A shocking number of NYC public school kids are homeless
According to an analysis by New York City’s Independent Budget Office, the number of homeless children enrolled in public schools in the city is on the rise, shooting up 15 percent from the 2013-2014 school year.
The analysis found that, last year, 33,000 kids who were enrolled in public schools had spent at least some time in a shelter, which is up 4,000 from the previous year.
The report also found that these homeless children are clustered into small areas. The city has 1,475 school campuses, but only a little over 10 percent of them, 155 schools total, have a homeless student body that is more than 10 percent of total students. The Bronx had the highest percentage, with more than 40 percent of students enrolled in the homeless shelter system.
— New York City welcomes its first-ever homeless Girl Scout troop —
The IBO stated that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to move the homeless population from scattered shelters into larger complexes might actually hurt those concentrations, putting more homeless people into a smaller area, though they stated that it was not immediately clear whether the plan would help or hurt.
“The Mayor’s recent initiative to move families out of hotels and cluster sites and into newly created shelters close to their prior communities may add to the concentration in some schools and reduce it at others,” the report stated.
