Years ago Parenting Magazine asked me to do an article on a homeless mother with children. The idea was simply to find such a family and follow them around for a month. I agreed and, for 30 days, entered the lives of a thirty-something woman and her three kids. The woman, whose name I’ve long ago forgotten, didn’t have a discernible drug problem. Nor was she a drinker. She’d ended up on the street to escape and abusive husband. I watched as she bounced around from shelter to shelter, trying to find a place that would accept both her and her fragile family.
But while there always seemed to be enough shelter beds for men who needed them, the beds for women with kids were extemely difficult to come by
I liked the mom, who struggled hard to overcome her circumstances, at least during the time I observed her. But she always seemed to be swimming upstream.
Yet it was her children who got to me. They were nice kids, and seemed intelligent behind their preternatural watchfulness. I remember one time when I asked the oldest girl, who was ten at the time. about her dreams for the future. She told me she wished she lived in a place where she could sometimes have friends over to play. That was it. But she recited the wish as if the possibility was as far out of reach as the moon.
I bring all this up because, in this week’s LA City Beat, the cover story is again by smart USC journalism grad student, Matt Mundy, and it’s about the homeless kids of Skid Row. Matt wrote the story in a longer version as his master’s thesis for his USC degree, then cut it down to feature size with the help of City’ Beat’s News Editor, my pal, the excellent Alan Mittelsteadt.
According to Mundy’s research, there are 13,521 homeless students in the Los Angeles Unified school system. In California, there are 178,014, and the country….907,000. And those are just the school-age children on the street we know about. The homeless are notoriously census resistant.
Homeless children are four times more likely to drop out of school and two times more likely to score lower on standardized tests; one in ten homeless students will miss at least one month of school each year, 36 percent have repeated a grade, and 14 percent – double that of other children – are diagnosed with a learning disability. All of these problems are caused, exacerbated and impacted in myriad ways by their troubled environments.
Read the rest here.
Let no child be left behind, indeed.
Photo by Monica Almeda, New York Times
thanks for this – (btw – did you see the video of Villaraigosa and the Catholic Worker folks that was posted on the LAT earlier this week? He was having a press confernece about 100 new streetlights.)
I will do a “Maggie” and tell everyone of my traveling around the world. One of the memories that always sticks in my mind, after working in places like Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Mexico is the kids living in the streets. I have many stories of us Americanos and the street kids, such as paying kids $5.00 to watch our car while we ate lunch. Or buying a couple of chickens and bread for the same group of kids after we ate our chicken. I remember the owner of a small eatery chasing away the street kids who would come by when we showed up for lunch. A co-worker went over to the owner and told him if he ever did that again we would not be back again. We used to talk about how this would never happen in the U.S. I also used to say, I’m glad I don’t see kids living in the streets in the USA, but I guess I was wrong.
According to Mundy’s research, there are 13,521 homeless students in the Los Angeles Unified school system. In California, there are 178,014, and the country….907,000.
I don’t believe those numbers at all. And, California has 20% of the nation’s homeless students? I guess that’s what you get when you open the doors to illegals. Say, how many of those homeless students have parents who are here illegally?
It was a dishonest reference to end the post with “no child be left behind, indeed.” This seems more of a failure of liberal programs and their alleged war on poverty rather than efforts to increase accountability of schools and teachers.
But, the solution is always more taxes. Let’s make things fair by taxing everyone right onto the streets.
Oh, for the good old days of Bill Clinton when homelessness completely dropped off of the headlines. Isn’t it funny how these problems are only raised when Republicans occupy the White House?
I’m always suspicious of these bleeding heart articles. I do care about people in need, but I don’t think that it’s right to use them for political purposes and to exaggerate the problem.
Why don’t you believe them? What is your criticism of the methedology of the article. I’ve seen you believe some pretty impossible things – usaully before breakfast I might add – so what’s the objection here? And why do you say they’re illegal? How about some arguments rather than simply mouthing opinions with no backup?
Isn’t it funny how these problems are only raised when Republicans occupy the White House?
I am going to coin a new phrase “Woodyisim”, and the comment above will surely be the first of thousands to come.
I guess I should be an equal opportunist and also coin “Maggieism†for such comments as “All you Baby Boomer revolutionists†or “Che Guevara tee-shirt, 60’s liberalsâ€Â
Those are mighty big numbers, reg. They could be like AIDS or global warming statistics–highly inflated for dollars and politics. Mr. Mundy would have to share his methodology and data for me to understand how he derived those amounts. Anyway, doesn’t an odd number like 13,521 seem a little unrealistic unless he counted every single homeless student, or like Democrats and ballots, counted them two or three times.
They are mighty big numbers, but they are undercounts if anything. If you shoot me your email address, I’ll be more than happy to provide you with the documents (from the California Dept of Education and from a three year analysis by the National Center for Homeless Education). The numbers for California and L.A. are actually slightly higher now, though not by much. If we were to get accurate counts from throughout the country the number would be far higher than 1 million.
Again, if you would like me to share that data with you, I’d be more than happy to.
Matt, thanks for the offer. Please send the information to Celeste and ask her to forward it to me. I’d give you my email, but these jerks would send me spam and dirty pictures of themselves.
I would be suspcious, however, about your sources–the Dept of Education and Natl’l Ctr for Homeless. Neither one seems independent of their results. I remember on the last census when the cities found that they had lost population (big surprise), they lobbied until tens of thousands of homeless could be manufactured to bolster their numbers for representation and government dollars. Both of the organizations you mentioned benefit from inflated numbers, too.
But, the problem isn’t education, any more than a fever is a problem. Both are symptons of an infection somewhere else, and I think that an infection has been spreading from the border. More money isn’t going to help if it’s not targeted at the real source of the disease.
BTW, Matt, your study was still interesting and very good.
Thanks for the compliment. I strongly disagree with your diagnosis, however, but that’s beside the point. I’ll forward my info to Celeste, and thanks for reading.
Matt, you’re supposed to be the expert. However, I look at things through a different lens than does Celeste and possibly you. As a tip for life, just remember, if a conservative disagrees with a liberal, the conservative is almost always right.
Are there any related studies as to the racial mix of these homeless–with emphasis on those who might be here illegally? If we sent the illegals home, that might get rid of half of the problem.
ah “racial mix” –
I LOVE reading this blog but I seldom post comments, or seldom engage in any discourse, because of the tenor so many of the comments take on.
Woody, every race and age is represented on LA’s Skid Row but the largest population cohort is made up of African American men.
Rebel Girl, always happy to see you here, and love your comments whenever they occur. As for the squabbling and brick throwing, think of it as theater.
Thanks for the pointer, Celeste, and thanks to Matthew for posting in the comments as well.
How many black males on the streets are in high school? I don’t see where they have anything to do with the topic of families with school kids living on the streets.
Now, to address my question as I put it, how many of the homeless families with school kids on the streets are in this country illegally? I think that Celeste and Rebel Girl don’t want a straight answer on this. It would force liberals to deal with the true problem rather than just the sympton.
Theater is good word for it. I admire your resiliency and spirit.
Those are pretty nice tents in the picture. REI must have an outlet store in the area. How do they drive stakes through the concrete? Can the homeless have home schools?
Until reading these comments, I had no idea Matt was double majoring in journalism and diplomacy.
Look at the picture above that Celeste provided and visualize an image of the homeless from the article. You probably think these kids live on the street. I did. Then Matt sent me the study, and here’s the breakdown.
54% Doubled Up
24% Shelters
7% Hotels/Motels
3% Unsheltered
10% Unknown/Other
The homeless numbers included people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. My city received a large number of these residents and we saw the mayor of New Orleans here regularly. These displaced people were provided lodgings in nice motels and hotels and provided living expenses and enrolled in our schools. It appears that most got better jobs here than they could in New Orleans. There is no reason to include them as homeless.
The numbers from the report Matt used included data provided by school systems receiving grants, thus imparing their independence. To identify the homeless, the primary nighttime residence of students was considered “only at the time of enrollment.” No adjustments were made during the year for people being settled. No adjustments were made for students who lived with relatives to get into better systems. None of the numbers were independently audited.
I’m swamped, so I’m not going to go into the data any further, but the seriousness of the problem is exaggerated when you compare the perceptions advanced versus the reality. When 100% of the absolute numbers are said to be “homeless,” but only 3% of them are actually unsheltered, then the problem is overstated.
This is typical of what we see in liberal journalism. Celeste throws out $5-7 trillion for Iraq costs. Others say that Bush has cost 2 million deaths. AIDS and global warming statistics are always stretched to the max. And, others say that there are 0.9 million homeless school kids in the nation. Well, 3% of 0.9 million is roughly 27,000, and they don’t stay homeless all year.
I can be more sympathetic to causes that are accurately reported, but I become suspicious when I find something else when you get the full information. It’s like hearing about someone being under sniper fire in Bosnia, and then finding out the truth. One can become quite cynical about reports out of California and government when they regularly misrepresent the truth–either intentionally or by error.
A major responsibility of a journalist is to verify his information and to be completely truthful–not to make a story out of something that isn’t one or to accept unreasonable numbers just to add to a story and without providing the methodology of gathering those statistics to the readers.
More research into the numbers on this story give a different and less menacing picture than those reported.
P.S. The study did not ask if the residents were here illegally.
I admire you on the willingness to share this info with others – good luck!