Getting Educated About Homeless Students

For 20 nights, Kate has collapsed onto a different air mattress in a new space, a strange place—none of them home.

The 15-year-old, her parents and two younger brothers cart themselves and their meager possessions from shelter to shelter.

On the third Wednesday of the month, Kate and her family migrated, with one plaid suitcase, to my synagogue, along with other nomadic women and their children. Tomorrow night, they will sleep at some church. Friday night? Another church.

This family is part of a St. Louis-based program called “Room at the Inn.” It provides temporary shelter to homeless women and families. Congregations host the homeless, keeping them off the street while blanketing them with safety, warmth and, hopefully, some tenderness. The congregation provides dinner, air mattresses, some waffles and juice and a 6:45 a.m. lift back to a day shelter.

There, in the morning, Kate will catch a taxi to her high school. Her father will head to Walmart, where he will start his fifth day as a cashier, making $9 an hour.

I don’t know where this family lived before they became church drifters. I don’t know whether Kate had a favorite fleece blanket or a desk filled with secret notes from boys or a collection of photo albums.

It is 9:30 p.m. My son, Max, and I, both volunteers for the overnight shift, spread blankets onto our air mattresses as Kate settles into her English homework. She skims her two chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird, takes notes on Atticus and on Scout and then fiddles with a crumpled handout that her teacher has distributed.

Tonight’s assignment: a list of 20 vocabulary words to define. There is certainly no dictionary tucked inside the plaid suitcase.

But, tonight, I am here. And, like a little miracle, I have taught To Kill a Mockingbird about 400 times. I can nearly recite the novel from memory.  

“Cantankerous,” I say. “That one means cranky.”  “Entailment…”

And off we went, word by word.

About two months ago, Missouri mandated that every public school administrator publicly display guidelines about our responsibility in educating the homeless. A poster now hangs in the corner of a window at my school. I just noticed it yesterday.

At the top, the poster states:

The McKinney-Vento Act, part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, guarantees homeless children and youth an education equal to what they would receive if not homeless.  

I think again about dictionary-less Kate sleeping on air mattresses for 20 days (so far), trying to keep up with her life. And I think about all that is missing from this poster.

In 16 years of teaching, I cannot recall a single moment (other than reading this sign) in which we discussed the education of homeless children—not in a meeting, not in an email, not at a conference. Nowhere.

Missouri’s Department of Education website has more than 80 links that delineate a district’s responsibility in educating the Kates in our communities. I suppose each state has its own version. Each school district has a designated homeless coordinator. Until recently, when I conducted my own web search, I never knew any of this.

Perhaps I am alone in my ignorance.

What about Kate’s teachers? Do they know that she’s been homeless for 20 days? How much should they know?

What happens to academic rigor when a student is sleeping among strangers or in a car or on a park bench?

And where in our curriculum do we help students understand the plight of the homeless? And even better, how do we teach them to avoid blaming or shunning?  

As I often do, I turn now to other educators for guidance, for understanding. How does your school district communicate issues about the homeless? When you think about that segment of students, what troubles you on a personal or professional level? How do you balance your curriculum, your responsibilities and your rigor with their fragility and vulnerability? I would love to learn more.

Baker is a language arts teacher at Wydown Middle School in St. Louis.