Reply to What will Closing D.G. General Mean for DCPS Elementary Schools?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]40% of kids in DC shelters are under age 2.  Like, babies and 1 year olds.  Most kids in shelter are not elementary school aged.  The new shelters are probably going to have no more than about 100 kids, so about 1 or 2 per grade will likely enroll in the IB elementary school.

I live in an area where a shelter is planned and our school is already about 10% homeless and about 1/4 have IEPs (not necessarily an overlap but in many cases it is).  We need more support already, but this will only be a very small increase.  [/quote]

10:21 here.

That is definitely true right now, but given the huge percentage of kids under 2 and the degree to which charters are already saturated, I think this is an opportunity to plan for more children attending their IB schools at PK3. Today's 2-year-olds, depending on when their birthday is, are entering DCPS this year or the next. They will not oversaturate any specific school, but given the magnitude of the crisis, I don't think it's reasonable to plan that family homelessness is going to dramatically decrease in the next 2 years. I think it would be a better idea to plan for the schools who are receiving shelters sending some of their children - younger, older, whatever - to those schools and have systems in place to manage that. I know that at our school, we have already received contact from a shelter that is opening within our boundary about working together to provide the best transition for the kids. There is no reason that that cannot happen in an intentional way.[/quote]

It's also time for the suburbs to shoulder their share of the burden and build shelters.  For decades they've been sucking wealth out of the District at the District's expense.  Time to pay the piper.  [/quote]

I understand what you're saying, but many of these people are long time DC residents. Sending them to Maryland or Virginia means relocating them to a different state, with everything that entails - new identification, new services, etc. The services they get at the shelters run through DC are provided by the government of the District of Columbia. The government of the District of Columbia can't provide services to residents of MD and VA outside of immediate crisis situations.

I think that because this area is so compressed, people often forget that it is actually 3 separate states. [/quote]

this is actually wrong. Most homeless families are actually very fluid in their movement between DC and MD, VA, as they stay with friends and families etc. Its well discussed among DC officials that the offer of guaranteed housing for homeless families in DC induces many of them back to DC for the better services.  MD and VA need to do this as well.   I know for a fact that some police offivers in VA have "advised" homeless or soon to be homeless families to make their way into DC for guaranteed housing (which is likely to be a hotel in MD). Most of these families are in hotels in MD already, DC general is just a piece of the problem.  Also,  do you all really think these families will overcome all their issues in 90 days?  no way these families will have permanent housing, education, job training, addiction counseling etc. So they will end up staying in these "temporary shelters" for years or just ending up homeless again.[/quote]

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