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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://hechingerreport.org/a-shelter-in-a-school-gym-for-students-experiencing-homelessness-paid-off-in-classrooms/">hechingerreport.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom</h1>
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<span>by</span>
<span class="gmail-author gmail-vcard"><a class="gmail-url gmail-fn gmail-n" href="https://hechingerreport.org/author/gail-cornwall/">Gail Cornwall</a></span> </span>
<span class="gmail-posted-on">March 17, 2022</span>
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<p>SAN FRANCISCO — On a Friday evening in the fall of 2019, Maria Flores
stood waiting with her “crazy heavy” duffel bag and her teenage son
outside the office of a man whose home she cleans. A friend of hers had
told him that Flores had been evicted from the apartment she had lived
in for 16 years. There, the single mom had paid $700 a month in rent
ever since she’d moved in eight-months pregnant. Now, one night at a
motel cost as much as $250.</p>
<p>“Every single day I was looking for a place to live,” Flores said.</p>
<p>He’d offered two air mattresses, keys to his office, and permission
to sleep there on weekends. For the better part of a year, Flores, who
asked to use only one of her two surnames, lived that way: Back and
forth, spend and scrimp. But there was no shower or kitchen at the
office. And on this Friday, someone was working late. Flores’ son, who
asked to be referred to by his middle name, Mateo, begged to go to a
motel, but Flores told him if they did, they’d have no money for food.</p>
<p>Still, she didn’t want to go to a shelter.</p>
<p>“Everything that I heard, it was something about drugs, it was something about people being in a quarrel,” Flores said.</p>
<img alt="" src="https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Cornwall-Homeless-Gym9.jpg?resize=780%2C521&ssl=1" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="262">Maria
Flores and her son Mateo embrace in the hallway of their new apartment
building. In 2019, the two were evicted from the apartment Mateo had
lived in since birth. Unique features of the Stay Over Program in the
gym at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School supported them as
they experienced homelessness. “I cannot complain, being in a shelter,”
Flores said, “At least you don’t feel so lonely.” <span><span>Credit:</span> Marissa Leshnov for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>There was one other option. A few months earlier, she’d heard about a
family shelter inside an elementary school gym. Every evening, after
the students and teachers left, partitions were snugged to the back
wall, creating three-sided squares for kids and caregivers to set up
sleeping pads on the floor. Cafeteria-style tables in a connected room
hosted dinner and, later, homework. Only families with a child enrolled
in the San Francisco Unified School District could be admitted, and
Mateo was a high school junior.</p>
<p>“I didn’t want to,” Flores said of calling the school-based shelter
that Friday night, “but I was so tired.” Standing on the sidewalk in a
neighborhood <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/02/02/1077522592/mayor-declares-a-state-of-emergency-in-san-franciscos-tenderloin-district">known for</a>
open-air drug dealing, with the sky growing darker, and then darker
still, she decided she and Mateo didn’t have a better option. She took
out her phone and dialed the number.</p>
<p>The idea of optimizing <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/playgrounds-for-all/480453/">school district property</a>
for evening and weekend use isn’t new, but Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8
Community School (BVHM, for short) appears to be the first modern public
elementary school to have hosted a long-term, overnight family shelter.</p>
<p>“As far as our knowledge in the entire country, we are the first
people to do it,” said San Francisco City Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who
was instrumental in advocating for the program.</p>
<p>Some objected: Shelter should not be the responsibility of a school, they argued.</p>
<p>And yet, “We were the folks that were willing to do it,” said Nick Chandler, the BVHM community school coordinator.</p>
<p>His school serves <a href="https://www.sfusd.edu/school/buena-vista-horace-mann-k-8-community-school">approximately</a>
600 students in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, three
blocks from the exclusive Adda Clevenger School and across the street
from a restaurant serving a $16 roasted octopus appetizer. Just under <a href="http://www.ed-data.org/school/San-Francisco/San-Francisco-Unified/Buena-Vista_-Horace-Mann-K--8">60 percent</a>
of the students are English language learners, and just over 60 percent
have been deemed socioeconomically disadvantaged, though that’s an
undercount according to the school’s staff who say many of their
families are also undocumented or under-documented.</p>
<p>One night in 2017, a desperate parent talking to Chandler in the school’s front lobby asked: “Can we stay here?”</p>
<p>The answer that night was no, but the question hung in the air. The
school’s wellness team had noticed more and more families in crisis.
They’d try to make referrals to the city and nonprofits, but often
nothing would come of it. Sometimes the waitlists were too long and
sometimes it wasn’t clear what list a family should even be on.</p>
<p>“The process is so intense and it requires so much documentation and
follow-through and systemic understanding,” said Claudia DeLarios Morán,
BVHM’s principal. “So it was a frustrated group of social workers and
counselors and teachers saying, ‘What happened to this child?’”</p>
<p>Kids without a regular place to sleep at night weren’t showing up
ready to learn, Chandler added. “And how could they? Your brain is not
relaxed. You’re not in learning mode, you’re in survival mode, you’re in
flight or fight mode.”</p>
<p>BVHM’s staff had been trained in trauma-informed care, but they
wanted to help kids not just to overcome, but to avoid altogether the
experience of sleeping in a car, living in an overcrowded apartment, or
having a parent stay in an abusive relationship to keep a roof over
their heads. The staff knew the office common area couldn’t work, but
the gym was a different story. Like most school gymnasiums, it has domed
fluorescent lights affixed to the rafters, blue gymnastics mats
cushioning the walls, and basketball hoops. The adjacent room, with
those six tables and a microwave, sports a teacher-lounge vibe.</p>
<p>When not a single teacher objected, the BVHM team brought the idea of
hosting a shelter for the school’s families to Ronen, the city
supervisor, and the group then pulled in Shamann Walton, a member of the
San Francisco Board of Education at the time. They were careful not to
suggest having a shelter would solve everything.</p>
<p>“This is a band aid,” Ronen said. “This is not a root-cause fix of the problem of childhood homelessness in this country.”</p>
<p>Over the course of April and May 2018, Ronen, Walton and others
fielded questions at public meetings. “We didn’t ask Claudia [DeLarios
Morán] and Nick [Chandler] to take this on on their own,” Ronen said,
“We stood up, and we took the heat with them.”</p>
<p>And there was heat. A vocal minority worried that a shelter would
draw an unsavory crowd to the neighborhood, that the gym would be left
smelling like urine, the playground littered with needles and cigarette
butts.</p>
<p>School administrators took questions, submitted during the meetings and afterward, and created an FAQ document they <a href="https://sites.google.com/sfusd.edu/bvhm/proposalpropuesta">posted online</a>.</p>
<p>“How will the administration guarantee … that no drugs, alcohol, or
weapons will come on to the premises?” is one. “Will people with a
criminal record … [or] mental illness be allowed to sleep in our
school?”</p>
<p>The answers reflect patience with these two questions and others
laden with assumptions about who experiences homelessness and how: “The
participants will be BVHM students and their immediate families. These
are the same people at back to school night, performances, daily drop
off and pick-up,” the BVHM team replied.</p>
<p>Much of the pushback centered around, “Why us?” Some commenters
worried school administrators would be in over their heads running a
shelter and others suggested alternatives, like transitional housing or
co-living spaces. “Our program is a response to a lack of space in
these,” the administrators answered, adding that a third party would
manage the BVHM initiative.</p>
<p>Another proposal: Ask other BVHM families to open their homes
instead. The school welcomed offers. They received none, Chandler said.</p>
<p>“The PTA meetings were hell, with this undercurrent of disliking poor
people,” said Sam Murphy, a white BVHM parent, who witnessed this
back-and-forth. </p>
<p>The school’s Spanish immersion program attracts some privileged families in a <a href="https://www.kqed.org/news/11641238/how-the-san-francisco-school-lottery-works-and-how-it-doesnt-2">competitive lottery system</a>, and one woman told Murphy the shelter, by then dubbed the “Stay Over Program,” would “lower the cachet of the school.”</p>
A couple and their five children moved to San
Francisco from Missouri. Before arriving at BVHM, they lived in hotels
and their Chevy Traverse, which was broken into three times. Their
teenager had worked to save up money for Air Jordans to wear to her new
school, but they were stolen, along with her basketball. Here, two of
the teen’s siblings return extra sleeping pads to storage. <span><span>Credit:</span> Marissa Leshnov for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>Despite the loud objections from some, the school had, in Chandler’s
words, a “real strong voice from our folks that had been there or had
been in similar situations.” With the bulk of the community on board and
the support of the mayor, the project moved forward.</p>
<p>It started as a pilot program, funded entirely by the city, with a
joint use agreement allowing a Department of Homelessness and Supportive
Housing program to be operated on school district property by Dolores
Street Community Services, a community-based organization with
experience running shelters. This kind of interagency and public-private
cooperation may seem intuitive, but <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/playgrounds-for-all/480453/">it can be quite a logistical feat</a>.
In this case, that included getting the approval of the fire
department, planning commission, and city attorney, as well as
integrating the program into the city’s preexisting web of access points
and services — and, on top of that, building political alliances.</p>
<p>“There are a hundred ways to shut this kind of idea down,” Ronen
said. But the idea persisted and turned into a plan and then a place.</p>
<p>The shelter soft launched in November 2018; in January 2019, after an
architect from the neighborhood offered to figure out how to install
showers beside the gym and a construction company did the work pro bono,
the Stay Over Program at BVHM, first of its kind, officially debuted.</p>
<p>Before then, Chandler said, he and other school staff “knew the
families, we didn’t know the services; the city knew the services, they
did not know the families.” Now, that has changed.</p>
<p>The idea that schools can act as resource hubs for students and their
families is known broadly as “community schooling” and has proven <a href="https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Community_Schools_Effective_REPORT.pdf">successful across the country</a>.</p>
<p>“A vast body of research shows that schools and communities can
mitigate the effects of poverty by providing support to children and
families to address basic needs such as housing instability,” said Pedro
Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California’s Rossier School
of Education.</p>
<p>Students experiencing homelessness are more likely to display
symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression —
even behaviors that look like ADHD. “[T]he experience of homelessness is
associated with difficulty with classroom task engagement and social
engagement,” according to a report by the <a href="https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Students_Experiencing_Homelessness_REPORT.pdf">Learning Policy Institute</a>.
(Core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided
by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the many funders of
The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.)</p>
<p>These students are also more likely to be referred for discipline,
including suspension. They are more likely to attend schools with
concentrated poverty, and they score significantly lower on state
testing than other economically disadvantaged students. Students
grappling with homelessness are also less likely to graduate high school
and less likely to attend college. They are more likely to change
schools and be chronically absent.</p>
<p>“For English language learners experiencing homelessness,” the report
concludes, “fewer than 9 percent met or achieved state standards in
mathematics.”</p>
<p>Nationally, 37 percent of students experiencing homelessness are
chronically absent, according to Barbara Duffield, executive director of
SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. That
percentage is likely much higher now, she said, in light of
pandemic-related barriers.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://transformschools.ucla.edu/stateofcrisis/">2020 report</a>
from UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, funded in part by
the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, found that several indicators of
educational distress — including suspensions and absenteeism rates —
are, on average, worse for Black, American Indian, Pacific Islander, and
multiracial students experiencing homelessness. (The Chan-Zuckerberg
Initiative is one of the <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/supporters/">many funders</a> of the Hechinger Report.) Thanks to a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10796126.2019.1591041">racial knowledge gap</a>
in the data, it’s unclear whether that pattern extends to Latino
students, said UCLA’s Edwin Rivera, co-author of the 2020 report.</p>
Children from a handful of families play together on
top of one family’s bed on the floor of the gym at Buena Vista Horace
Mann K-8 Community School. <span><span>Credit:</span> Marissa Leshnov for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>Not enough BVHM families have used the Stay Over Program to make a
dent in the school’s overall statistics, but, said DeLarios Morán, “For
families that stayed there, absolutely it stabilized their attendance.”</p>
<p>Maribel Chávez, a first-grade teacher at BVHM, said that before one
of her students started sleeping in the gym, he usually arrived late and
with an empty stomach.</p>
<p>“Not having a specific place that they are coming from every day,
there wasn’t a routine,” she said. He would miss the opening song and
the preview of the day’s schedule. She’d try to give him a quick recap
and “scrounge up some snack,” but it wasn’t enough. He threw objects,
tried to leave the classroom, and hit other students.</p>
<p>For a while, his was one of several families living in a single
apartment. He shared a room with his mom, Olga, who prefers to use only
her first name, and his two brothers. Then other residents of the unit
started to complain about his oldest brother cooking after his late
shift. Little conflicts became bigger ones until Olga found herself
trying to hold off using the bathroom so she wouldn’t run into anyone in
the hallway. After calling the police to say she suspected one woman
had intentionally left the stove on, filling the apartment with gas, she
left. They stayed with a variety of family members and friends for more
than a month before Olga and her two youngest sons landed in the BVHM
gym.</p>
<p>With lights out at 9 p.m., breakfast every morning, and a transition
straight to the school’s before-care program, Chávez said, she found the
first grader “in my line and ready to go” at the start of each school
day.”</p>
<p>She noticed a shift in his demeanor (“happier”) and behavior (“so
much calmer”). He and the other students who have utilized the Stay Over
Program “were able to come in and be present, to do their work and
learn,” she said.</p>
<p>Soon, the benefit of small group instruction and literacy
interventions kicked in. “The other day we were reading together,”
Chávez said, “and I was like, ‘Wait! Wait. Wait. Did you just read
that?’”</p>
<p>Stories like this one make DeLarios Morán feel that it is indeed her
school’s responsibility to help students find safe and reliable housing.</p>
<p>“If the child is not stable, that’s a barrier to their education,”
she said. “So that’s why we felt like as an educational institution, we
had a mandate.”</p>
Through these doors sits a room with six
cafeteria-style tables, lockers, and a storage area with sleeping mats.
In the connected gym, San Francisco Unified School District families can
set up beds on the floor each night, as part of the Stay Over Program.
<span><span>Credit:</span> Marissa Leshnov for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>But while public schools are required to offer a handful of services
to students who are experiencing homelessness, the federal legislation
that channels money to districts to support those services <a href="https://schoolhouseconnection.org/learn/from-our-inboxes/">can’t be</a>
spent on housing. The available funding, known as McKinney-Vento after
two U.S. Congressmen who championed the legislation, has long been
grossly inadequate. That said, other federal funding streams are
available to support a district-city partnership like this one,
including money from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban
Development. State dollars are often at hand. And in San Francisco, a <a href="https://www.kqed.org/news/11837613/proposition-c-court-win-delivers-nearly-500-million-for-san-franciscos-homeless-but-how-will-it-be-spent">business tax</a> passed in 2018, a 2020 <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Proposition_A,_Bond_Issue_(November_2020)">health and recovery bond</a> and <a href="https://sfgov.org/sfc/give2sf/mayors-fund-homeless">private donations</a> together provide hundreds of millions more.</p>
<p>Ronen, the city supervisor, acknowledged that San Francisco’s
comparatively large budget for addressing homelessness has facilitated
the program, and being a <a href="https://sf.gov/information/sanctuary-city-ordinance">sanctuary city</a>
helps too. She thinks any similar program would need a principal and
staff who aren’t scared of innovation, maintain a problem-solving
mindset, and see basic needs as part of their mission. But none of that
is specific to BVHM.</p>
<p>“It’s a community school mentality, and BVHM is not the only community school in the country,” she said.</p>
<p>She did offer a caveat to others wishing to replicate the program:
“It should only happen if that is what your community is asking for,”
she said. “If this was top down, if I have this idea and impose it upon
the school and the school district, it would not have worked. But is San
Francisco a unicorn? I don’t think so.”</p>
<p><strong>Related: </strong><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/a-multilingual-multicultural-call-center-helps-families-of-color-cope-with-remote-learning/"><strong>A multilingual, multicultural call center helps families of color cope with remote learning</strong></a><strong></strong></p>
<p>DeLarios Morán was more bullish: “They just have to follow the
blueprint,” she said. “We’ve done it now. So, it’s not like they have to
create the wheel.”</p>
Dafne’s youngest sister pulls sleeping pads from
day-time storage to the gym to help her family set up their bed for the
evening. The three girls and their mother slept in their car for a month
when pandemic job loss left them experiencing homelessness. <span><span>Credit:</span> Gail Cornwall for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>When the shelter first launched, it was only for BVHM families, but
the per-person cost to the city was too high to make fiscal sense. In
March 2019, the school board voted unanimously to expand the program to
include students and families from any district school. Monthly
occupancy jumped approximately eight-fold: As of January 2020, more than
30 schools had referred students, rendering the program cost-effective,
according to a January 2020 <a href="https://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Auditing/SOP%20Evaluation%20Report%20FINAL.pdf">evaluation</a> by the San Francisco Controller’s Office.</p>
<p>Dafne is a junior in high school. Her family left the city after her
mother lost a catering job during the pandemic and couldn’t pay rent.
They drove to Orange County to stay with her mom’s aunt, just until
things got better. But a year passed, and then a few more months. When
catered events resumed, her mom got her job back and an invitation to
stay at a friend’s place in San Francisco until a few paychecks added up
to enough for a rent deposit. But four more people turned out to be too
many for the friend’s husband, leaving Dafne, her mom, and two sisters
sleeping in their car.</p>
<p>Dafne said an elementary school gym isn’t an ideal place to sleep
either. At BVHM, she was regularly woken up by a shelter monitor walking
by at night and the persistent banging of the old building’s heating
system, a sound like a baseball bat colliding with an iron pipe. It
punctuated conversation at 2- to 20-second intervals one rainy night
this winter. But space heaters, or even white noise machines, aren’t an
option because of old electrical wiring.</p>
<p>Moving away meant Dafne lost her spot at the selective high school
she’d gotten into, but as a student at a different city high school now,
her plans remain ambitious. She wants to go to college and ultimately
“focus on real estate and flipping houses.” One of her sisters hopes to
be a lawyer. The other, a teacher. At BVHM, the three girls spread out
across the tables to do homework, much better than using flashlights in a
crowded car, Dafne said.</p>
<p>And the gym felt much safer than the car had, with people peering in
the windows at all hours. “We would try to cover it, but it was still
scary,” Dafne said.</p>
<p><strong>Related: </strong><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/children-will-bear-the-brunt-of-a-looming-eviction-crisis/"><strong>Children will bear the brunt of a looming eviction crises</strong></a><strong></strong></p>
<p>One of the program’s core components is to do more than shelter
families like Dafne’s; walking through the door brings with it entry
into a case management system that guides them through the complicated
process of finding affordable housing.</p>
<p>Back when she’d been evicted, Flores had connected with a few housing
programs, but “[t]hey just were talking about shelters,” she said. When
she and Mateo first arrived at BVHM in fall 2019, she brushed off case
management attempts because she didn’t want to hear more of the same.</p>
<p>Still, she appreciated having a reliable place to stay. “I cannot
complain, being in a shelter,” she said, “At least you don’t feel so
lonely.” Headaches she experienced while looking for housing every day
started to subside. She was sleeping again. “We were making jokes,” she
said, “We had that community.”</p>
Jacqui Portillo (left), from Dolores Street
Community Services, is the program director for the Stay Over Program.
She works closely with Claudia DeLarios Morán (right), the principal of
Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School. “The way she talks, that’s
what convinced me that I can trust her,” said one woman experiencing
homelessness of Portillo, “Jacqui is like an angel for me.” <span><span>Credit:</span> Marissa Leshnov for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>Many participants credit that atmosphere to Jacqui Portillo, the program director from Dolores Street Community Services.</p>
<p>“The way she talks,” Flores said, “that’s what convinced me that I can trust her. Jacqui is like an angel for me.”</p>
<p>Portillo grew up in El Salvador and went to six years of medical
school there, stopping shy of a degree. Instead, she became a nurse and
helped run her husband’s business. Their children lived a middle-class
existence with swimming lessons and their own rooms until the couple
separated. That’s when Portillo headed to the U.S. with her daughters,
the oldest of whom was 8. They stayed, for years, in one half of a
garage.</p>
<p>“When I came to this country, my life changed,” she said, “I didn’t have language. I didn’t have money.”</p>
<p>She bought her children their first computer with singles, tips from a
waitressing gig. Now in their twenties, the oldest went to Wellesley,
the middle to Vassar, and “my baby,” she said, to U.C. Berkeley.
Portillo wants the kids in the Stay Over Program to have the same level
of success.</p>
<p>Once she has a family in the gym, Portillo calls her contacts and
asks them to reach out. “If the family doesn’t answer calls from those
contacts, she said, “I ask them, ‘What’s happened? Jorge is calling
you!’” She keeps gently pestering until the connection is made: “We work
with the social worker from the school. We work with the immigration
office. We work with everybody,” she said.</p>
<p>For newcomer families especially, Portillo offers empathy, not
sympathy. And empathy is what fuels her determination to make the
program’s small budget stretch as far as possible. But Portillo refuses
to take credit for any accomplishments, including sacrificing her own
“off” hours to keep the gym open full-time over the 2021 holiday break
rather than making everyone leave by 7 each morning. “God was always
with me,” she said.</p>
Maria Flores carried this “crazy heavy” duffel bag
with her all day for over a year when she and her son Mateo experienced
homelessness. It was the toothbrush that weighed most heavily on her.
“It’s something that is private, something that nobody wants to see you
use,” she said. And now it stays at home. <span><span>Credit:</span> Marissa Leshnov for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>Before the pandemic, experts believed a large number of students
experiencing homelessness were not identified; now, the situation is
likely much worse. These kids had even greater difficulties accessing
online instruction than their low-income, housed peers.</p>
<p>And yet, at BVHM, the Stay Over Program operated 24/7 during the
district’s protracted school closure. Children attended classes via Zoom
in the room with those cafeteria-style tables and the help of shelter
monitors and a case manager, who made sure adults stayed quiet in the
gym next door. During breaks they had access to the school’s playground
and garden. Over the course of 2020, the program served 146 students.
When a family tested positive for Covid, they quarantined in the
school’s auditorium<strong>.</strong></p>
<p>“Everything was so nice,” Flores said of her time staying in the gym.
She still texts with three of the women she met there. “We go and eat
breakfast and stuff. So, I have good memories. Really, I do.”</p>
<p><strong>Related: </strong><a href="https://hechingerreport.org/420000-homeless-students-missing-from-schools-rolls-may-never-be-found/"><strong>420,000 homeless kids went missing from schools’ rolls last year. They may never be found</strong></a><strong></strong></p>
<p>At first, Flores was a newbie, and then she was one of “the old
ones.” But others kept leaving, their housing success stories swirling
in their wake, and Flores realized she was the last. Eventually, she
decided to let Portillo help with her case management. Soon thereafter,
she was placed in a residential shelter with a private room for her and
Mateo. It wasn’t what she’d envisioned. “When I saw the room, it was
like what’s in the military,” she said. “A small room, and it has — what
do you call it? — bunk beds.”</p>
<p>Disappointed, she sat down and cried. So did Mateo. “I felt like I was so abandoned,” Flores said.</p>
<p>She had kept all her meetings, done everything right, and still had
so much further to go to reclaim the type of home she’d had before being
evicted. Situations like this were one of the only negative findings in
the Controller’s evaluation. Participants called getting more permanent
housing a “waiting game” and said “people get bounced from place to
place.”</p>
During the school day, there is no trace of the Stay
Over Program hosted at night in the Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8
Community School gym. <span><span>Credit:</span> Gail Cornwall for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>One of the best things about the Stay Over Program, educators here
said, is that rather than adding a burden on educators, it has relieved
one. Having a clear protocol for connecting families with case managers
who specialize in housing has allowed teachers to teach and allows
Chandler, the community school coordinator, to focus on mental health
interventions and other areas of need.</p>
<p>“It let us stick to our expertise,” he said. He also noticed a higher
level of trust, both from families who’d utilized the program and
others who now believe he might actually have the power to help with
their problems.</p>
<p>Part of that has to do with the Stay Over Program’s unique features.
There is no limit on the number of nights families can stay, families
can reserve spots rather than needing to line up for
first-come-first-served entry each night, and absence for a night or two
doesn’t result in removal. That was important to Flores when she first
arrived. She and Mateo wanted to keep sleeping at the office a few
nights a week “to be like it used to be, just the both of us,” she said.</p>
<p>These policies are probably also responsible for the program’s unusual continuity. The <a href="https://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Auditing/SOP%20Evaluation%20Report%20FINAL.pdf">evaluation</a>
found that families stayed a median of 20 days, more than six times
longer than at San Francisco’s most comparable shelter, located in a
Baptist church. (It closed during the pandemic and has yet to reopen.)
But it could be the site. Of the families surveyed for the controller’s
report, 79 percent said it was “very important” to be able to stay
somewhere familiar, like their child’s school or another school in the
district.</p>
<p>When first asked, more than 90 percent of the survey respondents
reported that Stay Over Program staff, 90 percent of whom are bilingual,
treated them “excellent” or “good.” After they’d stayed two weeks or
more, still close to 80 percent said the same. Nearly all said their
child really liked (or felt very comfortable) staying in the gym, a
number that surprised Ronen given initial concerns about students facing
stigma. Duffield, the expert on national homelessness policy, found
these results “remarkable.”</p>
<p>The positive reviews don’t mean everything is perfect. Flores said
she and Mateo couldn’t take advantage of the free dinner provided,
because 7 p.m. was too late for him to eat, but the Stay Over Program
can’t open any earlier because BVHM’s after-school program uses the
space. Families only have access to small lockers and otherwise have to
carry their belongings in and out each day. Having to shower before 6:00
a.m. on the weekend was so early for Glen McCoy and the grandchild he
and his wife are raising, that they would drive to a Safeway parking lot
and fall back to sleep in the car. Some nights, the banging of the
pipes just doesn’t let up.</p>
<p>And yet, Olga — the mom of the now-reading 6-year-old — described the
space as “tranquilo,” calm. She stopped having panic attacks and got
treatment for a urinary tract infection she’d developed trying to avoid
using the bathroom in her shared apartment.</p>
<p>The stability and community offered by the program is temporary, and
the path to stable housing provided by this district-city partnership is
as long and frustrating for each individual family as the pursuit of
eliminating homelessness has been for San Francisco and the nation. But
it’s something. And for individual children it has been everything.</p>
<p>“We will not fix homelessness until the federal government believes
that housing is a human right,” Ronen said. “Hopefully we will not need
[a program like] this in the future, but right now we do.”</p>
Often, the first family to arrive will claim a
corner spot with two walls of the gym and one partition making a
three-sided square. It’s the only sleeping area with a shelf to store
belongings. <span><span>Credit:</span> Marissa Leshnov for the Hechinger Report</span>
<p>Flores and Mateo hadn’t actually been abandoned. They continued to
get help from a caseworker, and they finally moved into a subsidized
studio apartment in November 2021.</p>
<p>There’s a bathroom they can access any day, at any time. Their
showers don’t have a time limit. Flores thinks it sounds silly, but of
everything in that crazy-heavy duffel bag she carried around for more
than two years, it was the toothbrush that weighed most heavily on her.
“It’s something that is private, something that nobody wants to see you
use,” she said. And now it stays at home.</p>
<p>They got boxes out of storage. “I have my furniture,” Flores said,
“my vacuum!” All the clothes she had looked forward to wearing again no
longer fit, a consequence of eating out for more than two years. But now
that they have a kitchen, she’s cooking again: “We’re trying to eat
some healthy things,” she said.</p>
<p>Mateo doesn’t have to deal with the bunk beds that creaked so loudly
he worried about waking his mom, he’s not awoken by shelter monitors at
night, and a bed in the apartment beats an air mattress in an office.
He’s getting the sleep he needs to focus on his classes at the City
College of San Francisco: math, English, and criminal investigation.</p>
<p>But he still doesn’t have his own room, and Flores said they won’t stay here permanently.</p>
<p>“It’s another stop,” she said. “We are getting closer.”</p>
<p><em>This story about <a href="https://hechingerreport.org/a-shelter-in-a-school-gym-for-students-experiencing-homelessness-paid-off-in-classrooms/">students experiencing homelessness </a>was produced by </em>The Hechinger Report<em>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the</em><a href="http://hechingerreport.us2.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=66c306eebb323868c3ce353c1&id=d3ee4c3e04"><em> Hechinger newsletter</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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