Shelters, cars and crowded rooms
Alison is only 14 but she knows what she wants to be when she grows up: A surgeon. It’s not easy to study, however, when you’re so exhausted and hungry you can barely get through 9th-grade biology.
An immigrant from Colombia, Alison is one of more than 200,000 K-12 students in California considered homeless because they lack stable housing. And like most of those students, she lives with her family in a home shared with other families — in her case, two other families.
“I go to school every day because I like school, but sometimes I can’t concentrate,” said the Santa Maria teenager whose district reports nearly a third of its students are homeless. “When you’re that tired it affects your personality. You feel like … not much.”
As California’s housing costs continue to soar, more and more children like Alison are suffering the severest of consequences: No place to call home. Since 2014, the number of homeless children in California has jumped 20 percent. In the most recently released data, 202,329 young people are living in cars, motels, shelters, on the street or in crowded homes shared with other families.
That’s just over 3 percent of the enrolled K-12 students, more than twice the national rate, but the actual numbers are almost certainly higher. Schools rely on parents to report their housing status, but shame, fear of deportation or the government taking away their children discourage many parents from truthfully answering the housing questionnaire — typically given to all families at the beginning of the school year.
For families like Alison’s, filling out forms and staying on top of school requirements is not always easy. Her family, for example, has moved six times, including a stint in a rented van, since they left Colombia three years ago.
EdSource is not using the students’ last names in this story to protect their privacy.
By law, schools are required to identify and help homeless students, using state and federal funds to provide school supplies, extra tutoring, transportation to school or whatever else students need to succeed. But an EdSource analysis shows that more than a quarter of California schools report no homeless students at all and provide no services — despite the fact that homeless students live in nearly every community of California, experts say.
“The rate of youth homelessness in California is unconscionable,” said Shahera Hyatt, director of the California Homeless Youth Project, a state agency. “Part of it is we’ve gotten better at counting our homeless students, but there’s no question the housing crisis is playing a role. Housing is a fundamental need, and this crisis needs to be taken more seriously. …. The human and economic cost is great.”
Most of California’s homeless children, 86 percent in 2015, are not homeless in the traditional sense, state data show. They live with their families and have a roof overhead, but share living quarters with other families because they can’t afford their own residence. These families tend to move frequently, and the constant noise hinders attempts to study or sleep. And privacy in the bathroom? Forget it.
“When you’re living like that, you’re embarrassed to go. So you hold it,” Alison said.
In school, homeless children face daunting challenges, and need social services and academic help perhaps more than any other subgroup. Faced with extreme poverty, stress and, like Alison, just plain exhaustion, those children are far more likely to struggle academically and drop out of school than their peers.