Students Shouldn't Be Punished for Being Homeless

by Shannon Moriarty · 2010-02-08 08:57:00 UTC
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Rosa Bracero should have graduated from high school this week. Instead, she was forced to make an impossible decision between fulfilling her educational aspirations and helping her homeless family gain admittance to a shelter for the night.

Rosa was supposed to take the Regents exam at her Brooklyn high school last week -- a requirement for graduation in New York. But on the day she was scheduled to take the test, her family was evicted from their apartment. When the family went to a homeless intake center, staffers said they would be denied shelter if the entire family was not present for the seven-hour process -- even if it meant Rosa would have to miss her graduation exam.

According to the New York Daily News, the entire family was stunned at the cold, heartless lack of flexibility of the school and the New York shelter system. Rosa herself summed it up best: "I'm homeless so I have to be set back in my goals for my life? Isn't it enough that I'm homeless?"

This year, schools across the U.S. have been dealing with an unprecedented surge of homeless students. The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth says that in the past two years, the number of homeless students has increased 100 percent. Though the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act provides a number of guaranteed protections for homeless students, it can be extremely difficult for these kids to keep up (nevermind excel) when they are without a stable home.

Since Rosa's test debacle hit the papers, the city's education and homeless services departments have backtracked. Rosa's high school allowed her to take the test later in the week. It didn't matter, though; state regulations forbid makeup Regents exams to discourage cheating. The Homeless Services Department, on the other hand, issued a stoic statement, claiming that shelter workers "followed protocol."

Certainly, there's a tough balance between standardizing a complicated process like homeless intake and providing leeway for individual situations. But there must be flexibility for when the "protocol" is counter-productive to the long-term goals of homeless services. Why delay giving a homeless student a shot at earning a diploma, and perhaps a better future?

Photo credit: ScienceBlogs

Shannon Moriarty has worked in various homeless shelters and service organizations around the country. She is a graduate student studying housing and urban policy at Tufts University.
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