When 27-year-old LaToya Horton found herself homeless two years ago, her first worry was not about finding a new house or a new job. She wanted to make sure her two boys would be able to stay in school.
There were several challenges, she recalls now, speaking from her job at the One Family Campaign, a coalition of Boston’s homeless activists. Getting her children to school was particularly difficult because her family was moving often – from shelter to shelter, from Malden to Weymouth to Winthrop. One of the boys suffered academically because life at what he called “the big house” (the homeless shelter where Horton and the boys lived) was too different from the home lives of his classmates.
Horton’s children were not unique. According to Boston’s Homeless Census, counted Dec. 8, 2003, there are 1,291 homeless children in the city, approximately one quarter of Boston’s total homeless population. But Mayor Thomas Menino is hopeful that the problem is coming under control: city numbers show an increase in child homelessness of only 4 percent since 1993.
The homeless that Menino counted on the street on the night of Dec. 8 are only part of the picture, Boston Public School officials say. There are about 3,000 children in Boston’s school system who qualify for homeless assistance, according to the district’s Homeless Student Initiative. These include children that “double up” with other families in one home or children temporarily living with relatives.
But Horton’s story might reflect a slightly easier struggle if it took place today and she had access to the services required by the reauthorized federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.
Under the act, reauthorized with several changes by Congress in 2002, all homeless children must be given the same rights to educational services as all other students. The mandate is far-reaching. In an effort to ensure equal educational opportunities, school districts can be responsible for everything from school supplies and uniforms to meals and transportation to extra tutoring or academic attention.
“We give them the extra push that they need to remain in the general education pool,” said Mary William, director of the Homeless Student Initiative. “What every other child has, plus anything else they need to function on par.”
William is one of BPS’s two homeless liaisons – a position the McKinney-Vento reauthorization required every district in the nation to create. They get money from the Massachusetts Department of Education to implement the act in the 134 schools that make up the Boston school system. William, who has worked in the office since 1993, says every school has at least one homeless child, and most have many more than that. At its inception, she noted, the program was geared toward about 100 children.
The office relies on a referral system that calls on various sources, such as school guidance counselors, student support personnel or shelter workers, to report homeless students to the school district liaisons. The liaisons take it from there, making sure students have no problems with enrollment, attendance issues, transfers of records and other support services.
One major facet of McKinney-Vento is that it waives all enrollment requirements to ensure that homeless students can walk into a school and start classes that day. Another is the law’s directive that homeless children can stay in their “school of origin,” or the school they attended before they became homeless.
The provision is important for the sake of continuity, said Peter Cirioni, coordinator for the Department of Education’s Office for the Education of Homeless Children. For children whose lives are already in turmoil, it “produces the least amount of educational disruption,” he said.
But returning to the school of origin can sometimes do more harm than good. At Dearborn Middle School in Roxbury, one of two homeless students makes a daily commute to school from the Peabody motel he is temporarily living in with his family. He takes a cab to the T and then rides into Roxbury. Another student is living in a Quincy shelter and also commutes daily. Often, the students are late – sometimes almost by two hours, Dearborn Principal Teresa Soares-Pena said.
In cases like these, William often acts as an advocate for homeless students and their families as they deal with the city’s “rigid attendance policy,” she said. She and her partner, Donna Caselli, also use some federal funds to train teachers on how to most effectively reach homeless students and communicate with parents.
The Homeless Student Initiative is part of a larger BPS unit, the Unified Student Services Team. In fiscal year 2003, the unit was allocated $80,402,544 total, approximately half of which came from external funds – such as the federal grants that would go toward implementing the McKinney-Vento act. And of the $38,410,240 in external funds, $99,000 comes from the federal government through the state Department of Education specifically for homeless children.
And Boston, with its $99,000, is the largest McKinney-Vento grantee in the state, according to Cirioni. Though he wishes the state could distribute funds on an allocation basis – giving money non-competitively – Cirioni said he has been forced by the lack of total funding to “go competitive” – making districts write grants to apply for funds.
In the grants, districts have to identify the steps they will take to provide a supportive program that will avoid stigmatization, to create a community support network and to develop professional training programs, according to the education department’s website. While the Boston Public School district, one of 372 school districts in the state, traditionally has the largest homeless population and the biggest need, “they also write a good grant,” Cirioni said.
Funds are hugely inadequate overall, he said. But homeless student programs can find other sources of funding. Cirioni and William both identified Title I funds, designated in the No Child Left Behind Act – President George W. Bush’s sweeping 2000 education legislation – as money to improve the academic achievement of the disadvantaged, as an important alternate source of money for homeless programs.
“Title I becomes a very important educational link, because grants just can’t do it,” Cirioni said.
The biggest funding challenge, according to Robyn Frost, president of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, is the “unfunded mandate” that came as part of the McKinney-Vento reauthorization – districts are required to provide transportation to each homeless student, but they are prohibited from using the federal grants to do so. “Sadly the burden of transportation issue has been on cities and towns,” she said. Most districts have to set aside these funds from a general transportation budget, Cirioni agreed.
Another challenge comes not from a lack of funds but from a lack of exposure. William says one of her main goals is to increase community outreach and inform parents about the options available for their children. She holds three luncheons a year with local shelter leaders to educate them about the school district’s policies. Children are not allowed to be in shelters during school hours, which helps in the referral process, she added.
“Boston has done a stellar job of trying to integrate,” Frost said, noting that BPS had sent for more posters to hang in public places in an effort to get the word out to unaware parents, such as LaToya Horton, about homeless children’s rights.
Reaching out to homeless parents is particularly difficult, educators say. Because there is a stigma attached to homelessness, many parents refuse to report their status in the first place. William holds parent-empowerment workshops to help them understand their child’s education and encourage them to be involved.
“It’s very, very hard. The children do not get the attention they deserve,” she said, adding that sometimes, shelter providers become like surrogate parents.