In the 19 years that Mary has lived in Astoria, Queens, she has seen luxury condos replace squat apartments at a steady pace. The gentrification reached her doorstep last summer when she was evicted. That was the moment when Mary and her two children found themselves homeless, joining the record number of people seeking services from the New York City homeless shelter system.
Even more than housing, Mary said she worried about her children losing the stability and community of their schools. Her son has autism, and attended a special-education program that was good for him.
“My daughter would have adjusted to another school, but not Vinnie,” Mary said. “If you have any special-needs child, to keep them in what they’re comfortable in, their routines, especially when you’re dealing with anything on the autism spectrum, it’s really important.”
But her concern was not unique: given the changing patterns of homelessness in the city, advocates told WNYC many families felt as though they had to choose between a new school and a long commute.
With a record-high 114,659 homeless students in New York City, systems to keep families in their schools and their neighborhoods are stretched thin. Housing instability is increasing fastest in neighborhoods beyond the historic centers of homelessness — and homeless shelters — in the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn.
The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has responded with several programs, promising a “borough by borough, neighborhood by neighborhood approach” to shelter placements. According to the Department of Homeless Services, 73 percent of families for whom domestic violence was not a consideration were placed in shelters in the boroughs where their youngest child attends school.
But that didn't happen for Mary and her family. She was offered a temporary housing placement in Harlem, more than an hour away from her children's schools in Queens.
When city agencies transferred two hundred homeless families this summer to shelters closer to where they lived before, Mary's family wasn’t one of them. Eager to move before schools opened, Mary asked the supervisor at the Harlem shelter to transfer her to another family site operated by the same organization in Astoria.
A few weeks later, she and her family were back in the community they knew best.
New Initiatives
Education officials told WNYC the issue of student homelessness was “a top priority.” Earlier this month, they unveiled a new initiative to place about 100 community coordinators in schools with the largest populations of homeless students.
“They’re going to have 100 percent of their time focused on the students in temporary housing and help connect them to resources, such as expanded learning time, mental health services, connections to food pantries, nutrition programs, and social workers,” said Chris Caruso, who heads the Community Schools program at the Department of Education. “These are the things that our students need to be successful, and we’re confident that we’ll be able to provide that for them.”
The coordinators will offer another line of support that extended beyond the nearly 70 social workers who addressed the needs of homeless students in schools worst affected by housing instability.
One of those schools is P.S. 294 where one-third of the student population is homeless, and many more were teetering on the brink.
“All of the smart hard work that the teachers are doing can’t reach students that are worried about their mother being a victim of domestic violence, that are worried about their mother’s car being stolen,” said Principal Dan Russo. “They’re worried about the fact that they need to need to sneak a little bit of extra lunch in the cafeteria because there’s not food at home for dinner.”
In a school where so many were in flux, Russo said the work every day was focused on stability, including being relentless about student attendance.
“I’m not going to sit in my office and log 10 unanswered parent phone calls so that I can pull that log out some day and say we tried to call," he said emphatically. "I’m going to try twice, and if I can’t find you, I’m going to your house because the truth of the matter is, I need to see you, period. So that’s just it, you have to be tireless with the work. You have to be.”
Schools without such sizable populations of homeless students might not be as equipped to support them. And yet that’s where the rate of student homelessness is growing fastest.
Out of Reach
Christine Quinn, the former City Council Speaker, is the president and CEO of Women in Need, the city’s largest shelter provider to families. She said she supported the mayor’s effort to keep families close to home but also worried about kids who stay in the same school but with very different circumstances.
“That school may have no awareness that that kid is now homeless, no awareness of that trauma," she said. "I’m sure they have the paperwork somewhere, but does each teacher really know?”
That’s something that Mary wondered as she walked her son to his bus stop one morning.
After he reluctantly boarded the bus, Mary said Vinnie was more anxious about school this year, and she worried he might be getting bullied for being homeless. When they first moved back to Queens, Mary said her children were excited about living in a shelter that was a converted motel. Now, she said, they don’t use the word “shelter” anymore.
Correction: This story originally reported the number of homeless students in New York City as 152,839. That figure includes all homeless students in New York State. It has been updated to reflect the number of homeless students in New York City only. The text was updated at 10am on November 14.