Dear Commons Community,
The number of homeless public school students in New York City reached an all-time high of 119,320 last school year, according to new data released yesterday, as migrants crossing the southern border continued to flock to the city.
Since last summer alone, more than 30,000 new students in temporary housing have enrolled in city schools, including some 12,000 in the last five months who were not reflected in the data. As reported by The New York Times.
The statistics — which include children in shelters, hotels, relatives’ homes and other transient places — illuminate the challenges for Mayor Eric Adams’s administration in handling the rise in homeless students. They are uniquely vulnerable, dropping out at steep rates and often missing school. New York City’s homeless student population is now larger than the entire traditional public school system of Philadelphia.
As the system’s overall enrollment shrinks, the rise in homelessness among children means the issue has touched more schools. Now, about 1 in 9 New York City students are homeless. Some areas of the city have been especially hard hit, however. In one section of the Bronx, more than 22 percent of students were homeless.
The numbers are swelling as the city grapples with a housing shortage and schools face intense financial pressures. The constraints have left some crucial services for homeless students in the system, the nation’s largest, increasingly under threat.
“The situation is becoming more dire,” leaders at Advocates for Children of New York, the nonprofit that has collected the state data for more than a decade, warned in a news release.
Migrant children have made up most of the increase. The students could ultimately be a boon for many schools, helping those with declining enrollment to stave off budget cuts. But several school leaders, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the system was not doing enough to support them.
One Manhattan principal said the Education Department needs to create a separate office to oversee migrant issues and better coordinate resources and enrollment.
Another principal worried that some migrant teenagers might never fully catch up on their schooling before it was time to graduate. And a Brooklyn principal was concerned that migrant students with learning disabilities might not be diagnosed and could miss out on getting help.
Jenna Lyle, an Education Department spokeswoman, pointed to a recent boost in funding for schools with homeless students. “It is our ongoing priority to provide them with every support and resource at our disposal,” she said.
The last record for the number of homeless students in the city was 114,600 in the 2017-18 school year, and 104,000 lacked stable housing during the last school year.
To put this in perspective, New York City’s homeless student population exceeds the total student enrollments in all but nineteen of the country’s 13,000 plus school districts.
Tony
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