And there they are once again, those bell-ringing folks standing next to a red kettle outside several stores at The Highlands and at the Ohio Valley Mall.
It doesn’t matter if one sticks a quarter or a dollar in that bucket, the one with the bell always wishes a Merry Christmas, and that’s likely been true since the Salvation Army started with the jingles in 1891 to remind passersby that some don’t experience that special day.
Some of the men who are seen in front of those retail stores, in fact, are temporary residents of the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter on 16th Street in East Wheeling, and they are paid employees because of a lack of volunteers this year, according to Capt. Mark Van Meter.
“Those are long days for some of them, so we make sure those guys get a hot breakfast, a bagged lunch, and a hot dinner when they come back to the shelter,” he said. “And we’ve also made sure our folks have the gloves and caps they need to be out there for that long.
“When the collections come in, we make sure all of the donations make it to the bank, and then we get back out there the next day,” he said. “It’s what makes all of this work, and we just had to make it work better here in Wheeling.”
Van Meter, though, has been criticized for the changes he has made since he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to Wheeling in June. For the first time since the mid-1970s, he believes, the 16th Street shelter now welcomes only men instead of both genders and even children.
“Some people thought I came in and made these radical changes just to make a big splash, but that’s not what happened at all,” he explained. “What actually took place was that I saw we had a bad situation here in Wheeling, so I brought others from the Salvation Army here to look for themselves. Any time we go to a new place, there’s a review process, and during that process here we took a hard look at our homeless shelter, and what we saw was not a very good situation for anyone involved.
“I have been doing this for 25 years, so when I’m assigned a new location, I immediately start looking for the obvious things like what could cause litigation, risk management, and any other potential issues,” he said. “When we got here, we had women, we had children, and we had men all staying in a fairly unmonitored shelter. A lot of the adults were people who just came out of prison, or they are individuals who are dealing with some kind of mental health issue, too. To say the least, there were a lot of red flags flying in my mind.”
What Van Meter discovered was a region of Salvation Army locations that had strayed from the church’s intended intentions of offering those in need a temporary opportunity to transition to a better life.
“But we had people living in that shelter for at least a year, and that shelter is supposed to be a 21-day emergency shelter. The program here obviously got derailed for whatever reasons, but they had people coming to them and telling them they needed it, and they let it go. It’s a situation that’s been going on for years,” he reported. “When we did close the shelter, it took our shelter manager about four days to get all of the garbage out of there and to clean up some of the vandalism that took place the night before the shelter closed for a week.
“So, we’ve done what we had to do to get this shelter on track and to get it back to the Salvation Army’s mission here in Wheeling,” he said. “My wife and I didn’t expect this here, and we didn’t expect the criticism for doing what we believe will keep those children and everyone else safe from an environment like they were in.”
Van Meter officially implemented the 21-day limit for the shelter’s 35 beds, and the residents have to make their beds and be out of the facility by 7 a.m. The director plans to remodel to the occupancy policy in the future to allow 15 beds for the 21-day stays, 10 beds for 90 days of transitional living, and the other 10 for men who are released from jail with no place to live.
“I had a conversation with a guy just last night, and he was a miner who made good money, but then his mine closed. His relationship ended soon after that, and then his house burned down, and that’s why you just have to feel for a lot of these guys,” Van Meter said. “It really could be any of us who need to stay at the Salvation Army because of the way life goes for us sometimes. We all take a lot for granted every single day until something like what happened to that man happens to us.
“You never know who’s going to pull in and need help, either,” he said. “We’ve had some park their Cadillac Escalades in the lot and stay with us, and the same goes for our Thrift Store. You’d be surprised.”
