TESTIMONY OF:

Melissa Accomando – Senior Staff Attorney, Education Practice

BROOKLYN DEFENDER SERVICES

Presented before the New York City Council Committee on Education and Committee on General Welfare

Hearing on Youth in Shelter and the School System

April 16, 2021

My name is Melissa Accomando. I am a Senior Staff Attorney in the Education Practice at Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS). BDS provides innovative, multi-disciplinary, and client- centered criminal, family, and immigration defense, as well as civil legal services for nearly 30,000 people in Brooklyn every year. We thank the City Council Committees on Education and General Welfare and Chairs Treyger and Levin for holding this important hearing on youth in shelter and the school system.

BDS is fortunate to have the support of the City Council to supplement the services we provide as a public defender office in Brooklyn. Through specialized units of the office, we provide extensive wrap-around services that meet the needs of traditionally under-served clients in a comprehensive way. This includes helping young people and their families navigate the public education bureaucracy during and after contact with the criminal legal and family court systems.

Our Education Unit delivers legal representation and informal advocacy to our school-age clients and to parents of children in New York City schools. Many of the families we serve are involved in the criminal legal system or in Family Court proceedings. In addition, a significant number of the students we work with qualify as “over-age and under-credited” and have been retained at least one grade. More than half of the students we work with are classified as students with disabilities. As an interdisciplinary legal and social work team, we work to improve our clients’ access to education, and a significant portion of our advocacy relates to special education, school discipline, reentry, and alternative pathways to graduation.

Background

Our staff has witnessed first-hand the trauma and instability often experienced by young people in temporary housing. The transition to temporary housing is often stressful. Too often, families are removed from their familiar neighborhoods and placed in shelters or other temporary living arrangements in areas far from their communities, classmates and extended family. Shelter conditions can be unclean and unsafe. Many families are moved to shelters without cooking facilities.

The process of entering the shelter system can be confusing and some families must navigate the application process multiple times before they are deemed eligible. Families who do not initially qualify for temporary housing may have to return to DHS’s Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) intake center again and again, pulling their children out of school to make the long trip to the Bronx, and enduring multiple “provisional placements” before learning where they will ultimately end up.

School-age children living in shelters or temporary housing experience particular hardships. The disruption caused by a family losing its home is evident in its impact on a child’s access to school. After navigating the often-lengthy process of being placed in a shelter, a student’s once local school may only be accessible by long and unsustainable commutes. Though DHS policy states that families are supposed to be placed in shelters close to the school of the youngest child in the family, due to the massive overcrowding of the shelter system, families are often placed far from schools. Additionally, many families face over broad restrictions due to domestic violence or other safety concerns, where they are “precluded” from being placed in shelters in large areas – often entire boroughs. Families are then faced with the choice of enrolling their children in unfamiliar schools near the shelters or remaining in their home schools but enduring long commutes.

While families struggle to bring their children to school and consider the possibility of school transfers, students face days or weeks of tardiness and absences, only compounding the problems they experience. Though the City has guaranteed transportation assistance to all students living in temporary housing, this assistance often comes in the form of MetroCards given to students and parents. The burden is thus placed on parents to bring their children to school – often over long distances to different boroughs, and sometimes involving multiple children being brought to different schools. These commutes on public transportation are even more difficult for students with disabilities. Physical or behavioral disabilities can make long commutes even more burdensome – and sometimes impossible.

When school bus service is available, there are often delays – of weeks or even months – in getting this service set up. Obtaining bus service for a student in temporary housing requires having multiple forms filled out by shelter staff and school staff, having those forms submitted to the Office of Pupil Transportation, and then waiting up to 10 days for a bus route to be assigned. And that is only if all the paperwork is filled out correctly and a bus route is available. BDS frequently works with parents who have attempted to obtain busing for their children and have been waiting for weeks to have busing put into place, either because shelter staff have failed to properly complete forms, or because DOE refuses to put busing in place when families have not yet received a permanent shelter placement. And when busing is eventually put into place, some students endure exceedingly long commutes on buses that make numerous stops before delivering children to school.

Our office worked with one mother who sought busing for her 5-year-old son to transport him from Manhattan to Brooklyn. She was repeatedly given inaccurate information about how to request busing, and her shelter caseworker did not properly complete the forms necessary to secure busing. Our office got involved to assist with the busing request. But once the request was approved, she learned that her son would likely be on the bus for an hour-and-a-half each way.

Knowing her son experiences carsickness, and worried about the long ride, she instead decided to transport him herself on the subway – over an hour each way. Because of this commute, it is difficult for her to look for permanent employment. She has contemplated moving him to a school closer to the shelter – but she expects to return to Brooklyn as soon as she can find permanent housing, and worries about transferring him, only to move him again when she finds an apartment.

School stability is incredibly important for all students – but especially those experiencing housing instability.¹ Staying in the same school allows students to maintain relationships with teachers, school staff and friends, providing security and stability while they experience the upheaval of entering the shelter system. School stability, through a transfer to a shelter close to the child’s home school or school bus transportation, is often only available when a family is working with an advocate who can help the family navigate the system – and even then, is often unattainable or impractical.

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Problems experienced by students living in temporary housing have been particularly acute this year, when many students had to contend with learning remotely. Though students living in temporary housing were supposed to be prioritized for receiving data-enabled devices to allow them to log into their classes, our office has worked with families living in shelters who waited months to receive devices. And even when families received these devices, they struggled to log into classes due to poor mobile-data connections and limited or no wireless internet in many shelter buildings.

One of our clients who spent much of this school year in a hotel shelter told us that she begged the shelter staff to give her access to the hotel WiFi, because her child’s remote learning device could not pick up a cellular signal. For weeks, shelter staff told her that she was not permitted to use the WiFi. When she finally was granted access, the WiFi was so slow that she was unable to log her child in. Fearing what would happen if her child was marked absent from school every day, she ultimately reached an agreement with her child’s school that he would be marked present if she could document any interaction with the school – a text message or an email would suffice. While she is grateful that he is not being marked absent, she is understandably concerned that by the fall he will essentially have missed over a year of learning.

We are pleased that the City has finally committed to installing WiFi in all shelters housing school-aged children – something that should have happened even before the COVID-19 pandemic – and grateful to the organizations that brought a lawsuit to hold the City accountable for providing wireless access in shelters. However, many students living in temporary housing have lost over a year of school. The City must come up with a plan to provide compensatory education services to those students who have missed so much school this past year, including those living in temporary housing.

Brooklyn Defender Services believes that improved collaboration between the relevant city agencies, namely Department of Education (DOE) and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), is essential to positively impact the educational stability of students in temporary housing, and to ensure that they receive the education to which they are entitled. The remainder of my testimony will provide recommendation to increase school stability and supports for students who are experiencing housing instability or living in DHS shelters.

Recommendations

As the City begins to plan the future of school following this unprecedented year, there is an opportunity to prioritize the needs of children who have been disproportionately impacted by gaps in access to school this year, and to ensure that students newly experiencing housing instability can maintain school stability whenever possible. To ensure young people in shelter’s needs are prioritized, we offer the following suggestions:

Clarify the Shelter Placement and Transfer Process to Ensure Families Can Be Placed Near Existing Schools Whenever Possible.

Increased attention must be given to ensure families are placed in their home borough, and near their children’s schools, upon initial admission to PATH. Regularly, our clients contact us after applying to PATH to notify us that they were placed in an unfamiliar borough. For example, despite informing the staff at PATH that their child’s school is in Brooklyn, they receive a placement in Manhattan or the Bronx.

DHS and DOE, along with other relevant agencies, must create a more streamlined process to ensure that families can reside in a shelter close to their children’s schools and ensure that sufficient space exists in the shelter system to allow families to be placed in locations convenient to schools. When faced with the decision of a lengthy commute to school or a transfer to a closer school, parents often do not feel they have any option but to transfer their child to the local school, compromising their school stability and disrupting their child’s learning. But we are hopeful that DHS can create an easier and more transparent process where families can be initially placed in shelters so children can remain in their original schools. Through advocacy, BDS can often assist families in transferring to shelters near their children’s school. However, not all families have access to an advocate or attorney and ensuring families are placed in shelters near their child’s school should not require case by case advocacy. DHS should also adopt a formal policy giving families the right to a transfer if their initial placement is not convenient to a child’s school and laying out the process by which they can seek the transfer.

Take School Location into Account for Provisional Shelter Placements.

When families apply for shelter through PATH, they are almost never placed immediately. Instead, the family is given a provisional shelter placement while their eligibility for permanent shelter is investigated. While DHS policy indicates that families are supposed to be placed near the location of the youngest child’s school, no similar policy exists for provisional shelter placements. What is more, even though provisional placement is supposed to last only 10 days, families are often in provisional placements for much longer for reasons outside their control, as when investigations take longer than 10 days to conduct. Knowing that the provisional placement is not permanent, families do not want to switch their children’s school during this provisional period. Placing families in provisional placements near children’s school would help to avoid unnecessary disruption to the children’s attendance.

Ensure that Preclusions Are More Limited so that Families Are Not Prevented from Living in Large Areas of the City.

When DHS determines that there is a safety reason why a family cannot be placed near their former home or children’s schools, they should limit the size of the area in which the family is precluded from living. For example, if a family is precluded from living in one neighborhood in Brooklyn, it should not necessarily follow that the family cannot live anywhere in Brooklyn.

DHS should work with the family to ensure they are placed somewhere they feel safe, but – when possible – that will also allow for a reasonable commute to the children’s school. DHS should also give applicants a formal means of contesting the preclusion. For instance, applicants should be able to choose to prioritize placement near a school or another convenient location if they feel it is safe, especially because in many cases the family will continue to travel to the area near the school to bring the children to school.

Make Permanent COVID-19 Rules that Do Not Require School-Aged Children to Attend PATH Intake and Follow-Up Meetings.

Historically, all members of a family were required to be present during the PATH application process, and for any follow-up meetings. Thus, parents had to pull children out of school in order to go with them to PATH. During the COVID-19 pandemic, PATH has suspended the requirement to bring children to meetings at PATH – and this suspension should be made permanent. There is no reason that children should miss school in order to attend meetings at PATH. Our office has worked with families who have had to return to PATH time and time again when their eligibility for shelter was questioned, and their children missed days or even weeks of school.

Ensure Accessible and Practical School Transportation to Maintain School Stability

Accessible and reliable transportation is a crucial tool towards securing school stability for students in temporary housing. We appreciate that DOE has made bus service available to many students living in temporary housing. However, many other students in temporary housing remain without school bus transportation, either because their families are given MetroCards instead of being provided bus service, or because they have not been able to navigate the labyrinthian bureaucracies of DHS and the DOE in order to get bus service in place.

In New York City, where transportation can involve multiple transfers in all forms of weather, providing a family with MetroCards can be an impractical and unsustainable option, especially for younger children. Without feasible transportation options, parents often feel their only choice is to transfer their child to a nearby school, disrupting school stability. DHS and DOE, along with other relevant agencies, must create a quicker and more transparent process to secure yellow bus travel for students.

Additionally, parents are not kept informed of the process for obtaining bus service and other transportation assistance. DHS and DOE should work together to create a transparent policy, including a timeline, to ensure eligible families receive sustainable transportation options so students can remain in their home schools.

We are encouraged by Council’s Int. 150-2018 to create a task force regarding the transportation of homeless students; however, this legislation has been pending for several years while the issue of ensuring transportation to students experiencing homelessness persists. The Council should act swiftly to identify ways to address barriers to arranging transportation for students.

Make Bus Service Available to More Students in Temporary Housing.

As detailed above, we often work with parents who are given MetroCards to transport their children to school, instead of bus service, which can be difficult for families who live far from the children’s school or parents who have work obligations. When students are placed far from their schools, DOE should ensure that busing is made available for children who are too young to travel to school on their own. The City should also create additional bus routes to ensure that when students in temporary housing are given bus service, that the bus rides are not too long.

Provide Transportation Assistance When Families are in Provisional Shelter Placements.

Families who are placed in provisional shelter placements are told they are ineligible for busing until their shelter placement is made permanent; in the meantime, they may be faced with the impossible decision of keeping their children home from school, traveling a great distance to school by public transportation, or enrolling their children near a shelter placement that may not be permanent. DOE and DHS should provide reimbursement for car service transportation to children’s schools until a permanent shelter placement can be obtained, and transportation established. In the alternative, given the fact that many families spend longer than 10 days in provisional placements, DOE should allow busing to be requested for families in provisional placements.

3. Ensure Access to Reliable and High-Speed WiFi in Shelters and Create a Plan to Provide Compensatory Education Services to Students Experiencing Homelessness.

The majority of students in New York City are continuing to attend school remotely. And even when all students return to in-person learning, it is nevertheless essential that students living in shelter have access to reliable high-speed internet. The City should work as quickly as possible to honor the commitment it has made to install wireless internet in all shelters housing school- aged children by the end of the summer.

What is more, students living in shelters have missed a tremendous amount of school since the pandemic began. The DOE must create a plan to provide compensatory services and additional supports to these students so that they do not continue to fall further behind.

Conclusion

Brooklyn Defender Services is grateful to the Committee on Education and the Committee on General Welfare for hosting this hearing and working to address this critical issue. Thank you for your time and consideration of our comments. We look forward to further discussing these and other issues that impact the people we serve. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at maccomando@bds.org or (718) 254-0700 x 378.

¹ See, e.g., John W. Fantuzzo, Whitney A. LeBoeuf, et al., “The Unique and Combined Effects of Homelessness and School Mobility on the Educational Outcomes of Young Children,” 41 Educational Researcher 393-402 (2012).