A Homeless Child in Every Classroom

by Josie Raymond · 2010-08-19 14:00:00 UTC
Topics:

When I read the other day that there are almost one million homeless students enrolled in public schools in the United States, I felt like I'd been hit in the head with a flying chalkboard eraser. One million? How is that possible?

The AP did a good job of breaking down that mind-boggling number into smaller, merely infuriating nuggets of data.

Take its example of South Dakota. The state had 1,794 homeless students in the 2008-2009 school year, a jump of 73 percent from the 2006-2007 school year. So here are 2,000 of those 1,000,000 students.

Let's break it down even more. More than 1,000 homeless students are part of the Sioux Falls school district, which has 22,000 students in all. Following the math, about one child per classroom is homeless. Teachers in Sioux Falls (one of the most American of towns, don't you think?) can look at their pupils and know that one of them doesn't go home after school. Students can look around the classroom and wonder which of their friends is homeless. Unless, of course, it's them.

Gail Swenson, the supervisor of the district's Office of Homeless Education, told a reporter that contrary to what people might expect, there are homeless children in every single school in the district, in rich neighborhoods and poor ones. "Some would like to believe one part of town would not have a homeless child and another part would. It's across the board."

South Dakota is a microcosm. It's probably not even the best example since it has the second lowest unemployment rate in the nation at just 4.5 percent. Now imagine a similar situation in districts in every state. South Dakota's percentage of homeless students "only" rose by 73 percent. Texas saw its numbers increase by 139 percent, Iowa by 136 percent and New Mexico by 91 percent. Could homeless students be more common than pencil sharpeners in our country's schools?

Photo credit: amishsteve

Josie Raymond is a Change.org editor who has reported from the streets of the South Bronx, written for several magazines that folded (not her fault) and fixed thousands of typos.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Stimulus Funds to Rehire Teachers Banked for the Future Instead
NEXT STORY:
Sallie Mae Blinks!

COMMENTS (5)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.