They're the invisible population of Bismarck-Mandan.

They're homeless, and many of them are kids.

They don't often fit into the stereotypical picture of vagrants loitering in a park or camping under a bridge. That could be fatal behavior in North Dakota in the winter.

But they're around. There are school-age children and young people who do not have a permanent, fixed nighttime address, short-term or long. They may be in transit, moving from place to place, including shelters, staying with relatives or through one program or another being staked to a motel room for a while.

First, we have to admit the truth, that there are homeless among us. The degree of denial - or blissful ignorance - on the part of the comfortable majority in the community here is an impediment to delivering assistance to those who lack a feeling of belonging, who lack normalcy and perhaps even lack safety from not having a real residence.

Solutions to all the problems involved do not present themselves easily. It's not only a matter of people's housing; there often are addictions involved, abusive situations, forced unemployment or a pattern of bad choices. Those in social services, other agencies and aid organizations have to deal with a myriad of circumstances going beyond placing a person or a family in housing.

Homelessness is a cluster of thorny problems.

One of the matters to be dealt with is whether homeless children are in school.

Fortunately, there are people working for school districts who care - more than it just being their job - about kids who are homeless, kids who cope with a lack of the stability that most children, thankfully, are able to take for granted.

In the Bismarck School District, homeless students are being helped and being kept track of in an effort to do everything possible to make sure they're in school. Add the number of them to their not-in-school younger or older siblings with whom the district program consequently had contact so far in the school year, and it's 365 - 365 individual young people.

It shouldn't have escaped anyone's notice that it's been a bit cold lately for spending the night in a van. People are compelled to reach out for help.

To name the entities that work to help the homeless locally would be to risk leaving one out. Some of them hardly stir a breeze when they're quietly going about their work of compassion.

One thing is for sure: Not a one of the local volunteer organizations makes a pile of money by jumping onto the backs of the homeless. More often it's a thankless effort, beset with frustrations and occasionally with heartbreak.

Likewise, those whose jobs bring them into contact with the homeless - social workers, school district employees and certainly police officers - don't normally get the affirmation they deserve. It goes below the radar screen when a cop ascertains that a mother and young children are in a parked car because they have nowhere else to go - and the officer makes a call, and a chain of events leads to the homeless folks getting lodging.

It may not give them a permanent address, but at least they're safe from hypothermia. To be homeless anywhere is no walk in the park. Here, it can be grim.