Reply to Truancy In DC HS Is Shocking - Why No Urgency To Address?!!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I work as a case manager in DC.  If you want to solve truancy in DC you need to solve the housing crisis.

There are ton of marginally housed kids (mostly with mothers) in DC.  They bounce from DC to PG County and back again, often by the week or by the month or even by the day.  From an aunt's basement to a friend's couch.  Then they don't have cars or transportation so getting to school is hard if not impossible.

I really don't think DCUM has ANY idea of how prevalent this situation is.

You want school stability?   House them all with fully subsidized housing.  But that is super expensive----$2-4K/month per kid or family unit of kids.

[/quote]

This could account for incremental growth in elementary but not the incredibly high rates in HS … [/quote]

huh?  by high school you have the cumulative effect of years of housing instability and so many kids who are then behind in school as a result.  Many of them drop out by high school or effectively drop out by never attending. 
Trust me, it's all connected.  Ask anyone who actually works in the trenches of social services, day in and day out.

You house people, you will solve about 95% of DC's problems in a generation.  It is the #1, 2, 3 concern of almost every DC resident who lives under the poverty line.  It's pretty much the only thing I get asked about every day. 
There are the people that you think about as homeless (those who lives in tents) but then an absolute SEA of people who are what we call "marginally housed"----they live with relatives, friends, in unstable rent situations, etc. etc, etc.

DCUM doesn't want to hear about it.  No one does.  Because it's expensive and it doesn't seem fair (why should I bust my a$$ to pay my mortgage when XYZ gets a $4k housing voucher for free?).  But it's the root
of many problems in DC.

Off my soapbox. 
[/quote]

If housing were all it took, there would be very low truancy for residents of public housing and people with section 8 vouchers. I agree that stable housing is important, but there are also a lot of other needed services. And some of it would be really hard to provide...are you going to have a caseworker calling a parent every morning to see if she got out of bed to take her little kid to school? What will the caseworker do if mom says "it's raining, she can stay home?"[/quote]

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