"Young and Homeless in Rural America" by Samantha Shapiro pulls the curtain back on the growing issue of houselessness for students in rural communities.
The article follows a few high school students and their families. The story reveals how these rural folks navigate seriously precarious housing situations that often find them relegated to unsafe living conditions as the only alterative to a tent or a car parking lot.
One of the heroes of the story is Sandra Plantz, the homeless liaison for Gallia County Schools located in Ohio. While “homeless liason” is generally a position overlooked in many districts, it was created to bridge the gap in resources for students experiencing homelessness. After training herself on how to identify indicators that a student may be experiencing houselessness or house instability, Plantz reaches the conclusion that the problem is more pervasive than originally thought.
Often times, Plantz is able to detect that a student is experiencing house instability simply by looking at their truancy school records. She’s learned there is a correlation between spotty school attendance and house insecurity.
While the piece is harrowing all the way through, the story of T is particularly tragic. T makes it known that he wants to be the first in his family to graduate high school. Plantz spends two years trying to assist in this goal. In fact, it is written that, “Plantz absorbed T’s dream in all its urgency, as her own.” However, despite valiant efforts on both their parts, T’s houselessness renders him unable to see his dream through.
The article ends with T reflecting on his still ongoing desire to get a GED, despite having almost no support system. He is eager to change the trajectory of his life.
Yet, the odds are stacked against him.
According to the National Center for Homeless Education, there is an average annual increase of 5% in the number of students experiencing homelessness since 2004. While the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 was designed to help offset this rapid increase, the federal law has failed in many respects.
Keith Alan Cunningham explores these failings in “A Question of Priorities: A Critical Investigation of the McKinney-Vento Act”. His article was published in the Academy for Educations Studies in 2014. In his paper, he identifies several core problems with the implementation of the Act. Despite almost 10 years since its publication, the problem identified with the McKinney-Vento Act remain the same.
For starters, there is no unified way of disseminating information regarding resources for houseless students. Because school districts are the administrative arms of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the sole homeless liaison is often left with the task of servicing giant regions with little help, funding, or guidance. This creates discrepancies in who knows about resources and who benefits from them.
Similarly, with no system in place to educate teachers on houselessness, educators are frequently unaware of indicators that may signal a student is experiencing housing insecurity. Without this crucial system, more students fall through the cracks as concurring issues arising from houselessness, like truancy and issues with transportation to and from school, further alienate students from the possibility of successfully completing school.
This is especially true given that the main method of identifying if a student is house insecure is to self-report. Unfortunately, this leads to problems with under identification. Many times students do not know that they qualify as house insecure. Even if they are aware, many will not report what they are experiencing due to feelings of shame and the stigma associated with houselessness.
The real shame, however, is that we are collectively failing students across the country and especially in rural communities. In fact, “[i]n recent years… the highest rate of growth for student homelessness has been in rural America. For many of these students, a high school education is just a dream and not a feasible reality. By these metrics, higher education is not even in the sphere of possibility. If we do not equip school districts with the means to carry out the federal law as it was intended, it is quite literally useless. We will keep perpetuating the utter hopelessness of the type of poverty that robs students of dreams and aspirations.
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3 comments:
Thank you for bringing attention to this issue. I think the disconnect you identify between perceptions of rural homelessness and the actual pervasiveness of the problem is really important. It seems as though rural homelessness exists as an invisible problem that people cannot or do not want to see. As you point out, lack of training on recognizing people experiencing housing insecurity, as well as ineffective distribution of information on available resources for houseless individuals, in conjunction with rural spatiality, leaves growing rural homeless populations largely unidentified, uncounted, and unserved. I also wonder if the seeming invisibility of rural homelessness is influenced by a desire to dissociate the ways we have collectively failed both homeless Americans and rural communities from our national conscience. Even in urban centers where the housing insecurity is more apparent, many people cannot bring themselves to acknowledge homeless people, perhaps because the degree to which we, as a society, are not caring for the houseless is so unspeakable. Similarly, rural America has, in many ways, been left behind, yet there is still not ample policy-based attention to rural issues. I guess it is relatively unsurprising that America does not perceive rural homelessness, which is situated squarely between these two uncomfortable topics – it is easier not to look.
This is such a difficult issue that so many students to face. Another huge issue with underreported numbers lies in families' hesitancy to admit to financial issues out of the fear of child protective services using this to separate kids from their parents. As we have discussed throughout the semester, there is often a mistrust between rural communities and government/authoritative/legal figures, so I would imagine this could be a large and understandable problem for these communities.
I love learning that there is a program seeking to help homeless youth. But as always, it is tragic to see the downfalls of these systems. It seems that there is a common problem in rural communities regarding how to get resources to the right people. It seems like government resources should place some heavier focus on how to make their resources accessible while also productively and accurately making their resources known. I wonder how it is that these programs often miss their target audiences.
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