When Caitlin Cheney was living at a campground in Washington state with her mother and younger sister, she would do her homework by the light of the portable toilets, sitting on the concrete.
She maintained nearly straight A's even though she had to hitchhike to school, making it there an average of three days a week. "I really liked doing homework," says Cheney, 22, who is now an undergraduate zoology student at Washington State University. "It kept my mind off reality a little bit."
More than 1 million public school students in the United States have no room to call their own, no desk to do their homework, no bed to rely on at night. State data collection, required by federal law and aggregated by the National Center for Homeless Education, shows the number of homeless students has doubled in the past decade, to 1.3 million in 2013-2014.
A new report by the nonpartisan advocacy group Civic Enterprises brings the voices of these students to life.
"I've been working on the dropout problem for more than a decade," says co-author John Bridgeland. "I discovered homelessness wasn't on our radar screen and it wasn't on others' radar screens, notwithstanding this 100 percent increase."
But the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, includes both new mandates and some extra money to assist districts in helping more students like Cheney.
The challenge starts with finding them. As other research has shown, students with insecure housing aren't all living in shelters. They may be doubled up with relatives or moving frequently from place to place. And they may be housed with their whole families, or going it alone.
This study relied on interviews with 44 currently homeless youth and a survey of 158 more who were homeless at some point in middle or high school.
Ninety-four percent reported staying with different people such as relatives or friends, and 44 percent stayed in a hotel, while half had spent some nights in a car, park, abandoned building or a public place like a bus station. Often, schools have a practice of asking for proof of residence only once at enrollment, which doesn't capture transitions or instability.
A second issue in identifying these students is stigma. Two-thirds of the students in the study said they were uncomfortable telling people at school about their situation.
That was the case for Cheney. "I knew that there was a good chance my sister and I would be separated in the foster system," she recalls. "I couldn't allow that to happen. I got the message from my mom that I shouldn't be telling people at school, and I should try to resolve my issues on my own."
Homeless students are disproportionately youth of color and LGBT. Other research cited in the report says 40 to 60 percent have experienced some kind of physical abuse, while 17 to 35 percent have experienced s*xual abuse. And academically they are far behind their peers.
Read more HERE!:
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/06/13/...
Posted By: agnes levine
Thursday, June 23rd 2016 at 1:04PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
