For homeless,no place like school fed law tells schools they must do more

[ElsewheresDaughter]

more bushshit burden heaped on already financial straped states and school didtricts because of bush*s tax cuts to the wealthy..."robbing the poor to pay the wealthy"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0208/p10s01-legn.html

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Awareness of the law has been filtering down, but full implementation is slow in coming. Some schools have to keep retraining staff because of high turnover, while others "just don't want these kids, and will try to avoid implementing the law," says Joy Moses, a staff attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. The Center sued last year in New York's Suffolk County to get schools there to stop burdensome screening processes that delayed the enrollment of homeless children. It also sued New York State, which agreed to do more to enforce compliance with McKinney-Vento. The parties reached a tentative settlement in October.




FLAGSTAFF, ARIZ. – Last October, Nicole's grades hit a low point. It's hard for a fifth-grader to master math when the only place to sleep at night is the family station wagon.

For a month, her family would drive up into the pine-covered hills of Flagstaff, Ariz., stack up their belongings under a tarp, and huddle in sleeping bags for another night of "camping." In the morning, her mom, Darlene, and Darlene's partner, Steve, would sometimes have to kick open the frozen car doors. Still, they managed to drive Nicole to school on time every day.

They came here in August from Alabama, partly in search of better schools. They stayed in motels at first, and immediately enrolled Nicole in a year-round school that provides her with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But in this mountain resort town, it hasn't been easy to find enough work to put a roof over their heads.

It was the school, of all places, that finally helped them find a home. Realizing that children don't have a good foundation for academic success if they are worried about where they'll sleep, the Flagstaff school district set up an outreach program in 1993 called HomeStart.

The district was somewhat ahead of its time. Not until 2002, with the strengthening of a federal law known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, were all school districts required to have a liaison for homeless students - and to remove barriers to their full participation in school.

The law isn't just about kids who sleep in cars or on the streets. Estimates of the number of children in the United State who experience homelessness at some point in a given year range from 900,000 to 2.8 million. They're in shelters, or doubled up with relatives or friends in overcrowded houses. They're in motels or substandard apartments. They're teens on the run from abuse or kicked out after the latest argument with family. They don't have a stable place to call home - but wherever they are, they have the right to an education.