One In 10 NYC Students Still Homeless As Crisis Persists

NEW YORK — The last school year was the fourth straight in which New York City's public schools taught more than 100,000 homeless students, according to new data that shows a continuing crisis in the five boroughs.

About one in 10, or 114,085, of the city's district and charter school students were identified as homeless in the 2018-19 school year — enough to fill the Barclays Center arena six times over, according to figures the New York State Technical and Education Assistance Center for Homeless Students released Monday.

The "stubbornly high" total reflects a more than 70 percent increase in student homelessness over the last decade even though the school system's homeless population shrank by about 600 kids compared to the prior year, says Advocates for Children of New York, the nonprofit that runs the center.

"This problem is immense," Kim Sweet, Advocates for Children's executive director, said in a statement. "... The city won’t be able to break the cycle of homelessness until we address the dismal educational outcomes for students who are homeless."

The numbers show one dimension of a citywide homelessness crisis that has kept roughly 60,000 people in shelters each night in recent years. Advocates and officials have blamed the problem on a number of factors including domestic violence and a dearth of affordable housing.

While about 30 percent of the city's homeless students lived in shelters last year, nearly two thirds, or 73,750, were "doubled up" in housing with relatives, friends or others, according to the advocates' data. Nearly 5,500 stayed in cars, parks, trailers, campgrounds or abandoned buildings, and close to 400 lived in hotels or motels, the figures show.

The Bronx was home to the most homeless students in the city with 39,722, of which more than 10,500 were in Geographic District 10 in the borough's northwest corner, according to the data.

Homelessness can have dire effects on how students perform in school, advocates say. Fewer than a third of homeless students can read proficiently, a rate more than 20 percentage points worse than kids with permanent housing, according to Advocates for Children. Moreover, just 57 percent of all homeless students and fewer than half of those in shelters graduate high school, the group says, while the citywide rate is about 76 percent.

Advocates praised the Department of Education for taking further steps to support homeless students. The agency has made "critical investments" in those kids by providing them transportation, social workers and help connecting to other services, department spokesperson Miranda Barbot said.

Among those investments are the placement of 100 social workers in schools to help homeless students with mental health and other needs, while another 100 so-called community coordinators work to link up families with help, the education department said.

Education officials also work with the Department of Social Services to place homeless families closer to their kids' schools through Mayor Bill de Blasio's "Turning the Tide" initiative, which also includes plans for 90 homeless shelters across the city.

"We’re committed to serving these students and families by providing the programs and resources they need to have access to a continuous, high-quality education," Barbot said in a statement.

But the city must go further to curb chronic absenteeism among homeless kids, which affects nearly two thirds of those living in shelters, advocates say.

"With new leadership and school staff in place, the City must begin turning around educational outcomes for students who are homeless, starting with making sure students get to school every day," Sweet said in a statement.

The Coalition for the Homeless, another advocacy group, put the numbers in a harsher light. They show Mayor Bill de Blasio's housing policies "are failing a generation of our kids" by making too few apartments affordable to families forced into homelessness, said Giselle Routhier, the organization's policy director.

"Until he uses every available tool to help our homeless neighbors, the Mayor is needlessly condemning thousands of children to the long-lasting trauma of dislocation that we know impacts their mental health as well as their ability to learn and succeed for years to come," Routhier said in a statement.