Kirkland Schools Grappling With Helping More Homeless Students

Editor’s Note: This is a special report about homeless students in the Lake Washington School District. Patch partnered with Investigate West for this report. Today we look at the growing number of homeless students in the district, and the psychological effects homelessness has on students. Tomorrow we learn about one Kirkland school’s approach to helping students in need.

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Ask what concerns a school kid and you might get a list like this: wearing the right clothes, getting picked for the baseball team, maybe getting a cell phone. For a small but growing number of Kirkland students, the worry is more basic: where they’ll sleep, and how they'll get to school.

They might be sleeping on a friend's couch in Federal Way, while attending Lake Washington High School on Rose Hill. Their family might be staying with relatives in Snohomish, when the kids attend Helen Keller Elementary in Juanita. 

The Lake Washington School District and other districts around the state are grappling with how to help growing numbers of homeless students, even as budget cuts slash their ability to meet their federal obligation to do so.

This school year, the Lake Washington district identified 177 students as homeless. That’s up from 119 last school year, and nearly four times the numbers counted in 2006-07. At Kirkland’s two traditional high schools, Juanita and Lake Washington, 55 students were considered homeless in a March count; the previous school year the number was 38.

The numbers of students are a tiny portion of the district’s total population of 24,560, as of October 2010. But getting those kids to class costs the district more than $300,000 a year.

“It is a very small percentage, but there is a lot of need,” said Cheryl Chikalla, a district program specialist who tracks homeless student numbers and helps coordinate their transportation needs.

Under the federal McKinney-Vento Act, school districts are required to identify and report homeless students and to guarantee those students transportation so they can stay at their original schools even if they have been forced to find emergency shelter outside the district.

“We see people who never would have thought they would be classified as homeless, but are due to foreclosure or because the house they were renting was foreclosed, and they had no place to go,” says Chikalla.

The districts are required to track how many students are living in motels, doubled up with relatives, in cars or in shelters. (Click here for a look at where Lake Washington students were living in 2009-10.)

Many teachers and counselors say that's not only a federal requirement, but a personal obligation.

"I try to be their voice," says Concha Lapuente, a counselor at Helen Keller. "You have a right to a childhood. You have a right to food. I'm not going to let them sleep on the street. It's lovely sometimes to see them jumping up and down at recess like a regular kid."

Transportation squeeze

Being homeless can affect how children learn, can lead to depression, and can be misdiagnosed as learning disabilities.

“The main goal of identifying kids is so they can stay in their school of origin, so they have consistency with their peers, teachers and educational progress,” said Melinda Dyer, program supervisor for Education of Homeless Children and Youth for the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

That means providing cabs, bus passes, or other means of transportation for kids, even if it means they are commuting up to an hour and a half a day to school.

It’s up to individual school districts to squeeze that transportation money from their own budgets.

“There is no pot of money for homeless students,” said Dyer. “It’s a big burden for districts.”

Jeff Miles, LWSD transportation manager, said the district spent some $346,000 during the 2008-09 school year getting homeless kids to and from their original schools, and $314,000 in the 2009-10 school year. Those numbers represent just the cost of transporting students to and from outside the district.

For this school year, through February the district had spent $123,000, “so we’re on track for another $300,000-plus year.”

A report released in December shows 21,826 homeless students statewide in the 2009-2010 school year, a 30 percent increase in three years. That reporting period compares the numbers of homeless students reported in the 2006-2007 school year, before the recession began in December of 2007, to the most current full year, 2009-2010.

The increase reflects, in part, the grim economy. But Chikalla said teachers, counselors and administrators also are getting better at identifying homeless students. For example, this school year the Lake Washington district began putting questions on school registration forms that help spot such students. “Each year we get a little better at it,” she said.

At the same time, the numbers might also underestimate the size of the problem because many families go out of their way to hide their homelessness for fear of being stigmatized.

There is no doubt that the problems of homelessness and economic need have grown, said Lapuente, the counselor at Helen Keller, a school in a more working-class area of Kirkland with a concentration of low-income housing. At the urging of a neighborhood volunteer, Chris Pederson, Keller last year began a program called “Backpack for Hunger,” which sends needy students home with a backpack of donated food.

“The need was always there, but it has increased a lot,” Lapuente said. “I have double the number of people in this program than last year. I had 12 and this year 25.”

‘Do I have a place for homework?’

The state receives some federal money to help districts offset transportation costs and other expenses associated with tracking and helping homeless students. But Washington’s share of those funds was slashed by 28 percent this year, from $1.19 million last year to $862,000 this year, said the state’s Dyer.

School districts can apply for federal money to help defray their homeless student costs. This year, 23 districts received the grants, most of which were between $25,000 and $35,000 and were awarded on a competitive basis.

Transportation is only one cost connected to homelessness. Identifying the kids in the first place requires resources and can be challenging. Families don’t always disclose, or want it known, that they have lost their housing, or are couch-surfing and staying in motels.

High school students, in particular, may go out of their way to hide the fact they’re homeless to avoid being stigmatized by peers. Many districts rely on service agencies to help them identify kids and teens whose families are homeless, as well as teachers, school volunteers and others who may spot a red flag that indicates homelessness.

Lapuente said younger homeless students tend to be more resilient.

“The stigma, I think, comes with age,” she said. “I don’t think there is a stigma attached to the younger kids. They could be doubled up with someone else. That is really common in some areas. But that’s all they know, so it becomes normalcy.”

At the same time, they are often very much affected on a personal level by the uncertainty of their housing situation.

“There are different levels of homeless,” she said. “They might be a hotel sleeping on the floor with six other people. They might wonder ‘Do I have a place for homework? Where am I going tonight? Will it be Snohomish or Kirkland?’ There are kids who absorb the financial problems of their families. They are highly aware of any expense. They have a mini-adult built in. They are very aware of anything concerning money.”

Being homeless affects how children learn, said teachers and therapists who work with this population. Hunger, sleep deprivation, and post-traumatic-stress can lead to behavioral problems in the classroom, or interfere with concentration. (See this related story on the effects on children.)

The rationale for keeping kids in their original school is that it helps their learning.

A small 2006 pilot study by the Washington State Department of Transportation found that while homeless kids typically had lower grades and Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) scores than non-homeless students, the grades and scores were better among those homeless students who got to stay in their original schools.

“You make just one move and you lose half a year of educational growth due to the emotion of that move,” explained Chikalla, the LWSD program specialist. “They have to re-establish friendships and relationships with teachers. They kind of lose everything they knew.”