Good Article on Homeless Students

Columbus Homeless School Children Increasing

The Dispatch did a nice piece this week on the rise in students who become homeless during the school year. Cleveland had an incredible increase in students in the 2007 to 2008 school year, but we have small increases over the past year.   The number of students in Ohio has increased by 70% since 2006.  The stats from the school district are a valuable tool to look at homelessness in the community.  They do not depend on the number of shelter beds like the homeless stats released by HUD do.  The definition is broad, but easily understandable compared to the definition used by HUD.  And every school district is using the same definition for the past 20 years, and they all must submit data for the school year to the state of Ohio.  The numbers listed in the report in the Columbus Dispatch for Cleveland are different from the numbers I have for the district.  They list 1,123 homeless students for Cleveland, but the graph does not indicate what time frame this is for.  I have 2,275 homeless children from July 2010 to January 2011 within the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.  I have 2,567 for the 2009 to 2010 school year (July 2009 to June 2010).  

But the story does show the huge growth in homeless children in Columbus.  I think that it points to the problem that many cities took their eye off the ball for the past six years especially Columbus.  They focused all their money and staffing on working on long term homeless people and the other programs withered on the vine without a safety net.  Instead of trying to solve homelessness for everyone and trying to reduce the population across the board, they put all their money on one sub-group thus making other sub-groups see their resources decrease and numbers grow.   There is so much pent up demand for housing, jobs, and social services that if you put all your cities resources on one population, all the other groups needing help grows.   Also, if you pay attention only to shelter numbers and the count that HUD does every year, you miss trends in the community.  There are a limited number of shelter beds in the community, and we do not create new beds based on increasing demand.  So, if the family population grows because more people are out of work, the shelters are often the last to know about this trend.  The schools are often the first to know about what is happening with families.

The story on 60 Minutes two weeks ago about homelessness in Florida had a similar message. We should pay more attention to the numbers from the schools.  They say a great deal about trends and issues facing the homeless populations.  It was interesting that the Dispatch quoted a Groveport school official who said that January and February are the worst times for a rise in homeless children.  That is not my experience, which shows a sharp increase in homelessness in May and June after school lets out, but that is not something that the schools would be able to track.  The other piece of information not in the article is the near collapse of the Cincinnati Homeless Child and Youth project.  This was one of the premiere school programs in the United States until a couple of years ago, and it has fallen on hard times with massive budget cuts.  There was a scathing report about the Cincinnati school districts efforts to meet the requirements to get children re-rolled within 24 hours of their family becoming homeless.

We should mention the fantastic program we have in Cleveland, and the massive undertaking of serving all the Cleveland Metropolitan School District children.  Project ACT does a great job in serving all the children living in shelters or on sofas throughout the community.    If a child's family falls into homelessness and the child was a student of CMSD or migrated to Cleveland to seek shelter, we can be assured that the staff at Project ACT will move heaven and earth to get that child back into school.  They will cut through the bureaucracy to get them back into their school of origin or place them in a new school if that is what the parent wants for their child.   It is a huge undertaking, but Project ACT has always done a great job with this transitory population.  During the time of homelessness, which must seem like a hurricane hitting the family to a child, it is nice to have the stability of school for the young person.

Brian
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New School Children Resource Available

What to Do If You Are In Danger of Becoming Homeless While in School?

The state and federal government have clear and unequivocal rules for protecting a child's education. The goal is to get a child situated within 24 hours after becoming homeless with a preference for maintaining their school life unbroken. So, whenever possible, advocates try to keep the child in the school they were attending before their guardian became homeless. The State of Ohio Department of Education enforces these rules, and will make sure that school districts don't try to enforce an arbitrary residency rule on homeless children.

Thanks to our new VISTA, Holly, we have updated the list of contacts from each school district in Cuyahoga County. As the new school year begins, we have posted the 2010-2011 list of homeless liaisons within each school district in Cuyahoga County. With the passage of No Child
Left Behind each district in the United States had to appoint one school official who could help children who may be experiencing homelessness. These liaisons can help identify resources within the community for homeless children, and will help set up transportation back to their school of origin. So, lets say a child's family becomes homeless in October while the child was attending Maple Hts. elementary school, they could search our list and find the district's contact. This district official would help the child pay for transportation from the Harbor Light shelter in Cleveland back to Maple Hts. school every day. They could help with tutoring assistance or printing a family street card from our website to help the household stay together during their stay in the shelters.

Brian
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.

Homeless Families on the Rise

New York Times Story on Homeless Students

The New York Times had a great feature on the increase in homeless children within school as we start the new academic year. This is a huge problem in Cleveland, and we try to help by offering a contact sheet for children in their school district here. This provides information on who is responsible for helping a child that is in danger of being homeless or already without housing. Often the teachers are the first to recognize that there is a problem with the family and their housing situation. They will notice a child will be suddenly come to school tired, depressed, grades will drop, and often the teacher is the one will confide in. The one good thing to come from "No Child Left Behind" Law is that every district has to have a liaison to help students who find themselves homeless and report those stats to the State of Ohio. We are fortunate in Cleveland to have a model program for homeless children at the Cleveland Public Schools with Project ACT.

The Coalition published a report in 2007 on the State of Family Homelessness. We detailed the problem back before the current downturn. The bottom line note from our report was that 2007 was the worst time in our history for homeless women. We listed a number of overarching issues including the lack of domestic violence beds, the inability for couples and even married homeless couples to remain together, and the poor conditions of the family shelters with four facilities closing in the last six years. Things have only gotten worse in Cleveland over the last two years. We saw an amazing increase from the 2006 to 2007 school year and similar numbers last year. Check out the report and the state of homeless reports on our website.

Brian
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.