Agencies assure homeless have access to education
By JOHN WHITSON New Hampshire Union Leader Staff
August turns to September, parents fill shopping carts with back-to-school supplies, and kids try to pack the most into summer's last days.
As familiar as that ritual may be to most young people, it's foreign to others.
According to the Department of Education, there were at least 1,150 school-age minors throughout the state in 2005-06 who, with their families, had no permanent residence.
There's another population -- an uncounted number of teenagers and young adults living on their own -- who are homeless.
Most of them are trying to survive day to day with minimum-wage jobs.
But a minority try balance unstable lives by staying in school and working toward their high school degree.
"They have arguments with their parents, and they end up banging around and live with parents of their friends until those parents get tired of them and they go find some other friend with parents who will take them in," said Jim Schubert, longtime director of the PASS program -- the city's alternative high school -- at Manchester School of Technology.
As hard as it may be for a homeless teen to stay in school, it has become easier in recent years.
With the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Improvement Act of 2001, New Hampshire took a number of steps toward ensuring homeless kids easier access to school.
Lynda Thistle Elliott, state director of homeless education with the Department of Education, said it's difficult to get an accurate picture of homeless school-age kids.
"It's definitely trending up," she said. "Ten years ago the number was 230. But we're also much better at identifying children and youth in homeless situations now."
The 1,150 figure is arrived at through counts at shelters, she said, but it doesn't include teens who "couch surf" at friends' houses because they're too young to stay at a shelter.
Thistle Elliot said schools reported 180 young people enrolled last year who weren't in the custody of a parent or guardian.
"It's really just an estimate," she cautioned, because kids' living arrangements change throughout the course of a school year.
Families in Transition, a Manchester homeless shelter, served 250 people last year, 136 of whom were children -- not all old enough for school.
Under McKinney-Vento,
Those people have a right to attend school, even if they cannot document residence or provide health care records required of others.
"We're not as stringent on a student coming in who's homeless," said Bonnie Morgan, a Manchester Central High School guidance counselor. "We feel that the one constant in their life that they will need is coming to school every day."
Morgan said it's usually not too difficult to get health and academic records after a student has been registered by calling the school they most recently attended.
A guidance counselor at Central for 29 years, Morgan said homeless families and kids surviving on their own have always been around; they are just more comfortable now letting school officials know about their situation.
"They present themselves to us and say, "I have no other place to turn, and I am homeless,'" said Morgan. "We have kids sleeping in cars. Sometimes they are in motels for a while."
The number fluctuates throughout the school year, but Morgan said there were about 40 Central students last year who at some point were homeless.
Gale Starr, vice president of teen services at Child and Family Services in Manchester, said the local school system "has done a great job" of honoring McKinney-Vento.
Years ago, she said, it was much harder for students new to the district to register without a fixed address. Now, every district in the state has a homeless liaison, and every school in the city has a homeless advocate.
"It's come full circle," said Starr.
There are more social service programs to help kids today, said Schubert, and that prevents them from falling all the way to the streets.
"I think maybe about 15 years ago I had a couple of kids who lived out of boxes -- refrigerator boxes," said Schubert. "What they would do is they would melt candles over the top of them so when it rained they wouldn't get wet. I haven't seen that recently."
Morgan said that not only are there more programs, but young people are very aware of them.
At the Salvation Army's Carey House in Laconia, case worker Jason Seal said the biggest obstacle for his clients is transportation.
About 700 people stayed at Carey House last year -- nearly a quarter of them children.
"The schools aren't the problem," said Seal. "The problem I find is more with the parents themselves. They don't have connections with people who have vehicles and they make poor decisions."
He described a family last year that came from Franklin after being evicted from their house. The parents, he said, pulled their five kids out of school with two months left in the year instead of filling out paperwork for Laconia schools.
Now the children have been held back a year, said Seal. "They were pretty much just lazy," he said of the parents.
Thistle Elliott said homeless families and teens can still face obstacles at registration if the school officials they encounter aren't award of federal law.
"There are always challenges about school enrollment," she said.
"We still deal with issues about residency. Is it better? Yes. Do we still have a long way to go? Yes."
Along with the growth of social service programs, Morgan said, students in Manchester have education options that didn't exist years ago.
"Now we offer PASS, the Omsbudsman program, youth empowerment, GED. There are various things out there where they don't have to be here from 8 to 3 every day."
