By Brittany Hutson
Our nation’s capital and the surrounding communities are stumped over how to properly address a growing epidemic among high school students: homelessness. The number of students who are homeless in the U.S. has climbed to nearly a million for the first time since the Education Department started counting earlier this decade. What’s quite peculiar about the rising stats is that the problem is penetrating some of D.C.’s affluent neighborhoods.
According to the Washington Post, there are 439 homeless students in Loudoun County, 2,000 homeless in Prince George’s County and 950 students homeless in 2009 within the district itself. Known as one of “America’s richest communities” with a median household income above $100,000, Fairfax, Va. has tracked nearly 2,000 homeless students. The issue becomes even more complex because there is a group of homeless students, known as “unaccompanied”, meaning that they are without parents, guardians or reliable shelter, whose numbers are also rising—most especially, in Fairfax, there are about 200 students counted as “unaccompanied” and this figure rose twice the amount it was two years ago.
Though Fairfax underwent an experiment last year using $170,000 in federal grants to provide subsidized housing for students, this is a unique occurrence because although a 2001 federal law requires that every district has a homeless liaison and funnels about $60 million annually to programs aiding homeless students, it does not provide them with any shelter, just access to tutors and transportation.
The criteria by which a student is determined to be homeless is serving as a roadblock for these students to get necessary assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Education Department have differing definitions about a homeless student. By HUD’s definition, students are homeless if they sleep in shelters or on the streets. The Education Department consider students who stay on friends’ couches, in cars or under stadium bleachers, as they do in Fairfax, are homeless.
Fairfax’s Homeless Youth initiative has been successful thus far, but funding is drying up and the possibility of other school districts offering local housing programs is up in the air, the Post reports.
For a nation that is supposed to have one of the largest economies in the world, it is frankly unacceptable that nothing has yet come to fruition in terms of providing adequate housing for students in need. With talks about education reform, this is an issue that certainly needs to be a high priority because as the number of homeless students increases, so does the possibility of them dropping out of school.
