Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools

As No Child Left Behind becomes ever more onerous to students and teachers and the penalties ever more draconian, we in VUSD and across the country struggle with more and more students who have no security at home. No place of their own to study in. No assurance that when they go home from school they will be living in the same place as when they left in the morning. This great uncertainty intrudes constantly on the child's thoughts making listening and learning in schools ever more difficult.

Read more in the New York Times. Here is the first couple of paragraphs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/education/06homeless.html?_r=1&hpw

Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools
By ERIK ECKHOLM September 6, 2009 New York Times

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C’s she got last spring — a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel.

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities — and the federal mandate — to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.