For homeless students, chronic absenteeism is alarmingly high.
The number of students regularly missing school has generally increased since the pandemic, but for homeless students it has been especially bad. Although federal law requires states to provide public education For homeless students, achieving this has proven problematic. And getting homeless students into school has been an elusive goal for many districts.
Leaders at a school in San Diego, an area with one of the largest homeless populations in the country, believe they have an answer. Monarch School, a public-private K-12 school, is an agreement between the San Diego County Office of Education and a local nonprofit organization. It has about 300 students, all of them homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.
Just the fact that students are homeless creates a sense of community, school leaders argue, removing the stigma of not having a reliable place to call home. It also allows the school to focus on providing personalized social-emotional learning.
So why do critics say the very idea of a school for the homeless is “problematic”?
one of a kind
The McKinney-Vento Act, the federal law that oversees education for the homeless, bans homeless-only schools as a form of “segregation.”
Monarch School benefits from an exception, making it the Only publicly funded independent school for homeless students. That status is partly because powerful lawmakers, including Dianne Feinstein, California's longest-serving senator, who died in late September, have supported the school.
Monarch is based on a community-based approach to education and social services, emphasizing on-site family programs and resources. For example: The school has showers, food pantries, licensed doctors, and social programs on campus. It encourages entire families to take advantage of free housing and healthcare, in part through its parent resource center.
Most students are referred to Monarch through social workers at other institutions, and the school says that's because of the social programs it offers.
If you ask school leaders, that sets him apart.
“The emphasis of our work is to provide a safe, socially enriching place for homeless students to achieve academic success,” says Afira DeVries, executive director of Monarch School. That means building an independent community because, she says, it's hard for students who don't have a home to be themselves in the mainstream American school system. “It's a bright, beautiful, colorful, happy place,” adds DeVries.
When parents, students and families are experiencing trauma, it can be really helpful to show up in a building, says Marisol Alvarado, vice president of programs at Monarch School.
In a phone call with EdSurge, Monarch's CEO said social-emotional learning was the school's priority. Students who attend school return to shelters, motels or even cars, DeVries says. While the academic part of the job is important, he adds, students need interventions that stabilize them so they learn in the first place. If Monarch can build emotional resilience in students, it can prepare them for an academic career, DeVries says.
She also pointed out a investigation study conducted by the school, in conjunction with the Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education at the University of San Diego, which reported increased feelings of belonging and self-esteem among students. But that study did not track academic outcomes or chronic absenteeism rates.
So does the model work? Is it a good idea to have more schools for homeless students?
Monarch maintains that it provides quality education. The school's rolling average graduation rate for its senior classes, DeVries estimates, is 93 percent. Last year, she adds, the entire senior class graduated. But it's less clear how many students stay in school long enough to graduate. For the past year, many of the students have been sent back to their assigned schools, according to Monarch leadership. The goal is to stabilize students enough so they can return to traditional schools, DeVries says.
Meanwhile, critics allege that the school's academic results are actually “terrible” compared to homeless San Diego County students who study in traditional public schools. TO 2020 report The United States Senate found that Monarch students had poor reading and math skills compared to area public schools, especially elementary school students.
But the objection is broader.
Some people are convinced that homeless-only schools are a bad idea. That includes Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting education for the homeless. Duffield has been a longtime advocate, with a history of working on federal policies for homeless education.
She maintains that schools for homeless students disrupt education by removing students from the mainstream school system. When Congress banned separate schools, he says, it recognized that homeless students do better academically when they are integrated into the mainstream school environment than when they are separated from their peers, in part because a separate school simply cannot offer the same educational opportunities. than a separate school. integrated school, and also because separate schools cause homeless children to change schools based on their housing situation.
In general, the idea of a school that separates homeless students from regular public schools is upsetting because they cannot provide as many support services, such as access to free meals, and lack social clubs, student associations and other extracurricular activities, according to the notes. about homeless-only schools submitted to EdSurge by Duffield's organization.
While schools for homeless students may have good intentions, they end up promoting low expectations and perpetuating pity and prejudice instead of opportunity, Duffield says.
appearing
How about we get the students to attend class? Can a school for homeless students stand out there?
The school says yes. It self-reports a daily attendance rate of 83 percent for October, the last figure it made available. But more than that, Monarch leaders argue that they take San Diego students who got lost in the public education system and help them re-enter the classroom. In part, they argue, that's because they remove the stigma associated with being a homeless student. Because of this, they see many students returning to their school while experiencing homelessness, Alvarado says.
But critics argue that this argument is self-serving, and the 2020 Senate report indicated that Monarch has a above-average chronic absenteeism rate, 58.8 percent for the 2018-2019 school year (compared to a chronic absenteeism rate of 25 percent for California homeless students overall). Monarch did not provide current estimates of chronic absenteeism in time for publication.
Critics also don't buy the stigma argument.
There are many ways to address stigma without a separate school for homeless students, Duffield maintains. If anything really stigmatizes students, it's having to attend a separate school that remains on their records, she adds. The important thing, in Duffield's opinion, is to show students that homelessness is just an experience they are having. It doesn't define them or their potential: it's a state they're going through, and school can be a source of normality, stability and support, just as it can for their peers, Duffield adds.
For advocates like Duffield, addressing chronic absenteeism is about addressing the problems students have accessing the basics of life. It's about transportation, access to supplies, and having someone to follow them and notice what's going on in their lives.
What does the Monarca leadership think?
When asked why other districts haven't emulated the school, DeVries said it comes down to money. Students coming to Monarch represent a loss of revenue for the schools, she says, and it's also expensive to alter traditional school models to ones similar to Monarch.
“The idea tends to be: You're creating more disruption by putting them in the spotlight,” DeVries says. “Our perspective on this is that when you come to a place like Monarch School, all of our children face the same struggle, which means they are no longer stigmatized,” adding, “My children don't have to hide here.”
