26
9.13.20
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
⬤ THE EDUCATION ISSUE
hen schools in New York City abruptly closed
in March because of the corona virus pandemic,
Prince, a bright, chatty 9-year-old bursting with
kinetic energy, found himself at home plodding
through the Google Classroom app on his moth-
er’s phone. The limbo that came with the shut-
down was not a new experience for him. He and
his mother, Fifi , who is 29, had been homeless
for nearly his entire academic career. (To pro-
tect their privacy, their personal nicknames are
being used to refer to Fifi and Prince.)
He had attended fi ve diff erent elementary
schools and missed many weeks of classes by
the time the city’s schools went online- only.
Like many of New York City’s more than
100,000 homeless schoolchildren, Prince was
familiar with uncertainty and isolation, with
not knowing what day it was. For nearly all his
life, he had lived under the curfew imposed
by homeless shelters, with no visitors or play
dates allowed at his home, and had adapted to
long, endless waits at city agencies. Quarantine
had coincidentally found him better situated
than he had ever been: For the fi rst time in
Prince’s memory, his family had a precarious
hold on a rental apartment in the Bronx.
Since Prince was little, teachers have been
telling Fifi that with the right challenges and
encouragement, he has enormous academic
potential. Before the pandemic, Fifi had been
looking for bigger academic opportunities for
Prince, researching charter schools and gifted
programs. All that was now on hold. It was
disappointing for both of them that Prince
was not really learning anything as they tried
to peck through screens, but they’d been
there before.
When I fi rst met Prince, on a Thursday in
March 2019, he had also been trying to keep
up with school from his mother’s tiny phone
screen. His second- grade class was working
on a new unit; there would be a big test the
following week. Math was Prince’s favorite
subject, and he wanted to do well on the test.
When he brought home A’s, his mother would
buy him a new toy. Prince almost always deliv-
ered the grades. It wasn’t hard; he genuinely
loved school. The teachers at his elementary
school in East Harlem were kind; there was a
free after-school soccer program on Mondays,
and the class took trips to parts of the city he’d
never seen. Prince enrolled in that school just
fi ve months earlier but had been absorbed
into a group of friends and the rhythms of theclassroom easily. Prince was well liked, and he
knew it; if he arrived too late for school break-
fast, he would fl ash his gap-tooth grin and the
cafeteria workers would wave him in to pick
up a bagel on his way to class.
But on that March morning in 2019, as his
classmates settled into their seats in East Har-
lem, Prince, dressed in a puff y black coat and
jeans that slid down his slim frame, instead
skipped up the ramp to the PATH intake center
in the Bronx for homeless families. Fifi , who is
petite and has shiny brown hair, wore skinny
jeans and a cross- body purse. Her boyfriend,
Manuel (his middle name), who is 37 and whom
Prince called Dad, followed, carrying a back-
pack cooler full of the family’s important doc-
uments and pushing a shopping cart loaded
with neatly folded bedding and clothes packed
in laundry and garbage bags.
PATH, Prevention Assistance and Tempo-
rary Housing, is where homeless families in
New York City go to apply for shelter, and
where they go to reapply if they are initially
found ineligible or if they are ‘‘logged out’’
after missing check-in at their shelter for two
nights in a row. The number of homeless New
Yorkers has risen to the highest point since
the Great Depression, and the largest demo-
graphic within the homeless population is
children. As a result, the number of homeless
students has increased nearly 70 percent over
the last decade, according to the Department
of Education. Over the past two years, I’ve
spoken with more than a dozen homeless
families with school-age children as they
struggled with the often dueling imperatives
of fi nding shelter and keeping their children
in school.
Despite making up a majority of the city’s
homeless population, homeless families are
often not visible in the way single homeless
adults can be — if a family is found living on
the street, the children can be taken away by
Child Protective Services. The people walking
into the PATH center on any given day are
mostly indistinguishable from those walking
to the shopping center a few blocks away.
You have to look closely to fi nd the telltale
giveaways — a few too many bags, or the lit-
tle boy I met with his sister and mother on a
sunny day dragging a large plastic Paw Patrol
umbrella with a hooked handle, a prized pos-
session that he wanted to have with him wher-
ever he ended up next.
New York City is the only place in America
that guarantees a universal ‘‘right to shelter,’’
hard fought for by activists over decades in
court and granted to men, women and chil-
dren by 1987. In New York, this right has creat-
ed a system incomparable to any other in the
nation — a sprawling, incoherent megaplex
that involves at least six city departments,
which sometimes work at odds with one
another, and has a presence in hundreds ofbuildings in the city, off ering very diff erent
levels of supervision and support.
In order to qualify to be placed in a home-
less shelter, a family must document all resi-
dences from the previous two years and prove
to PATH’s fraud investigators that they cannot
return to any of them. And if families become
homeless because of domestic violence, as
Prince’s originally did, they have to provide
each police report and restraining order when
they fi rst go to the PATH center. In 2018, only
40 percent of families who applied for shelter
at PATH met all the requirements and gained
a placement.
At the PATH intake center, Manuel parked
the family’s cart in the luggage area. Prince
settled into a gray vinyl chair. He would spend
most of the next week at the center, along with
many other city schoolchildren, watching
boards that fl ashed the number of the next
family to be called. Experientially, PATH is
like a multilevel Department of Motor Vehi-
cles: Families arrive during the day and move
from fl oor to fl oor, with long waits on each one,
fi nally ending up on the basement level. From
there, they might receive a housing assign-
ment by midnight or later. If they don’t, they’re
bused to a temporary overnight placement for
some sleep and then bused back as early as 6
the next morning to continue waiting.
It was Fifi ’s ardent wish that Prince would
manage to put himself on the other side of the
city’s divide and end up more like the people
she had served as a nanny or in jobs at Whole
Foods and food service at the airport. That’s
why she off ered toys for good grades. She and
Manuel showed up together for every parent-
teacher conference, checked in with Prince’s
teacher at school pickup and often took home
the free books that were left in a box at the
school entrance to read with Prince at night.
If Prince could have been in school instead
of the PATH center that Thursday, Fifi would
have found a way, but the city generally requires
parents to bring their school-age children to
the center for the intake process, regardless
of whether they’re missing school. So at the
center each day around 3 p.m., when school let
out, Fifi logged into Prince’s class app from her
phone to download the day’s math lesson. It
was the most challenging work of the year, and
the two pored over the lesson — subtraction on
a number line, addition with regrouping 10s —
and reviewed the three pages inked in colored
pen over and over as they waited.Fifi and Prince entered the homeless-
shelter system when Prince was a baby
and Fifi fl ed a dangerous situation at home
with Prince’s biological father to a tempo-
rary shelter for women escaping domestic
violence. After Fifi ’s time at the domestic-
violence shelter ran out, she started looking
for a rental apartment for herself and Prince.