If you watched the PBS town hall meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last month, you probably had no idea how many homeless people you were looking at.</p><p>In fact, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and &ldquo;NewsHour&rdquo; anchor Jim Lehrer were surrounded by people displaced by the economic downturn. They were handpicked by KCPT staff. You probably didn&rsquo;t notice them because they looked like everyone else. Until recently, they were like everyone else with a roof over their heads. They were waiting to tell Bernanke their stories, to ask him how Fed policies would help ease their pain.</p><p>But they were never called on.</p><p>Tonight, you will hear from them.</p><p>The latest installment of KCPT&rsquo;s &ldquo;Weathering the Financial Storm&rdquo; series, airing at 8 tonight, focuses on families who have lost their homes because of job loss, health care bills and foreclosure. Much of it is told in their own words, using video diaries. </p><p>It is an important part of the bigger economic story, but it has been lost in all the yelling about bailouts and bonuses and stimulus and socialism. These are people who don&rsquo;t have the luxury of painting mustaches on the president&rsquo;s likeness and screaming at their congressional representatives. These are people just trying to get by.</p><p>&ldquo;There hasn&rsquo;t been a lot of national programming on this issue,&rdquo; KCPT&rsquo;s Nick Haines says. &ldquo;The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been very keen on helping fund stations to do more work in this area. The feeling is that local stations can be more nimble in covering this tough economy.&rdquo;</p><p>Indeed, KCPT came up with a nimble idea &mdash; it gave Flip cameras to several families to make video diaries of their homeless experience. The idea, Haines says, is that folks will tell a confession-cam things that they wouldn&rsquo;t tell a camera pointed at them by a stranger.</p><p>You&rsquo;ll hear from one Olathe family of seven who were turned out of their home by job loss.</p><p>&ldquo;The parents didn&rsquo;t feel comfortable on camera, but the kids did,&rdquo; Haines says. &ldquo;The oldest girl took the camera and gave a confessional, and then the other kids talked while the dad was holding the camera.&rdquo;</p><p>And some of the things they say are heartbreaking.</p><p>&ldquo;The kids actually feel guilty about putting their parents in this position,&rdquo; Haines says. </p><p>You won&rsquo;t be surprised to learn one school district has 300 homeless students in it. You might be surprised to learn it&rsquo;s the Shawnee Mission district. </p><p>You may also be surprised to find out how quickly things can go from bad to worse, even in the suburbs. Like the Lee&rsquo;s Summit family who woke up one morning to discover they were squatters. Seems their landlord had his property foreclosed on and didn&rsquo;t bother to tell his tenants. The stress of suddenly winding up on the streets caused a rift in the marriage, and the kids were split up as well. </p><p>This is the fourth installment in the &ldquo;Financial Storm&rdquo; series; previous programs looked at foreclosure, unemployment, health care costs and how families can prepare financially to cope with tough times. If you missed the earlier editions, you can watch them at www.kcpt .org/video or www.weathering thefinancialstorm.org.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">what&rsquo;s working for me &hellip; </span></strong><br /> <strong>1. </strong><strong>Watch the Pilots With </strong><strong>Aaron.</strong> The Legends 14 is filling up fast, so get thee to <a href="http://www.StarAdvantageKC.com">www.StarAdvantageKC.com</a> and click on Contests to join me for the first look at the best of this fall&rsquo;s TV.