Sumner Schools See Large Jump in Homelessness

Editor’s Note: This is part of a special report that looks at the growing number of homeless students in the Sumner School District. Today we look at the financial impact on the district of getting children to classes, as well as the psychological effect homelessness has on children. Read that story . Tomorrow, learn about the limitations of resources for homeless students, and the economy’s effect on student enrollment. Patch partnered with InvestigateWest for this report. The names of the family profiled in this story are pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

Shelby is a fourth-grader at McAlder Elementary and sings in the choir. One day, she hopes to go into fashion design–she adores Project Runway and sketches dresses she imagines will appear on the catwalk during New York Fashion Week. She likes black streaks in her blonde hair and once wore a fake lip ring so long it left a mark.

Shelby doesn’t care that the other kids at school make fun of her for being different, for doing things like coloring her hair funky colors, or taking a cab to school. They call her “crazy” because the cab says “Horizon Medical” on the side of it. Shelby said her classmates think she is being brought to school from an insane asylum.

Although the other fourth-graders tease her, Shelby doesn’t correct them. She knows the truth is less glamorous–a cab picks her up outside her trailer for school because she is considered homeless.

Shelby is one of 255 homeless students in the this year—a number that has increased almost 39 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

In last year's district Healthy Youth Survey, 2.3 percent of the student population couldn't predict their living situation throughout the school year.

That tracks with a study released in December, which shows 21,826 homeless students statewide in the 2009-2010 school year, a 30 percent increase in three years, according to InvestigateWest, which partnered with Patch on this report. The reporting period compares the numbers of homeless students reported in the 2006-2007 school year, before the recession began in December of 2007, to the most current full year, 2009-2010.

“There are a lot of families who have lost their homes due to foreclosure …. They are the new poor,” said Molly Mergeth, homeless-student coordinator for the Sumner School District. “Some of these people have been nowhere near poverty levels before. Then, on the lower economic side, struggling families can’t find affordable housing here. Their rental homes are being foreclosed on.”

Doubling up, couch-surfing

The increasing numbers of homeless students reflect a national trend, driven largely by the fallout of the grim economy. Families are the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population. They now account for 40 percent of the homeless population, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness. And most of those families have school-age children.

According to a July report by the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, the number of students who are homeless across the country has increased 41 percent in two years, to about 1 million students.
School districts around the state are grappling with how to help growing populations of at-risk students, even as budget cuts further slash their ability to meet their federal obligation to do so.

Under the federal McKinney-Vento Act, school districts are required to identify and report homeless students and to guarantee those students transportation so they can stay at their original schools, even if they have been forced to find emergency shelter outside the district. The districts are required to track how many students are living in motels, living with relatives, in cars or in shelters.

In Sumner, a majority of families are doubling up and living with family and friends, said Marilee Hill-Anderson, director of the STARR Project. The issue becomes even more complicated when the kids become teenagers. Hill-Anderson said that out of 84 homeless teens in the district, 57 of them were unaccompanied, meaning they were couch-surfing, living with friends or with a partner. (Click here for a look at where homeless Sumner students were living in 2009-10.)

“A lot of these students turn 18 [before graduation] and their parents ask them to leave,” said Hill-Anderson. “So they stay with friends, boyfriends or girlfriends.”

The Sumner School District has participated in McKinney-Vento since the 2001-2002 school year. This year, the district was granted $28,890 in McKinney-Vento funding, renewable for the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years. About 95 percent of that money goes toward Megerth’s salary and benefits, and the rest is put toward program support funds.

Struggles at home

Shelby and four of her siblings are still in the Sumner School District, even after turmoil at home. Shelby’s mom, Melissa, (who asked that her real name not be used), served over a year at Purdy Women's Correctional Facility for methamphetamine related charges. She was just released this last September. While in prison, Melissa’s mom, who lives in Sumner, watched over the kids.

Her eldest daughter had a child at 18. Her eldest son is a student at Sumner High and could face jail time for criminal acts against a minor. Her second-oldest daughter, a student at Bonney Lake High, is couch-surfing with friends after another living situation didn’t work out.

Melissa and her three youngest girls, all students at McAlder Elementary, share one bedroom in a small trailer with a woman Melissa met in prison. It’s Melissa’s dream to one day find a house in Sumner big enough to fit her whole family, something she won’t be able to do until she finds a secure job. As a convicted felon, it’s no easy task.

The trailer park is small, with only a handful of neighbors down a dead-end street. Melissa said the people in the other trailers are drug dealers and addicts. Even in that environment, Melissa isn’t tempted to get back into her old ways.

“Prison was a hard lesson for me to learn, but the ones who really suffered and paid for it were my kids.”

Costly transportation

Being homeless can affect how children learn, can lead to depression, and can be misdiagnosed as learning disabilities, labels that stick with a child for years. (See related story).

“The main goal of identifying kids is so they can stay in their school of origin, so they have consistency with their peers, teachers and educational progress,” said Melinda Dyer, program supervisor for Education of Homeless Children and Youth for the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. That means providing cabs, bus passes, or transportation, even if it means kids are commuting up to an hour and a half a day to school.

It’s up to individual school districts to squeeze that transportation money from their own budgets. “There is no pot of money for homeless students,” said Dyer. “It’s a big burden for districts.”

During this school year, Sumner has spent $55,000 of its general fund transporting homeless students, picking up them up as far away as Tacoma. Ann Cook, head of communications for the Sumner School District, said that the Pierce County school districts don’t charge each other for shuttling students and work to find alternative transportation, like supplying Orca transit cards or reimbursing gas.

“Transportation costs vary widely depending on the needs of the students, where they’re living and the ability of their caregivers. There isn’t a specific amount of money set aside for transportation,” said Cook.

The rationale for keeping kids in their original school is that it helps their learning.

A small 2006 pilot study by the Washington State Department of Transportation found that while homeless kids typically had lower grades and Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) scores than non-homeless students, the grades and scores were better among those homeless students who got to stay in their original schools.

Shelby and her sisters don’t like riding in the Horizon Medical cab. They said the driver smokes cigarettes in the cab and they smell bad when they get to school. Sometimes she’s late picking them up and they miss breakfast, which they qualify for on the free and reduced lunch program.

Although Shelby is the oldest, Macy is in charge of Katie’s carseat, which she stores in the school’s front office. Every morning, she drops it off with the staff and every afternoon she picks it up and meets her sisters in the carpool lane with the rest of the student body as they wait for their ride home.

The girls have asked the cab driver to hang back and wait for the other kids to leave before she pulls up in front of the school, but the driver is often impatient and goes through the carpool lane with all the other vans and family sedans.

The girls climb into the cab with their backpacks full of notebooks, books and sometimes food, for the 20-minute ride back to their trailer on River Road.