Sarah Coleman's impulse to run away started when she was 6 years old.
That's when she climbed out her second-story bedroom window to escape the Lawrence home where she says her mother used drugs and locked up her and her two younger brothers, leaving them alone for hours at a time.
Sarah Coleman sits in the South Park gazebo, one of the many places she used to hang out or sleep as a runaway teen-ager. Coleman, now 20 and off the streets, is looking for a job and preparing to get her GED.
"I got tired of being in the house, being hungry. My brothers were hungry," Coleman, now 20, recalls. "I climbed out my window and jumped from the second story. I walked a half a block to a church and told them I was scared and hungry."
Since then, Coleman has run away from dozens of group homes in six different cities. She's served time in juvenile detention centers and even jail.
Her mother, Frances McClanahan of rural Lawrence, admits there was some drug use in the home when Coleman was growing up.
"But I never did leave my children," she said. "Me and Sarah don't see eye to eye. ... She does not want to have nobody rule her. She's her own boss. She does what she wants to, and she has for many years."
The tales of the 140 or so Lawrence children who flee their parents each year vary. Some children run from abuse or neglect. Others simply don't care for rules.
"For a lot of children, running away is a response to stress, just like when I am under stress I eat chocolate," said Judy Culley, executive director of The Shelter Inc., a nonprofit agency that provides juvenile intake services to Lawrence law enforcement.
"Running away is an obvious way of getting away from whatever is causing you stress that has an immediate gratification. Immediately you feel better because you're away from where the stress is. What you don't realize is it's not good in the long-term.
"But sometimes kids are running away from situations that are actually bad for them."
Symptom of deeper problem
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Although Culley said children typically run away less in cold weather, this year's uncharacteristically mild winter hasn't reduced runaway numbers in Lawrence.
According to the Lawrence Police Department, the number of runaways in Lawrence has more than doubled every year since 1999 jumping from 26 that year to 67 the next year and 137 through November 2001.
However, The Shelter's statistics point to a steadier trend, which hovers around 140 children annually.
The discrepancy results from a difference in how the agencies tabulate data.
Statewide, 7,089 children ages 5-17 were reported missing in 1999, according to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. That number dropped to 6,646 in 2000, the most recent year for which statistics were available. Though those totals include children who were abducted, the abduction rate is less than 5 percent, said Mary Ann Howerton of the KBI's Crime Data Information Center.
Children ages 14-17 are the most likely to run away, and females flee more often than males, according to the Chicago-based National Runaway Switchboard, a toll-free referral and information contact point for runaway youth throughout the nation.
The top three issues that push children to run, the agency reports, are family dynamics, school and peer pressure.
"I guess I look at running away as more of a symptom than an issue in and of itself," Culley said. "Not that it's good for kids to run away. But when kids are running away, looking at what that means for that particular child is the thing that makes the most sense to do."
Reasons for running
Coleman first ran from a home life she hated.
"Growing up, I had a rough life," she said. "Mom brought in different men. We watched her do drugs."
So Coleman left when she was 6 and tried to stay with her aunt. But Coleman said her mom told social services where to find her and she was taken into custody.
Then she started running away from rules.
"I didn't feel like listening to everybody else's rules," she said. "I got tired of listening to everybody else when no one would listen to me."
She'd take off for weeks or months at a time until police caught up with her. She bounced from group home to group home until she was 11 and went to live with her grandmother.
In the meantime, watching her mom use drugs had taken its toll on Coleman.
"Mom's supposed to teach us the right things to do," she said. "I figured doing drugs was the right thing."
Coleman began feeding her own addictions at 13. Alcohol, marijuana, acid and hallucinogenic mushrooms sufficed for awhile. She'd use drugs when she was on the run from group homes.
When she was 18, crack became her drug of choice.
She said she'd been homeless off and on for the past two years, sleeping in garages, on porches, in the South Park gazebo and on Massachusetts Street benches.
She was on probation for theft in September 2000 when she was arrested for having a contaminated urine test. She spent 8 1/2 months in the Douglas County Jail and just got out this summer.
Now, she says she's been off drugs since New Year's it was her resolution and she's looking for a job and preparing to get her general equivalency diploma.
Run risk
Coleman's track record is good evidence that not identifying and addressing the issue that pushes a child onto the street or into hiding in the first place often leads found children to run away again.
That's why Lawrence parents Linda and Mark Schraad didn't let their 14-year-old daughter, Megan, come home in November when they found her at a friend's house. She'd been hiding there four days.
Instead, Linda and Mark Schraad, who are divorced, let Lawrence Police officers take their daughter into custody.
"Mark and I said we would not take her back home," Linda Schraad said. "A lot of parents just take them back home and let it go at that."
Megan's parents and police made arrangements for Megan to stay at the Shelter temporarily, but she ran the following Sunday and was gone eight days before she turned herself back in.
Mark and Linda Schraad hoped a stay at the Shelter would begin to instill in Megan some respect for authority. A 13-page list of rules, the bonuses for following them and the consequences for violating them greet children who check into the facility.
Law enforcement
Lawrence police spend a great deal of time looking for runaways.
Sometimes, parents are fairly certain where their children might have gone, said Lawrence Police Sgt. Mike Pattrick. Other times, parents don't know much about where and with whom their children hang out. But officers persist as long as it takes to track down runaways, Pattrick said.
"They're taken seriously because a juvenile should be with their rightful parent or legal guardian," he said. "If they're not, it means they're either up to something they're not supposed to be doing or they're in danger."
Just because they're young doesn't mean runaways are harmless.
Police earlier this month arrested a runaway and another juvenile at an East Lawrence home after the two girls hit and kicked two police officers and a Douglas County Sheriff's deputy who tried to take them into custody.
But not all runaways can be arrested. Unless they break the law in some other way such as shoplifting, using drugs or vandalizing property they can't be held in a locked facility, Culley said.
"People think that if you just lock up runaways then you won't have a runaway problem," she said. "But the law doesn't allow that to happen. That's why it's a much more complicated problem.
"I know it is a headache for law enforcement. I know that it's something that takes a lot of law enforcement time. What you hope is that, as they're identified by law enforcement, they get hooked up with services."
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