Back in School, but What about Home?
With school having just started back, education seems to be on everyone’s mind. Getting over the anxieties and challenges of starting a new school year can be a big hurdle – especially if your child is entering kindergarten or a new school. This year, my son is a 5th grader at a school that he has attended since pre-school, but my daughter started at a new school as an incoming 6th grader entering middle school. At orientation, she remarked “This place is BIG!” As a parent putting myself in her shoes, I couldn’t have agreed more.
When children have a supportive family and a stable home environment, doing well in school can still be a significant challenge. Keeping up with all of their subjects, text books, assignment sheets, daily reading, and long-term projects can be a tall task! However, there are much greater challenges being faced by large numbers of children in our community.
Last year, 10,555 students in Jefferson County Schools were homeless at some point during the year. To me, that number is staggering, both in terms of volume, as well as impact for each child. I think about how difficult it must be to try to focus on academics when you may not know where you are going to eat or sleep. Even if you’re staying with another family, sleeping on a couch in the living room is a far cry from sleeping in the comfort of your own bed in a private space. It’s also painful to think about the many situations which may have caused the unstable housing to begin with – the loss of a job, a serious illness or death in the family, a lack of financial resources, chemical dependency, mental illness, domestic violence. Every situation is unique.
Fortunately for us, our community is thinking about some of these most challenged students and how we can support them to make sure they have a fighting chance in school. Organizations like the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, the Coalition for the Homeless and systems like Jefferson County Public Schools, our Kentucky’s Department of Community Based Services (child welfare), and Family Courts are teaming up to discuss how we can better support homeless children and their families, and how all of our systems can work together to ensure all children have every chance to be successful, by addressing their holistic needs. When organizations and individuals come together around common goals, amazing things can happen.
I invite you to consider what it would be like to be in a homeless child’s shoes trying to learn in the classroom. What images does this evoke for you? How could taking on this perspective help us all as a community to better support these children’s academic success and long-term stability?
