Kamari Felton has spent most of his life packing his bags.
As a kid who bounced between aunties’ sofas and homeless shelters, he got used to moving. But this time, as the 22-year-old packed up his room in the Covenant House shelter, he was thrilled. The next day, he’d be riding west toward green mountains and fresh air, to college at Frostburg State University in Maryland, where he was enrolled as a freshman, a scholarship in hand, his schedule already set.
Then the call came.
“They said I wouldn’t get the scholarship because they just realized I wasn’t a Maryland resident,” said Felton, who has lived in both Maryland and D.C. and made his current address at the D.C. shelter clear on his application. “That’s $10,000 I won’t be getting. And without that, college isn’t possible.”
This is what his story looked like at 6 a.m. Thursday, after I spoke with him earlier this week, got in touch with folks at Frostburg State and the financial assistance folks in D.C. government, and published a column online about this preposterous situation.
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Six hours later, he got another call.
Back when he was accepted at Frostburg State, he applied for D.C.’s out-of-state tuition assistance program. Surely it would help this honor student and athlete, the pride of H.D. Woodson High School who quietly hid the fact that he lived in a homeless shelter.
But D.C. told him his application was incomplete — he needed documents proving D.C. residency when he was a kid. That’s hard for someone who was homeless most of his school years. They suggested his mom may have those documents.
“The last day I saw her was in December 2019,” he said. He knows she’s alive, he’s heard that. “But I don’t know where she is.”
So last week he was stuck, in a familiar place of being let down, again and again.
Felton said he’ll never forget the day in 2015 when his family lost their apartment and checked in at D.C. General, a family shelter.
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“It was super, super cold outside. And I had this big, fat, blue coat,” he said, remembering the late night and the paperwork and the exhaustion and the vacant game room they slept in because no rooms were available. “I was just, like, bundling myself inside this coat.”
Life in the shelter was rough, and he watched it swirl around him. Violence and drugs. He saw the adults in his world get caught up in it, and he stayed at school, in sports and in teen programs as long as he could every day, trying to avoid it.
“Kamari was different from the other teens in the program,” said Leah Gage, who was a graduate student when she helped run the Playtime Project’s teen program at the shelter. Felton was in ninth grade when she met him. “He wanted to engage with the adults. He wanted to play chess and board games, to talk to adults about anything.”
He got good grades, played football and basketball, wrestled. He stayed out of trouble and imagined a life after the shelter. Maybe he’d be a professional basketball player. Or a doctor.
When the shelter closed, Felton and Gage kept in touch.
“He never called asking for help. I always waited to hear if he wanted anything when he got in touch,” Gage said. “But he just wanted to talk. … Sometimes people say I’m his mentor. But really, I think we’re friends now.”
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In the years after graduation, Felton bounced between family members, trying to find work, trying to care for his two little brothers. He knew he couldn’t go straight to college after graduation — he needed money, they needed money. His first big interview was with a marketing company. He had a suit, because he went to church. He remembered what he learned at the practice interviews career counselors did at school. The company asked him to come back for a second interview.
The aunt he was living with at the time — deep in Southern Maryland, where there is no public transportation into D.C. — got sick on the day of his second interview and couldn’t drive him. Another chance, gone.
Eventually, he heard from a cousin in New Jersey who offered a place to stay. There, he got a job with a solar panel company. He worked hard on the sales narrative the company gave him, practicing it on the bus, in the bathroom, asking his friends to run through it with him. He did well. His boss liked him.
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“But I was still thinking: College. College. College,” he said.
Then the pandemic hit. It shut down his company, his hopes for college. He wound up bouncing between families and shelters again. When business opened back up, he went to the solar company’s D.C. branch. The New Jersey boss was in charge there and snapped him back up when he saw his application.
“He thought more of me than I did myself,” he said. “And I was surprised. I’m not used to getting compliments like that. It was a little awkward.”
He got back in touch with Gage, who wouldn’t let him forget his college dreams. Eventually, she helped him fill out the Common Application, which connects a student with an array of universities.
“He was so surprised when he started getting responses,” she said. “I wasn’t. But he was.”
She took him to an open house at Frostburg State, way up by the Pennsylvania border. “I could tell he belonged there,” she said.
Felton, who is soft-spoken and introspective, drifts off when he talks about Frostburg State. “It’s just so green. The mountains. It’s so pretty. Nothing like D.C.”
Gage knew it would be life-changing for him.
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“You know, Kamari never got to be a kid. Ever,” she said. “It was a real campus, away from D.C. It would be a real campus experience for him.”
He registered. And was excited. As the first day of orientation grew near, Gage helped him with a Target run.
“I got him things like a shower caddy,” she said. “Stuff a parent would remember.”
He was all packed on Aug. 21. They were supposed to drive up the next day. Then the news came about the scholarship falling through. After all that.
“I told him, ‘Kamari, we can make $10,000 happen,’” Gage said. “But he didn’t just want a handout for this year.” Felton told both of us he wants the paperwork to be right, to know he will have that financial aid for four years. He wants the system to work. A system that has failed him.
When I contacted them earlier this week, the folks at the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education said that Felton’s application was incomplete but that they can work with him. They asked me for his phone number.
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Though Frostburg State officials told Felton he would need $10,000 by Friday to start classes, they told me they were still working on his application.
“We are aware of the situation,” Nicole McDonald, assistant vice president for marketing and communications at the university, said in an email. “Our Office of Financial Aid is continuing to research options to help with his situation. Programs for homelessness are more complex than other financial aid processes, and we are trying to assist the student with other scholarship and aid options.”
When the column published online, we were inundated with offers of assistance. Readers moved by his tenacity wanted to help — to give the help he should’ve received all along. A reader started a GoFundMe account. It began swelling.
“I never thought about a GoFundMe because I didn’t want to feel like a victim,” he told me Thursday morning. He wanted the system to work. He wanted the guarantee of four years of scholarship, he wanted it to be easier for other kids who have experienced homelessness to get the help he needed.
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Gage told Felton that he may want to consider accepting the donations. College is always more expensive than you think.
I told Felton that he needed to email the woman so he could get the funds.
“I’m not used to receiving handouts,” he wrote to her, thanking her profusely. “So it’s kinda hard for me to see that and, you know, accept it.”
Felton had not unpacked his bags. As he had done for years, he remained optimistic, hoping that doing all the right things, doing what everyone has asked of him, would pay off.
And by noon Thursday, it did. The D.C. tuition assistance program told me it reconsidered the rejection of Felton’s application and heard his appeal, and he received notification that his university will get up to $10,000 to cover tuition.
Good thing he didn’t unpack those bags.
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