Homelessness in Texas Public Schools is a Suburban and Rural Problem, Too
Gage Kemp was 16 when he and his father were evicted from their home in Allen, a suburb of Dallas, and had to move into a motel. Kemp’s father, who struggled with alcoholism, urged him to drop out of high school and get a job to help pay the bills. Kemp was one of more than 100,000 homeless students attending Texas public schools, and therefore was eligible for assistance in getting transportation to and from class, buying supplies and clothes, and other services.
But Kemp didn’t know help was available, and no one at Allen High School told him. Eventually he dropped out. “If you watch the gradual course of my grades from elementary to high school, I was a straight-A kid and then it was Bs, and then to Cs,” said Kemp, now 23. “Learning about history didn’t matter to me. I was learning how to survive at home.”
There are approximately 113,000 homeless students in Texas public schools, according to a joint report released this month by advocacy groups Texas Appleseed and Texas Network for Youth Services. Many of those students live in urban areas, but some, like Kemp, live in suburbia and still more are in smaller towns across the state.
The report identifies a number of factors — including insufficient housing and “woefully inadequate” funding for homeless intervention at schools — as contributing to the problem. The findings also challenge the popular notion that student homelessness is a purely urban phenomenon. Though the highest number of homeless students were counted in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas, schools in the Abilene, Corpus Christi, Amarillo, Victoria and Midland regions reported some of the highest rates of homeless students.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/homelessness-texas-public-schools-suburban-rural-problem/