NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Last year, 154,000 public school students in New York City were homeless at some point—a record number reflecting the city’s deepening housing crisis.
The figure, released by Advocates for Children of New York on Monday, amounts to about one in seven public school students in the city experiencing homelessness.
To put the number into perspective: The NYC public school system has more homeless students than the number of students in the entire Dallas public school system.
At about 30 schools in NYC—including in East Harlem, Brownsville, Brooklyn, and the Highbridge and Grand Concourse sections of the Bronx—more than half of students were homeless.
The average age of a child in an NYC shelter is 5 to 7 years old.
Students who are homeless have a higher absentee rate and longer commute times. They lag behind on their studies and tend to bounce around between multiple schools.
“It is much harder for them,” said Christine Quinn, head of Women in Need (WIN), the largest provider of housing for homeless families in the city.
“They get teased and bullied for being homeless,” Quinn said. “It is not a way to learn. It is, even in the best of shelters, an existence that has a lot of trauma.”
Quinn called the issue a “moral failure” and is urging the next mayor to take several actions, including appointing a new deputy chancellor to focus only on this problem.