The Hidden Education Crisis Behind the City’s Record Homelessness Rate
“It’s scary that we could be facing this again in two or three years,” said Latoya Iheanacho.
She reflected on the time she spent in homeless shelters with her three children. Even after her family secured a two-bedroom apartment through the city’s housing lottery, the fear lingers. One job loss. One lease issue. One unexpected crisis. Any of it could send her family back to the shelter system.
As a formerly homeless youth myself, I know these anxieties all too well. Year after year, I find myself wondering when that day might come — the day I have to walk back through the doors of a Department of Homeless Services intake center.
How Families Fall into Homelessness
Student homelessness is rooted in another crisis we too often overlook: family homelessness.
When we picture homelessness, what do we see? Stigma teaches us to associate it with untreated mental illness or addiction. But those narratives distract from a far more unsettling truth: homelessness can happen to anyone.
As housing costs climb far beyond what most families can afford, and wages fail to keep pace, more parents are losing stable housing. And when families lose housing, children do too. That means more students growing up in shelters, in cars, or doubled up in overcrowded apartments, trying to do homework in spaces never meant for them.
The Landscape of Student Homelessness in NYC
Student homelessness in New York City is at a record high, and it’s been rising for years.
In 2018, 130 schools had at least 1 in 4 students experiencing homelessness. Just five years later, that number has more than doubled to 330 schools.
According to new data released by Advocates for Children of New York on October 20, 154,000 public school students were identified as homeless in the 2024–2025 school year. Today, one in every seven students in NYC public schools is homeless. While the city has enrolled more than 45,000 children from migrant families since 2022, experts stress that this crisis long predates the recent influx — driven primarily by a persistent shortage of affordable housing.
Maria Odom, Executive Director of Advocates for Children of New York, emphasizes that the next mayor “must lead a citywide, cross-agency effort” to address this emergency.
Because of the locations of family shelters, a lot of homeless students are concentrated in certain neighborhoods. In fact, in some neighborhoods, more than one in five students is homeless. It is no surprise that student homelessness is not equally spread across New York City’s five boroughs.
Where there is poverty, there is student homelessness. For example, more than 20% of homeless students come from lower-income neighborhoods such as East Harlem; Brownsville and Bushwick; and High Bridge and Grand Concourse in the southwest Bronx (these are neighborhood clusters that share school districts, shelter placements, and community resources, which is why they are grouped together in housing and education data). At roughly 30 schools, more than half of the students were homeless.
How Homelessness Disrupts Learning
One of the most significant challenges for homeless students is the distance they often have to travel just to get to school. Because families are seldom placed in shelters near their original neighborhoods, children may spend hours each day commuting. For students who rely on the city’s yellow bus system, known for its chronic delays, this can mean arriving several hours late to school.
According to the report noted above, 52 percent of all homeless children — and two-thirds of those living in shelters — were chronically absent, missing at least 10 percent of the school year. And if a child is not in class, they cannot learn. The impact is evident on report cards: in 2023, approximately 75 percent of students living in shelters lacked reading proficiency, and more than one-third did not graduate on time.
For Iheanacho and her family, the commute meant waking up at 4 am every day to get her three children to school. Between multiple buses and trains, the trip could take two hours each way. At night, they returned to shelter rooms infested with mice. Iheanacho told The New York Times that one of her daughters entered puberty early, something doctors linked to stress.
When attendance problems triggered a child welfare investigation, Latoya made the difficult decision to leave her job so she could personally ensure her children arrived at school on time.
This is a multi-agency systemic failure. When shelters are unevenly distributed across the city, when transportation systems are unreliable, and when families are forced to navigate trauma while constantly in motion, how can we expect children to learn — or families to recover?
The Cost of Failing Our Youngest New Yorkers
Family and child homelessness is where generational poverty begins and how the cycle continues. Education is supposed to be a doorway to opportunity, but homeless students are being shut out by an educational system that cannot meet their needs. How is it that in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, we still cannot provide the bare minimum?
Each homeless child represents a promise we’ve broken, a new generation of poverty we’ve allowed to take root. These children are not even adults yet, and we have already set them up to struggle. And make no mistake: this is a collective responsibility. This is not an invitation to blame parents who cannot afford rent or find a place to live in an outrageously expensive city.
This crisis is the result of greed and systemic failure — and the hundreds of thousands of people who are being pushed under by policies that prioritize wealth over people. It is about lawmakers who lack the courage to act. It is about the millionaires and developers who profit from inequity every single day. New York City’s children should matter more.
As Dave Giffen, Executive Director of the Coalition for the Homeless, put it:
“The increase in homeless students is so profoundly obscene that I don’t know how the No. 1 priority of any administration isn’t ensuring that everyone in the city has a place to live.”