Student Homelessness – Maryland

State’s student homeless population doubles, By Jessica Anderson, January 22, 2012, Baltimore Sun: “For a few hours after school, Ryan Johnson is just like most 16-year-olds. He lounges on the couch with his favorite Xbox game or checks his Facebook page. But then reality sets in. He decamps from his cousins’ house for the Howard County cold-weather shelter. Dinner is a meal with his father and 20 other homeless people. He goes to bed early, on a green plastic mat next to strangers, who also have no other place to go in one of the state’s wealthiest counties. ‘It has been really hard,’ said Ryan, a junior at Wilde Lake High School in Columbia. ‘I look at it like a detention I have to do every day, even though I didn’t do anything wrong.’ Ryan’s experience is becoming increasingly common. The number of homeless students in Maryland has more than doubled in the past five years, rising from 6,721 to 14,117 last school year, according to the Maryland State Department of Education…”