28
9.13.20
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
⬤ THE EDUCATION ISSUE
another mother whom Fifi met during the
day told her that Crystal’s was a bad place,
that it had bedbugs in the rooms and drug
dealers out front.
When the van dropped them off around 11
p.m., with Prince sleeping in Manuel’s arms,
Fifi took a good look around. The shelter was
off a highway. Until 2014, the building had been
the Capri Whitestone, a ‘‘hot-sheet motel’’
where patrons paid by the hour. When the
Department of Homeless Services turned it
into a family shelter, it left up the signs adver-
tising the Capri Whitestone and its 555 Lounge,
and people would continue to arrive looking
for it, until a local state senator petitioned the
department to remove the signs. The next
year, according to news reports, the depart-
ment placed two convicted sex off enders —
one who had molested children — at Crystal’s
Place. (The department did not respond to a
majority of fact- checking requests.)
Fifi didn’t know any of that at the time, but
standing on the sidewalk as cars whirred past
on the other side of the highway barrier, she
saw what looked like drug dealers in front of
the entrance, just as the woman at PATH had
described. There were few stores except for
a strip mall a bit down the highway, and the
shelter was 2.2 miles from the subway stop they
would need to use to take Prince to and from
school every day. She thought about making
this walk and crisscrossing the isolated high-
way, past the cemetery and the Home Depot,
twice a day. Bus service to the subway was
more than a half-mile away. ‘‘I just had a really,
really bad feeling,’’ Fifi told me.
Manuel called his father, and he sent an
Uber to get them to the subway, where they
rode back to his apartment in East Harlem.
The family waited there for another two days
to be logged out of Crystal’s Place.Over the course of 2019, 132,660
people slept in the New York City municipal
shelter system; over two-thirds were fami-
lies, and almost 45,000 were children. Those
statistics don’t represent the true number of
children without stable homes in the city —
children whose families are doubled up at a
friend’s house or staying in a cheap motel. In
some cases, families who have been denied
eligibility for shelter might park their children
at a relative’s home or with a baby sitter for
the night while they sleep on a subway or in
a hallway. A federal law, the McKinney- Vento
Homeless Assistance Act, requires that pub-
lic schools ask incoming students about their
housing status; at the end of last year, families
in New York City reported that 114,000 school-
age children met the McKinney- Vento defi ni-
tion of homelessness: lacking a ‘‘fi xed, regular
and adequate nighttime residence.’’
New York City has the largest public- school
system in the nation, with more than 1.1 mil-
lion students. The number of students who are
homeless is larger than the entire school pop-
ulations of Boston, Indianapolis and Roches-
ter combined. The infl ux of homeless children
into the city school system echoes nationwide
trends; the number of homeless students in the
United States has increased by 70 percent over
the last decade and shows no signs of slowing.
Last year, 43 percent of the city’s homeless
students were chronically absent — defi ned
as missing 10 percent or more of the school
year — compared with 30 percent of students
in poverty and 16 percent of students not in
poverty. A 2018 audit by the city comptroller’s
offi ce found that there was no evidence of
outreach eff orts to 34 percent of students it
surveyed who were chronically absent.
Many homeless children have a hard time
simply getting to school, because they areexhausted from sleeping in an apartment
with more people than beds, or aren’t able to
clean their clothes, or have slept somewhere
far from their school, or have to miss school
to attend mandatory appointments with their
parents. In New York City, families who have
not yet been found eligible for shelter receive
temporary placements in shelters, often miles
from their schools, and are not able to get
school bus service until they are found eligi-
ble, a process that can take anywhere from 10
days to many months.
Around the country, the increase in student
homelessness has gone on for years, mostly
under- acknowledged and poorly studied.
‘‘Most research on homelessness focuses on
single homeless adults,’’ says Barbara Duff -
ield, director of School House Connection, a
national nonprofi t organization that focuses on
homelessness and education. ‘‘There is a lack of
rigorous research on children who are home-
less, their educational outcomes and the long-
term implications of childhood homelessness.’’
The federal Department of Housing and
Urban Development oversees tracking of
homelessness by something called a point-in-
time count, in which it records the number of
people on the streets and in shelters on one
night. By this method, the department reports
that there has been a 29 percent decline in fam-
ily homelessness over the last 10 years. But fam-
ilies avoid the street, and many cities and rural
areas simply don’t have shelters.
The data from schools’ reporting show that
nationally, the number of homeless children
has gone from more than 650,000 in the 2004-5
school year to more than 1.5 million in 2017-18.
State education data released by the National
Center for Homeless Education this January
found that in that same year, nationally, only 29
percent of homeless students passed state exams
in reading and 24 percent in math. In New York
City in 2018-19, 29 percent of students in tem-
porary housing passed the state reading exam
and 27 percent passed the math exam, according
to the New York City Department of Education.
Children living in shelters fared worse: In 2015-
16, only 15 percent of third-through-eighth-grade
students living in one read profi ciently, and only
12 percent met state requirements in math.
Homeless students also have higher rates
of special needs, partly because of health and
developmental factors — poor nutrition, low
birth weight, asthma, exposure to lead, stress.
Their transience also hinders access to treat-
ment and early intervention, and low- income
parents of children with special needs can have
a harder time maintaining employment. Fed-
eral Department of Education data compiled
by the National Center for Homeless Educa-
tion shows that while children with disabili-
ties made up roughly 14 percent of the overall
student population, among homeless students
in 2017-18, the average rate in many states was