Schools and Homeless Students – Massachusetts

Schools hit by expense of transporting homeless, By Kathy McCabe, October 6, 2011, Boston Globe: “The white van with a yellow school bus sign on top stopped at the front door of a hotel on Route 1. A young girl with a heavy backpack stepped off, waving to her mother, who came to meet the bus. Two other children exited the bus and pushed the glass door to enter the lobby. Hotels are a regular stop on public school bus routes north of Boston, where hundreds of homeless families are temporarily living because the state’s 2,000 family shelter units are full. As of Monday, there were 1,437 families living in motels and hotels across Massachusetts, according to the state Department of Housing and Community Development. More than 300 families are living at hotels in Burlington, Chelmsford, Danvers, Haverhill, Malden, Saugus, Tewksbury, and Woburn, according to state data. But since August, when a new program started to place homeless families in permanent housing, the number of families living in hotels has dropped by about 20 percent, or by 341 families, including 30 that moved from Danvers hotels…”