For homeless college students, power absenteeism is dismayingly excessive.
The variety of college students who repeatedly miss faculty normally has risen for the reason that pandemic, however for homeless college students, it’s been particularly unhealthy. Although federal regulation requires states to offer public schooling to homeless college students, delivering on this has confirmed troublesome. And getting homeless college students to point out as much as faculty has been an elusive objective for a lot of districts.
Leaders of a college in San Diego — an space with one of many largest homeless populations within the nation — suppose they’ve a solution. Monarch Faculty, a public-private Ok-12 faculty, is an association between the San Diego County Workplace of Training and an area nonprofit. It has round 300 college students, all of them experiencing homelessness or vulnerable to changing into homeless.
Solely having college students experiencing homelessness creates a way of neighborhood, faculty leaders argue, eradicating the stigma of not having a dependable place to name dwelling. It additionally allows the varsity to concentrate on offering tailor-made social-emotional studying.
So why do critics say the very concept of a college for the homeless is “problematic?”
Considered one of a Variety
The McKinney-Vento Act, the federal regulation overseeing homeless schooling, bans homeless-only faculties as a type of “segregation.”
Monarch Faculty advantages from an exception, making it the solely publicly funded separate faculty for homeless college students. That standing is partially as a result of highly effective lawmakers together with Dianne Feinstein, California’s longest-serving senator who died in late September, have supported the varsity.
Monarch Faculty depends on a neighborhood strategy to schooling and social providers, emphasizing on-site household packages and assets. For instance: The college has on-campus showers, meals pantries, licensed clinicians and social packages. It encourages complete households to utilize free housing and well being help, partially via its mother or father useful resource heart.
In case you ask faculty leaders, that units it aside.
When dad and mom, college students and households are experiencing trauma, it may be truly actually useful to point out as much as one constructing, says Marisol Alvarado, vp of packages at Monarch Faculty.
Most college students are referred to Monarch Faculty via social staff from different establishments, and the varsity says that’s due to the social packages it affords.
“The emphasis of our work is to offer a secure and socially nurturing place for unhoused college students to realize tutorial success,” says Afira DeVries, CEO of Monarch Faculty. Which means constructing a standalone neighborhood as a result of, she says, it’s arduous for college students who don’t have houses to be themselves within the mainstream American faculty system. “It is a shiny, lovely, colourful, joyful place,” DeVries provides.
On a telephone name with EdSurge, Monarch Faculty’s CEO stated that social-emotional studying was the varsity’s precedence. The scholars who attend the varsity go dwelling to shelters, motels and even automobiles, DeVries says. Whereas the tutorial a part of the work is necessary, she provides, the scholars want interventions that may stabilize them in order that they be taught within the first place. If Monarch Faculty can construct emotional resilience within the college students, it could actually set them as much as construct an educational profession, DeVries says.
She additionally pointed to a analysis research carried out by the varsity — with The Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Training on the College of San Diego — that reported larger emotions of belonging and shallowness amongst college students. However that research didn’t monitor tutorial outcomes or power absence charges.
So does the mannequin work? Are extra faculties for college students experiencing homelessness a good suggestion?
Monarch Faculty argues that it offers a high quality schooling. The college’s rolling common commencement fee for its senior courses, DeVries estimates, is 93 p.c. Final yr, she provides, your complete senior class graduated. However college students there might not be following the standard path. By senior yr, the dream is for college students to have recovered from the trauma of homelessness and to have transitioned out, in accordance with the varsity’s management. The objective is to stabilize college students sufficient to return to conventional faculties, DeVries says.
In the meantime, critics allege that the varsity’s tutorial outcomes are literally “horrible” in comparison with homeless college students who research at conventional public faculties. A 2020 federal report discovered that Monarch Faculty’s college students had poor studying and math abilities when in comparison with public faculties within the San Diego space, particularly for elementary college students.
However the objection is extra sweeping.
Some individuals are satisfied that homeless-only faculties are a nasty concept. That features Barbara Duffield, government director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit centered on homeless schooling advocacy. Duffield has been a longtime advocate, with a historical past of engaged on federal coverage for homeless schooling.
Duffield argues that faculties for homeless college students disrupt schooling by eradicating college students from the overall faculty system. When the U.S. Congress prohibited separate faculties, she says, it acknowledged that homeless college students do higher academically when they’re built-in into the mainstream faculty atmosphere than when they’re separated from their friends, partially as a result of a separate faculty merely can’t provide the identical instructional alternatives as an built-in faculty, and likewise as a result of separate faculties trigger homeless youngsters to alter faculties primarily based on their housing state of affairs.
Basically, the concept of a college that separates homeless college students from the same old public faculties rankles as a result of they can not present as many assist providers, like entry to free meals, they usually lack social golf equipment, scholar associations and different extracurricular actions, in accordance with notes about homeless-only faculties despatched to EdSurge from Duffield’s group.
Whereas faculties for homeless college students could also be well-intentioned, they find yourself selling low expectations and perpetuating pity and bias moderately than alternative, Duffield says.
Exhibiting Up
What about getting college students to point out up for sophistication — can a college for homeless college students distinguish itself there?
The college says sure. It self-reports a every day attendance fee of 83 p.c for the October, the newest determine it made accessible. However greater than that, Monarch Faculty leaders argue that they take college students from San Diego who have been misplaced to the general public schooling system and assist to re-engage them with courses. Due to that, they see plenty of college students coming again to their faculty as they cycle via homelessness, Alvarado says.
However critics allege that this argument is self-serving, and the 2020 federal report listed Monarch Faculty as having a greater than common power absentee fee, at 58.8 p.c for the 2018-2019 faculty yr (in comparison with a 25 p.c chronically absent fee for California homeless college students normally). Monarch Faculty didn’t present present power absentee estimates in time for publication.
Critics don’t purchase the argument about stigma, both.
There are many methods to deal with the stigma with out a separate faculty for homeless college students, Duffield argues. What’s necessary, in her view, is to point out college students that homelessness is simply an expertise that they’re having. It doesn’t outline them, or their potential – it’s a state that they’re going via, and college could be a supply of normalcy, stability and assist, simply the identical as for his or her friends, Duffield says. If something really marks out college students for stigma, it’s having to attend a separate faculty that stays on their data, she provides.
For advocates like Duffield, tackling power absenteeism is about addressing issues college students have accessing life’s fundamentals. It’s transportation, entry to provides and having somebody who’s following up with them and noticing what’s happening of their life.
What does Monarch Faculty’s management suppose?
When requested why different districts haven’t emulated the varsity, DeVries stated that it’s about cash. College students who come to Monarch Faculty characterize misplaced income for faculties, she says, and it’s additionally costly to change conventional faculty fashions.
“The thought there tends to be: You are creating extra disruption by placing them in a highlight,” DeVries says. “Our perspective on that’s whenever you come to a spot like Monarch Faculty, all of our youngsters are coping with the identical battle, which implies it is not stigmatized,” including, “My children don’t have to cover right here.”
