Nearly one in every eight New York City public school students experienced homelessness during the 2023–24 school year, according to a new report published Monday.
New York’s Advocates for Children (AFC), a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring high-quality education to students from low-income backgrounds, found that more than 146,000 students across 32 school districts in the city did not have a long-term physical address – a 23% increase from the prior academic year. The data used for the report came from the state’s department of education.
The students at the center of the report either lived in city shelters, hotels or motels, or they also “doubled up” by sharing housing with others due to economic hardship, with the Bronx and upper Manhattan seeing the highest concentrations of that particular population, according to the report.
While the problem stems in part from a population increase, including immigrant families and asylum-seekers, the AFC report said “student homelessness is a longstanding challenge for New York city public schools (NYCPS)”.
The report added: “2023–24 was the ninth consecutive school year in which more than 100,000 students were identified as homeless – meaning that children who were in kindergarten the first year the city hit the ignominious 100,000 threshold have now started high school.
“The only school system they have ever known is one in which there are more students without a permanent place to call home than there are seats at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field combined.”
Of the hundreds of thousands of students living in shelters, 67% missed at least one out of every 10 school days and were considered chronically absent.
These students also “dropped out of high school at triple the rate of their permanently housed peers”.
And even if they are able to show up, homeless students lag far behind others in education outcomes. Of these students between third and eight grade, their English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency rate was more than 20 percentage points lower than that of other students.
The director of AFC’s Learners in Temporary Housing Project, Jennifer Pringle, called New York City’s student homelessness crisis “unconscionable”.
“While the city works to help families find permanent housing, it must also focus more attention on helping students succeed in school,” Pringle said. “School can be the key to breaking the cycle of homelessness, but so many children, especially those in shelters, continue to fall behind.”
