School and teacher: Anchors for homeless students in Minneapolis, St. Paul

Second grade teacher Ruth Craft’s biggest clue often comes at the end of the first day of school, when some of her students pack the contents of their desks into their backpacks. Thanks to in-school training and years of experience, Craft knows that those students may have had things lost or broken during a move, or they might not have school supplies where they’re staying. Whatever the reason, those students often turn out to be homeless or highly mobile.

This year at Minneapolis’s Pratt Elementary School, Craft has had four homeless students in her class of 25. Two already transferred to other schools. She knows to make sure her homeless students are in her group on class field trips. They’re the ones she worries about when she calls in sick. “You’re the anchor,” she said. “When life is uncertain, they have to have one place that they know is going to be consistent.”

This is the second of two stories on homeless students in the Twin Cities. For more, see Homelessness on the rise in Twin Cities schools: Shayla’s story.

* Names have been changed to protect students’ privacy.

With that idea in mind, Twin Cities schools provide a myriad of resources to students identified as homeless and highly mobile, everything from school supplies to alarm clocks, activities, transportation and moral support. At best, Minneapolis and St. Paul district programs keep homeless students from dropping behind and dropping out, but it’s not always enough to keep the gargantuan forces of poverty and shaky ground at home from pushing some students through the cracks.

School is a high-stakes challenge for homeless students, who need to graduate prepared to find a job or enroll in a post-secondary school. A 2009 Wilder study found that 34 percent of Minnesota’s homeless parents experienced homelessness as a child. Students who switched schools during the 2010-2011 school year were 40 percent less likely to meet 11th grade math standards than those who were stable.

Although St. Paul Public Schools saw a bigger jump in the number of homeless students enrolled this year [see Homelessness on the rise in Twin Cities schools: Shayla’s story], Minneapolis schools have many more homeless students. Between July and September, Minneapolis schools identified 2,600 homeless students, compared to 823 in St. Paul. There were 2,563 last year. Part of the difference between the districts is explained by the cities’ shelter systems. Minneapolis has approximately 1,500 shelter beds available to families, compared to around 230 in St. Paul.

Federal McKinney-Vento legislation requires districts to provide transportation that would allow homeless students to stay in their school of origin. That means lots of school buses pick students up from Minneapolis shelters on their way to the suburbs or St. Paul. The large number of shelters also means lots of homeless families from out of town are placed in Minneapolis schools. Margo Hurrle is in charge of placing those families. She’s also in charge of keeping track of families outside the shelter system. “We have some parents who literally move every night,” Hurrle said. “You’ve got to alleviate their stress and tell them, we’ll get your kids to you.”

Non-shelter kids aren’t always easy to identify. According to guidance counselor Nick Pederson, Edison’s staff has to be tenacious about figuring out which students are homeless. Sixty to 70 percent of Edison’s homeless students do not live in shelters but with friends or family, or on the street. Pederson said guidance counselors meet regularly with teams of teachers to discuss which students are having trouble. “If no one knows this kid, someone has to break through. Often it’s teachers,” he said.

Edison received training from the district’s Building Bridges program, a series of workshops and in-school coaching sessions that teaches school social workers how to identify and work with homeless students. Social workers then train the rest of the school. Edison’s teachers, nurses, security guards and clerical workers know to talk to social worker Steve Lish if they see students hoarding belongings or showing up for school tired and unprepared. Lish then ensures that students can access city bus passes, after-school activity fees or counseling.

The school was a lifeline when Victoria Mulbah’s* aunt started abusing her soon after she moved to Minnesota from Liberia. The school provided basics like shampoo. With no family in the area, it was the school’s Liberian advocate who finally drove 18-year-old Victoria to a shelter when she decided she’d had enough.

Despite Edison's guidance counselors, a social worker, a mental health collaborative, and a health clinic, Lish says available services are not enough to combat a weak economy and generational poverty. "I'm at the very end of the line, treating the symptoms," he said. Besides Edison's 79 homeless or highly mobile students, more than 90 percent of the school’s students qualified for free or reduced price lunch in the 2010-2011 school year. And more than a quarter of the students who started last school year at Edison High School were gone by June.

“Mostly we have to be relationship builders,” Pederson said. “If you can get the basic needs met with love and personal care, growth jumps can occur.”

Victoria said she’s close with her guidance counselor at Edison. Shayla Perry* [see Homelessness on the rise in Twin Cities schools: Shayla’s story] still feels like an outsider. “In all the years that I’ve been going to school, it was only one teacher that I actually talked to,” she said. As for the rest, “They don’t know me. They don’t know how I work.”

Alleen Brown

Alleen Brown (alleenbrown@tcdailyplanet.net or Twitter @AlleenBrown) is a freelance writer from Minneapolis.