August 16, 2017
There were 100,000 homeless students in New York City public schools during the 2015-16 school year, a number equal to the population of Albany.
The daunting challenges that creates, both for individual children struggling to learn and for schools trying to improve performance, are laid out in a report to be released on Wednesday by the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness. If current trends continue, the report’s authors say, one in every seven New York City public school students will be homeless at some point during elementary school.
“In every school classroom, that’s two or three kids,” said Anna Shaw-Amoah, principal policy analyst at the institute. “And the challenges are not just about whether you’re currently living in a shelter or a doubled up setting, but did they have that experience last year, or did they have this experience in kindergarten? The instability really travels with students. If you fall behind in one year, it’s going to be harder to get on grade level the next year.”
Within the last six years, more than 140,000 New York City students have been homeless, the report said.
The growing number of homeless children is part of the fallout of the city’s housing crisis, which has seen a growing number of families in city shelters, as rents have risen, federal and state aid has dwindled, and a state rental assistance program ended. The de Blasio administration has struggled to slow the rising numbers, but with little success.
Read more at New York Times
