![]() ![]() While the shelter helped the family meet their basic needs, Ibarra said she asked the school repeatedly for extra academic help for her daughter. “It was like she wasn’t even in school,” Ibarra said. Aaliyah and her older brother, joined by several other children, spent most of their school days on computers in a mixed-grade makeshift classroom at the shelter. The four of them, including Aaliyah’s infant brother, moved next to Homeward Bound, an apartment-like shelter for families, where they were living when the pandemic hit a few months before Aaliyah started kindergarten.Īaliyah’s school, David Crockett Elementary, stuck with online learning her entire kindergarten year. The family spent the next six months at Maggie’s Place, a shelter in North Phoenix that caters to pregnant women. At the time, Ibarra was pregnant with her third child and couldn’t afford the rent with what she earned working at a fast-food restaurant. “If we don’t identify children proactively, we can’t ensure that they have everything they need to be successful in school and even go to school,” she said.īefore the pandemic, Ibarra and her two children moved in with her brother in Phoenix because she was having trouble making ends meet. ![]() The stigma and fear associated with homelessness also can lead families not to tell anyone they lack secure housing, Duffield said. “When I moved, I missed my friends and my teacher,” Aaliyah said. They would say things like, ‘We’re moving again? We just moved!’” Ibarra said. “I know they didn’t enjoy moving as often as we did. She knew how hard the disruptions were on her kids. She was worried if officials knew the family was staying in a shelter, and the school was obliged by law to provide transportation, the family would face pressure to enroll in a different school that was closer. In Bridget Ibarra’s case, she chose not to tell the school her kids were homeless - and she says teachers, disconnected from students by a screen, never asked. Federal counts of homeless people living on the street or in shelters also appeared to decrease in 2021 due to pandemic disruptions, but by 2022, those numbers shot up to the highest in a decade. But the decrease, representing more than 288,000 students, likely includes many kids whose homelessness was unknown to schools. The number of children identified as homeless by schools nationwide dropped by 21% from the 2018-2019 school year to the 2020-2021 school year, according to federal data. Many education leaders, Duffield said, don’t even know about federal money earmarked for homeless students - and the programs expire next year. “There is urgency because of the losses that have occurred over the pandemic - loss in learning, the gaps in attendance and the health crisis,” she said. Schools are offering tutoring and counseling but now have limited time to spend federal pandemic relief money for homeless students, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national homelessness organization. As students nationwide have struggled to make up for missed learning, educators have lost critical time identifying who needs the most help. ![]() Not being identified as homeless meant students lost out on eligibility for crucial support such as transportation, free uniforms, laundry services and other help. Homeless students often fell through the cracks during the tumult of the pandemic, when many schools struggled to keep track of families with unstable housing. ![]()
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