“Mommy, can you get me something to eat?” he pleaded and whined over and over as the day passed. Tuberculosis ravaged the United States at the turn of the 20th century and, like COVID-19 today, left families missing loved ones. After three months, when the two were reunited, they were placed in a family shelter in Brooklyn. She looked completely zoned out. Left alone to raise four children, did she discover an unexpected resilience and toughness in herself? State education data released by the National Center for Homeless Education this January found that in that same year, nationally, only 29 percent of homeless students passed state exams in reading and 24 percent in math. He was waiting for the school bus carrying his first-grade daughter, London. In their father's absence, Mary's oldest son Karl stepped up to help his younger siblings, including helping get Frank Henry, my grandfather, a job in insurance, where Karl also worked. St. Paul, in comparison to other cities, had a relatively low death rate — 94.3 per 100,000 in 1903. In New York City, families who have not yet been found eligible for shelter receive temporary placements in shelters, often miles from their schools, and are not able to get school bus service until they are found eligible, a process that can take anywhere from 10 days to many months. Over the past two years, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen homeless families with school-age children as they struggled with the often dueling imperatives of finding shelter and keeping their children in school. J intercepted him, put an arm on each of his shoulders as if to steady him and spoke a few words. Perhaps the trait that formed out of necessity was passed down. But the security guard at the entrance took the warm boxes out of her purse and told her she had to throw them away. When families make it down to the bottom level of the center, some take a chance with letting their children run just outside the exit door to burn off some steam. School was an exposure to the wider world of our city in unanticipated ways; to the truth that there was no place for a family that had lived in our neighborhood for generations amid the new, understated charcoal-gray houses, and that more broadly, the enormous wealth of the city would not insulate its vulnerable citizens but rather accelerate their destabilization, and that the adults involved, myself included, were seemingly powerless to help children no different from our own. She sat on the brown vinyl-covered bench, stupefied, the contents of her bag scattered through the bus. ), Over a snack at McDonald’s, I asked RJ, who was repeating first grade, if students in his newest class knew that he was homeless. And his death reminds us of the long-lasting trauma that endures when someone dies before their time: the waste of a life unfulfilled, the holes that remain in the lives of family and friends, sometimes generations later, even when memory fails. J had no live teaching, and his speech therapist had sent Mae cards to print out. A few minutes later, that person charged in, reprimanded me for trespassing and demanded that I leave the property. Allen took London’s hand as they walked down the street. Just as Mary Frances Klein and Karl Klein did a century ago. Quarantine had coincidentally found him better situated than he had ever been: For the first time in Prince’s memory, his family had a precarious hold on a rental apartment in the Bronx. Modern medicine has tamed many of the plagues and scourges that once killed en masse. That night, around midnight, the Department of Homeless Services van took the family to a new placement in the Bronx. If they don’t, they’re bused to a temporary overnight placement for some sleep and then bused back as early as 6 the next morning to continue waiting. She still talked longingly about moving back to the neighborhood where she had many relatives within 10 minutes, where she had grown up, and she talked about having J come back to our school. The norms at many homeless shelters can be jail-like and put a heavy social burden on children. But those events happened a while ago; the restraining orders Fifi took out against him after each one had expired. When I went with the boys and some friends to Legoland, my son came charging off a play structure, red in the face and crying, looking for me. She took a few McNuggets out of the box and hastily tried to feed them to Prince outside. A second grader whose hair was threaded with beads sidled up to her. But on that March morning in 2019, as his classmates settled into their seats in East Harlem, Prince, dressed in a puffy black coat and jeans that slid down his slim frame, instead skipped up the ramp to the PATH intake center in the Bronx for homeless families. I have to find a way to get her back on track.”, Nearly 40 years after the city was first caught off guard by the influx of homeless families, the system for placing them is still unpredictable and haphazard. After school, Angel said, his friends would go home, have a snack and play video games, talking on their headsets, until they met up later. For two weeks after the schools closed down in March because of the coronavirus, Allen had to report to work in Midtown Manhattan. Over all, she said, the city’s approach to homeless students during the pandemic has been “nothing but broken promises.” She noted that this summer, when many struggling students were to be enrolled in summer school and when schools that serve children with severe disabilities have a six-week session, Department of Education iPads could not access the internet; a new login was required. Mitchell told me that sometimes P.S. 401’s students were chronically absent. After Fifi’s time at the domestic-violence shelter ran out, she started looking for a rental apartment for herself and Prince. As long as you have hope, you can move on." And perhaps that's the lesson: It falls upon us, the survivors, to help those left with a hole in their lives. She waved to them. Last year, the city spent roughly $3.2 billion on homeless services, more than double what it spent in 2014, according to a comptroller report. Not having access to an education condemns these kids to a life of poverty, homelessness and hardship.”, The shutdowns the pandemic has brought have worsened many of the conditions that drive family homelessness and undermine education. In the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a recession coincided with deep cuts in social-service programs like job training, day care and aid for dependent children. At the time, I wanted to protect J’s face-saving story and actually didn’t know what to tell my son about where his friend had gone. Prince was well liked, and he knew it; if he arrived too late for school breakfast, he would flash his gap-tooth grin and the cafeteria workers would wave him in to pick up a bagel on his way to class. London wandered out into the hall, and Allen said a shelter staff member reported him to Child Protective Services for negligence. Since Prince was little, teachers have been telling Fifi that with the right challenges and encouragement, he has enormous academic potential. But families avoid the street, and many cities and rural areas simply don’t have shelters. She organized folders of documentation and paperwork so she could jump on any opportunity that came along. I asked RJ if he played with his classmate at the shelter, and he again looked at me with utter bafflement. He looked at me as though I were crazy. Advocates for homeless families warn that without action, the city is poised for an enormous wave of new homeless families and even more children not able to attend school consistently. I was also told by residents at various shelters that nail clippers, scooters and flip-flops were forbidden. She tried to make contact with each of the unstably housed children at breakfast, except for the kindergartners, whom she connects with at lunch. During breakfast, they oriented the children about what day and month it was, because they said children who switch schools a lot and miss days sometimes lose the narrative thread. Federal Department of Education data compiled by the National Center for Homeless Education shows that while children with disabilities made up roughly 14 percent of the overall student population, among homeless students in 2017-18, the average rate in many states was between 18 and 20 percent or higher. Their transience also hinders access to treatment and early intervention, and low-income parents of children with special needs can have a harder time maintaining employment. In New York, this right has created a system incomparable to any other in the nation — a sprawling, incoherent megaplex that involves at least six city departments, which sometimes work at odds with one another, and has a presence in hundreds of buildings in the city, offering very different levels of supervision and support. Knowledge of our patriline seemed to end there. Like COVID, it usually hit the lungs, and spread through respiratory droplets from infected people coughing or just breathing. “What can we do better?” LeRouge asked. Schools have traditionally been organized around place, parish, zone. J lived with his 8-year-old sister and his mother, Mae (Mae asked that I use her middle name and her son’s first initial to protect their privacy), on the top floor of a modest house opposite a cemetery where some of J’s great-grandparents are buried; his family is Hispanic and Italian. She stayed up nights crying and had to leave her job-training program because dealing with her housing situation was a full-time job. “He can’t eat prison food.” Prince didn’t cry, and he stopped whining about being hungry. When the music stopped and she lost her chair, she got angry and started screaming and hyperventilating. How was your day off?”, “I did a lot of things. That morning in the cafeteria, she looked at me, following Wilson and holding my notepad, and then back at Wilson. The influx of homeless children into the city school system echoes nationwide trends; the number of homeless students in the United States has increased by 70 percent over the last decade and shows no signs of slowing. “Yeah, she helped him walk because he couldn’t see with his eye.”, “Attendance is really important,” LeRouge said. And if families become homeless because of domestic violence, as Prince’s originally did, they have to provide each police report and restraining order when they first go to the PATH center. The challenges of “at home” learning for the city’s many children without a home have worried advocates for homeless children since March, when they unsuccessfully campaigned to get access for all homeless students to regional enrichment centers set up by the city for children of essential workers. Eventually, Mae began moving things in plaid plastic zippered bags to the basement of one of her older children’s jobs. Steven Banks, one of the original Legal Aid Society lawyers who went to court to fight for a right to shelter, is the city commissioner of social services and oversees the Department of Homeless Services. The teachers at his elementary school in East Harlem were kind; there was a free after-school soccer program on Mondays, and the class took trips to parts of the city he’d never seen. How sharp was Mary's grief and loneliness? COVID has killed nearly a half million Americans in the past year, although the vaccine may soon bring life closer to normal. Our school is on the rise, working hard to win the race! One night outside the PATH intake center in the Bronx in April 2019, I met a mother, Elizabeth, pushing a double stroller with two babies and trying to reassure her sixth grader, who attended a charter school in the Bronx, that their placement in a hotel in Flushing, Queens, would be fine. Mae worked with the office of a city councilman and a public-interest lawyer to get a stay on her eviction to continue apartment hunting. “It’s really bad. We will preserve the First Amendment rights of those who protest, but those who hurt people or harm property will be arrested. When I first met Prince, on a Thursday in March 2019, he had also been trying to keep up with school from his mother’s tiny phone screen. According to the department, this is partly because the vacancy rate in shelters is so low that it is hard to make precise placements. “I just wait for someone to text me where they decided to meet up,” he explained as we sat on a bench near the subway stop in the Bronx. Homeless students attend all but a dozen of New York City’s 1,600 noncharter public schools, but they are much more highly concentrated in schools in high-poverty areas like Brownsville; according to Advocates for Children of New York, during the 2018-19 school year, there were three other city districts where at least one in five students were homeless. “You could cook in that oven.” Prince skipped across the living-room area, where Fifi and Manuel slept on twin beds pushed together, to show me how big it was. Wilson told me: “What I do know is she doesn’t like to feel a sense of loss and can’t handle disappointment. Those statistics don’t represent the true number of children without stable homes in the city — children whose families are doubled up at a friend’s house or staying in a cheap motel. 401. Then they ran off together. But the bus ride home was even worse, often taking three hours. The New York City Department of Education has not released information about engagement in online learning for students in temporary housing. The number of homeless New Yorkers has risen to the highest point since the Great Depression, and the largest demographic within the homeless population is children. Mitchell, whom I had mostly seen imploring children to chant that nothing can stop them, suddenly seemed weary. “Good morning. Mae had dyslexia and crippling anxiety, which made it hard for her to take mass transit. Only 62 percent of New York City’s homeless students graduated from high school last year; citywide, the overall graduation rate was 77 percent. Research from Voices of Youth Count at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago showed that failure to graduate from high school or earn an equivalency diploma increased the chances of experiencing homelessness as young adults by 4.5 times. I will have a totally new crop of children. She got by on food stamps and public assistance and made her life work, cooking cornbread on a hot plate because her apartment’s ancient stove didn’t work. By 1910, Mary and the four children had moved in with her parents — Irish immigrants Patrick and Marie O'Brien, also in the Midway neighborhood, census records show. In 2018, the city’s Department of Investigation published a report showing that from January to August of the previous year, 59 prostitution-related arrests and 34 assault-related arrests had been made at 34 of the city’s 57 commercial hotels housing homeless families with children. “My file says so.”, As their third day at PATH wore on, Prince could not stomach the food he’d had in the past at PATH — a still-frozen bologna sandwich and a small cup of warm juice with a foil lid, which “tasted like medicine.” He focused all his boredom and frustration on this matter. And he reported that he had made a best friend, J, a boy with bright eyes and a calm, easygoing demeanor who was, his teachers told us, “incredibly sweet.” J was repeating kindergarten because he had completed his first try while still struggling to read, and so he had a few adult teeth poking bunny-style out of his smile. Manuel called his father, and he sent an Uber to get them to the subway, where they rode back to his apartment in East Harlem. Today, no one imagines that family homelessness in New York City is a temporary emergency; it is a tacitly accepted part of the picture of what it means to be poor here. The girl had told Wilson that she prays at night that Wilson will remain at P.S. He was wearing Vans and earrings. J went to a new school again. Last year, 43 percent of the city’s homeless students were chronically absent — defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year — compared with 30 percent of students in poverty and 16 percent of students not in poverty. Nothing can stop me from my greatness!’” The girl with the beaded hair screamed back at the top of her lungs, eyes shining happily. She brushed away tears angrily. If they experienced job loss because of the pandemic, they’re currently protected by an eviction moratorium, which has been extended to the end of the year, but they are most likely amassing unpaid back rent. We owe it to them to do better.”. Homeless families slept on metal cots in gyms and auditoriums, in wards at the Bellevue psychiatric hospital and in “welfare hotels” with deplorable conditions. Allen, who had been living on Long Island, didn’t have a suitable apartment for London to move into. He told me that he spent time in the foster-care system as a child and served time as a minor for selling drugs. A 2018 audit by the city comptroller’s office found that there was no evidence of outreach efforts to 34 percent of students it surveyed who were chronically absent. (To protect their privacy, Allen and London are identified by their middle names.) “He’s a baby,” she said. He just got, in his words, “really mad and really quiet” for the rest of the day. He initially stopped offering homeless families priority placement for public housing and Section 8 programs and established a rental subsidy called the Advantage program, and at first the homeless population dropped. The vans, which transport families, appear to have no car or booster seats and seem to operate primarily at hours that are far past any child’s bedtime. The move had taken an academic toll — Angel said that there was no desk or comfortable place to do homework in the shelter and that he had fallen off the honor roll — but there was also a social toll. But by the time the placement came, Fifi was too exhausted to protest. In August, Mae called me from their current home on Staten Island. “This is my beauty,” Wilson told me. Wilson wore a belted dress and flat sandals, and her hair was arranged in a regal swirl atop her head. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fools!" “Come, walk with Ms. Wilson. When J’s sister got sick with strep throat, Mae discovered that her thermometer was packed in one of those plaid bags in Brooklyn. He was just 45 years old, and he left behind his wife and four young children. Sammie McFarland from Long Covid Kids, which supports more than 1,200 children, said in some cases youngsters had still not recovered nine or 10 months after contracting the disease. One is curious to know more details beyond the scope of the census documents and city directories. Fifi, who is petite and has shiny brown hair, wore skinny jeans and a cross-body purse. The children include 9-year-old Quedynce, 6-year-old Navaeh, 5-year-old Harmony, 3-year-old Jaidus, and 2-year-old Jalaiya. The driver had said the bus would arrive at 3:30. We are going to get some water to splash on your face, and we are going to have a great day today.”, Wilson returned to the second grader with the beads in her hair and sat next to her. The northern climate and fresh air were thought to help. “How much is he affected?” When the results came back, Prince scored an 84, lower than his usual top grades. Her work has also appeared in Foreign Policy, ESPN the Magazine and Wired. One morning I joined the team before breakfast began. (The department did not respond to a majority of fact-checking requests.). “It’s piled so high,” Allen told me that Thursday in the spring of 2019. “I didn’t want to keep switching her. But so far, the boy had not been able to earn the jersey. Our goal is to see transformation in Haiti by raising up the next generation of leaders in a … While the boy was there, LeRouge tried to follow up on his nearly two dozen absences. He knew that his mother wanted to see higher scores. Now that roughly one-tenth of city students are untethered to a place, in the last few years the de Blasio administration and the Department of Education, under Chancellor Richard Carranza, have made efforts to focus on homeless students. He remembers that when the population of homeless families went from 950 in 1982 to more than 5,000 in 1988, he and Koch at first thought it was a temporary bump. He must have been 90, and he smiled widely as he asked me the questions that the old ask the young — What's your job? We strive for a just world, working together with children, young people, our supporters and partners. There were few stores except for a strip mall a bit down the highway, and the shelter was 2.2 miles from the subway stop they would need to use to take Prince to and from school every day. Furman Center, whose research focuses on housing, 239,000 very-low-income renter households are at “high risk” of becoming homeless. “I forgot two kids,” he said. He fell far behind academically. If my son got a better prize from a red supermarket machine, he would gladly give it to J. The staff was trying to figure out how to get students back online. For nearly all his life, he had lived under the curfew imposed by homeless shelters, with no visitors or play dates allowed at his home, and had adapted to long, endless waits at city agencies. In 1903, the United States suffered 165.7 tuberculosis deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 104 COVID deaths per 100,000 people in 2020. The people walking into the PATH center on any given day are mostly indistinguishable from those walking to the shopping center a few blocks away. 401, Shondelle Wilson, a social worker, was appointed to care for the unstably housed children, and Reginald LeRouge was brought on to coordinate efforts for students in temporary housing. The northern air didn't help my great-grandfather. Mae had spent the previous year going through the arduous process of getting her daughter, who is also dyslexic, placed in a private school for children with learning disabilities, where she was now thriving. At a time when the city should be doing everything possible to support students in shelter, it is instead letting them fall even further behind.”. My son, by contrast, was one of the youngest students in the class, an early reader, with what the parenting euphemizers call a “spirited” temperament. 401. 401 during the 2018-19 school year, 104 lived in temporary housing. In February 2019, Fifi suddenly started to see a relative of Prince’s biological father on the street near the shelter. Citing racial bias, former patients claim Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic ignored their abuse claims decades ago Jan. 29, 2021 at 6:00 am Updated Jan. 30, 2021 at 7:18 am Fifi stopped going to her job at Whole Foods to avoid seeing the relative. Nonetheless, according to the 2020 Mayor’s Management Report, only some 50 percent of city shelter placements in 2019 were in the same borough as the youngest child’s home school, a percentage that rose in the first four months of this year to 60 percent. As they waited for the Department of Homeless Services van to pick them up, another mother whom Fifi met during the day told her that Crystal’s was a bad place, that it had bedbugs in the rooms and drug dealers out front. His next stop was to follow up with a fifth-grade boy, a twin who had lived in one of the local family shelters for five years, to find out why he most recently missed school. And Mae says she was told that the conditional status could take 10 days or more, which she had not anticipated, and that during that time, the Department of Education would not provide a school bus. Family homelessness in New York City at the current scale is a phenomenon of the last several decades. By this method, the department reports that there has been a 29 percent decline in family homelessness over the last 10 years. It wasn't an uncommon kind of loss in that age, before the discovery of antibiotics and other miracles of modern medicine. She began to cry and told me that she couldn’t get upset in front of her son; we would have to talk later. Vecinos' week-long program raises funds for children's dental program The event kicks off with The Vecinos Havana Nights Virtual Concert featuring Zona … But working minimum-wage jobs, she was never able to save enough to afford New York City rents, and over the years she and Prince bounced from shelter placement to shelter placement. 401’s more stable families transfer their children upstairs, where they are better shielded from the challenges that the very poorest and most transient students bring. “I had to go with my uncle to get eye surgery,” he said. But Allen could not keep up with the rent on his salary. She wasn’t socializing in the new neighborhood and was panicking more. London had been notably ahead of her peers for a while, Allen said. He'd helped his younger brother Frank through a tough time long ago. He made his first call to a family at one of the shelters down the street and offered to walk down the block and take the child to school if the parent could meet him halfway.