More than 104,000 New York City Students Were Homeless Last Year

Nearly 1 in 10 students in New York City lived in shelters, doubled up with other families, or in cars, abandoned buildings or outside as the city grapples with a housing shortage and affordability crisis. The data did not include the influx of recently arrived homeless migrant children, The Straits Times reported.

The number of students in temporary housing grew by 3 percent over the prior year and has surpassed six figures for seven consecutive school years, posing steep challenges for the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. The city is grappling with how to help its most vulnerable children recover from pandemic learning losses while also integrating the more than 6,000 additional homeless students who have enrolled in city schools over the past four months.

The vast majority of the newest group of students are immigrants from Central and South America who were bused to New York City from Texas after they crossed the US-Mexico border. They have strained a system in which immigrant students have often struggled.

Jennifer Pringle, who works at Advocates for Children of New York, a non-profit that collects the data on homeless students annually, said that the system must meet the needs of the newcomers, “while not losing sight of the long-standing issues” facing local children who are homeless.

“If we want to break this intergenerational cycle of poverty and homelessness, we have to make sure we’re prioritizing education of students in temporary housing,” said Pringle, the director of the organization's Learners in Temporary housing project. “The outcomes are just awful, and without a coordinated, targeted response, we’re not going to see a change.”

While other large cities have similar rates of homelessness among students – in Los Angeles, for example, it is 11 percent – New York City’s vast size puts the problem on a different scale. The number of homeless students here has swelled from roughly 78,000 a decade ago to more than 114,650 at its peak in 2018, about the same size as the entire public school system of Philadelphia.

About 30,000 students lived in shelters. But about 69,000 children were doubled up with other families, and 5,500 other young people lived in cars, parks or abandoned buildings, meaning they were likely to have less access to social services and other supports provided in the shelter system.

Many students living in temporary housing struggled with staggering educational challenges during the pandemic, as they often could no longer rely on school buildings for crucial services like counselling. Some attended classes remotely from shelters that lacked reliable internet access.

More than 6 in 10 homeless children living in shelters were defined as “chronically absent” last year, which means they missed at least 10 percent of school days, more than double the rate of their peers in permanent housing.

Even during more normal times, homeless students often face disruption, sometimes commuting long distances to their schools and transferring to new ones as they bounce between living situations, even though a federal law gives them the right to remain in the same school when they move.

The regular upheaval hurts their academic performance: Only 60 percent of homeless high school students living in shelters graduate in four years. Their high school dropout rate is three times higher than that of students in stable housing.

New York City schools could soon receive a boost in funding for each student they enrol who lives in temporary housing, after a city task force signaled it might propose changing the formula for distributing funds to city schools. The current formula attaches extra money to several groups, including students with disabilities and those learning English as a new language, but it is “missing some special populations”, said Sheree Gibson, a member of the task force, at a recent public meeting in Queens.

The task force will make its recommendations to the school’s chancellor, David C. Banks, this month, and the decision about whether to change the formula lies with him. It is unclear if changes will become effective before funding for the next school year is calculated.

The more than 6,000 new homeless students, of which at least 5,500 are recently arrived migrant children living in shelters, have brought fresh challenges to the system. With many learning English as a new language, some schools have struggled to find enough bilingual teachers and social workers to meet their needs. School officials have said that they are working to add more of those staff members and create new programs for English-language learners.

Nicole Cisuentes is among the new arrivals. A third grader whose family arrived in the country from Colombia last month, Nicole has enroled at the Helen M. Marshall School in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, where more than 40 percent of students were English-language learners last year.

But her mother Julieth Murillo was eager for her to learn English, so Nicole initially joined a classroom where only English was spoken.

Murillo said the adjustment was rocky. “She came home with nothing in her notebooks,” she said, and was not always welcomed by other students. About two weeks ago, Murillo moved Nicole into a dual language class taught in Spanish and English.

“Now she’s really happy,” Murillo said in Spanish. “Everything is going really well, thankfully.”