Alaska ever since, “except for two years in Colorado, which doesn’t count,” she says.
Pat and Stan have three sons – Nathan, 26, currently in graduate school at Cornell University; Paul, 19, an undergraduate at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.; and Daniel, 17, a high school senior.
Pat is currently a family nurse practitioner (she trained at the University of Alaska at Anchorage) for Covenant House Alaska in Anchorage, which is part of Covenant House International, the largest privately-funded agency in the Americas providing shelter and other services to homeless, runaway and throwaway youth. Incorporated in New York City in 1972, Covenant House International has facilities in 21 cities throughout the United States, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Nicaragua.
Context: Describe your job with Covenant House.
Pat Senner: Covenant House was started in New York by a Catholic priest who was reaching out to homeless teenagers. Covenant House Alaska serves 2,000-3,000 kids a year. There are three residential programs, including a home for pregnant girls and girls with children. There is also a transitional living program for youth age 18-21. To be in this, they need to be employed, and they can stay up to 18 months.
The initial program [in Anchorage] was a crisis program, a shelter that was open 24 hours a day, for 13- to 20-year-olds, with a capacity of 40. Covenant House Alaska was originally envisioned as a short-term solution for when kids got mad at their parents and walked out and they needed a place to cool off, then they would go back home. But it evolved into services for “throwaway kids” – kids whose parents don’t want anything to do with them, or who are over 18 and have “aged out” of the foster care system.
I have multiple roles. I take medical histories and physicals on youth that come to the Crisis Center and from this develop a medical case plans – which might include applying for Medicaid, having teeth cleaned or repaired, getting glasses or seeing a specialist such as a orthopedic doctor. We also have a drop-in center with a clinic and I see patients there. I have a public health responsibility. I see a lot of infectious diseases, especially sexually transmitted diseases, so taking care of them is a public health issue. Most teenagers are healthy, but some walk into our shelter with serious illnesses such as cancer, organ transplants, diabetes or hemophilia. I’m responsible to make sure these youth get the care and medicines that they need, which isn’t always easy. I also have responsibility for developing medical policies and procedures for Covenant House such as what to do if a youth comes in who has active TB.
Context: How did you get involved at Covenant House?
PS: I’ve been here seven years. It was an accident, or maybe it was providential. I was at a benefit for another nonprofit in town and so was a Covenant House staff person. This person asked our table: “Do you know any nurse practitioners who would be interested in working part-time?” At the time, I was working full-time with a urology practice and I wanted to go to part-time because I had young children at home. They’re grown now, so I’m back to full time.
Context: What does the population you serve look like?
PS: About 40 percent of the youth we serve are Alaska Natives. Alaska Natives make up 20 percent of the Alaska population. About ___ percent of the youth we serve have been part of the foster care system.
The common view of homeless kids is that they came from good homes but they went to the bad side – got involved in drugs and ran away. In fact, a lot of them come from terribly dysfunctional families, where the parents have substance abuse problems. We see a lot of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and a lot of mental health issues.
[The statistics show that] over the past 10 years, the average age of the youth served by Covenant House Alaska has gone up – the median age has gone from 16 to 18. In a way, this is good news because we would like not to see young children in this environment. This is probably a result of the push in the ’90s to put kids in foster care, and now they’re aging out of the system.
That reminds me of a quick story. I was listening to a National Public Radio piece on kids aging out of foster care and someone called in and said he had gotten placed at Frontier Boys’ Village near Colorado Springs, where a lot of people I know did voluntary service. The caller said this was the best place of this kind he’d ever experienced because the staff treated him like family rather than like a patient. The caller had gone on to become an engineer.
Context: What issues do you deal with that are unique to Alaska?
PS: This is a Covenant House practice throughout the country – one thing that is different is that about 70 percent of our funding comes from private donations. We try not to get too dependent on government funding because it is not reliable. One year, the government may consider one type of program a priority and the next year that priority will change to something else. Many Alaska programs serving at-risk youth have had to close their doors because government funding was unreliable.
In Alaska, “rural” means no roads. Many villages and small communities are not economically able to sustain themselves when everything needs to be flown or shipped in – including fuel – and job opportunities are few. We are seeing a huge influx of people from rural Alaska into Anchorage. This year the Anchorage School district estimated they had an additional 700 students enroll who had come from “the bush.” There are kids who came from rural Alaska to Anchorage to live with relatives and it doesn’t work out. Because of television, they understand urban culture, but they have trouble with things like integrating into a city high school or into university. They come from one-room schools to schools with thousands of kids. In my son’s high school, the students come from homes where there are more than 50 different languages spoken. People come to Alaska from all over the world.
Context: What kind of influence did your Bethel education have on your choice of profession?
PS: When we were in VS in Seattle, I worked in mental health so in a way I’ve come full circle.
At Bethel, you learn the philosophy, the responsibility, of service – by hearing about other people having done international service, voluntary service. Convocations were a big influence.