Homeless families, cloaked in normality, By Alan Feuer, February 3, 2012, New York Times: “On the sixth day she was homeless, Tonya Lewis overslept. She woke in the dark, in Room 6E at the 93rd Avenue Family Residence, a privately run shelter in Jamaica, Queens. It was 4:45 a.m. She was already running late. Rousting her children – Unique, 15, and Jacaery, 2 – from their beds, Ms. Lewis got them dressed and started shoving DVDs and diapers into two bulging tote bags. When the boys were ready – sleepy, sullen, hoodied, backpacked, in hats and winter jackets – she pushed them out the door (‘Come on, we gotta go!’) to begin their daily routine…”
Tag: Homeless children
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…”
Detroit Free Press Series on Homeless Students
- Michigan’s homeless students: Foreclosure crisis takes toll on 31,000 kids, By Jeff Seidel, December 18, 2011, Detroit Free Press: “Like a silent epidemic, the number of homeless children in Michigan schools is growing. In the 2010-11 school year, more than 31,000 homeless students attended school — 8,500 more than in the previous school year, a 37% spike attributed to the weak economy, loss of jobs and the foreclosure crisis. Overall, the number of homeless students in Michigan has jumped more than 300% in the last four years. Most experts say those numbers are low because many parents are embarrassed to admit they are homeless. And many school districts lack the resources to identify these kids, as required by federal law. Advocates say there’s also a disincentive to find homeless children. Once a district finds them, it has to pay to transport them to school and provide other services — a tough job for many cash-strapped districts. School officials who deal with these children say the numbers are likely to grow next year because of the thousands of families who have lost jobless benefits and other cash assistance…”
- For Michigan’s homeless students, a storage room of backpacks shows community support, By Jeff Seidel, December 19, 2011, Detroit Free Press: “The small cluttered motel room is filled with all their worldly possessions — bags of clothes from a free clothes locker, a fistful of utensils standing up in a Mason jar, a deep fryer, a toaster oven, a Crock-Pot, a box of food donated from a nearby church, and a backpack that links thousands of homeless children across Michigan. The backpack was given to 11-year-old Amber Phillips by the Macomb Intermediate School District because she is a homeless student. She has been living in this motel for two months..”
- Covenant House is a haven for Michigan’s homeless students, By Jeff Seidel, December 20, 2011, Detroit Free Press: “Even before the downturn in the economy, there were thousands of homeless children across the state — kids who ran away from home because of family squabbles or because of abuse or because of myriad other reasons. Some children now might have a new reason to run away. ‘Now, we are seeing kids who leave home because they feel their parents can’t afford them anymore and they feel like, ‘I have to go on my own and spare them paying for me,” said Pamela Kies-Lowe, the state coordinator for Homeless Education at the Michigan Department of Education. ‘They are trying to be magnanimous to their families. They strike out on their own and figure out they can’t make it.’ She said even those who leave for reasons of abuse might have an underlying tie to the economy…”
- Love from new families turns lives around for Michigan’s homeless students, By Jeff Seidel, December 21, 2011, Detroit Free Press: “Traverse City and Adrian are running two of the most unusual programs in the state to help homeless children — families taking in a homeless child for a year so he or she can finish high school. It’s an idea that could be replicated around the state to help agencies already besieged by too many people who need help and not enough money to go around. In both cities, homeless children are placed in mentor homes for the entire school year. Last year, 15 students were in the Traverse City program; all seven seniors graduated. In Adrian, 13 children were in the program last year and all of them also graduated from high school, including two valedictorians. Beth McCullough, who runs the Adrian program, said 87% of the homeless students in the program have gone on to higher education…”