Chicago Coalition for the Homeless board member Cary Martin and I waited more than two hours on October 20, 2009 to testify at the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) budget hearing in Chicago. The hearing room was packed. Sometime after 6 p.m., CCH was called and we urged that $4 million be budgeted in fiscal year 2011 for schools to serve the special needs of homeless children and youth.
Cary, a successful Chicago attorney, eloquently told her story of childhood homelessness, the paramount importance of getting an education, and the value of homeless education services in her life.
As director of the CCH Law Project, I presented data from schools in suburban Chicago showing a startling 45% increase in identified homeless students from the 2007-08 to the 2008-09 school year. The increases ranged from 24% in suburban Cook County to 125% in Kane County. A story in today’s Chicago Tribune (Oct. 28, 2009) by Bonnie Rubin highlights the increases and the dire living situations of too many Illinois schoolchildren. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/chi-homeless-studentsoct28,0,7967162.story.
Preliminary data from this current school year shows an even more dramatic increase in identified homeless students in suburban Cook and collar counties: a 77% increase comparing September 30, 2009 enrollments to the same date in 2008. Chicago Public Schools numbers are up 25% this school year compared to the same period last year.
I explained the effectiveness of ISBE’s $3 million homeless education grants in FY 2009, a new program proposed and advocated by the Law Project. Grants to 29 districts statewide were used, among other things, to increase tutoring and after-school programs for students experiencing homelessness, and to hire outreach workers to reconnect youth to school and to connect families to community resources.
We know so much about what works for students who lack housing to get and keep them in school, keep them safe, enhance their academic efforts and provide stability. But we can't get there without adequate funding to support school districts serving increasing numbers of homeless students. Shouldn't Illinois do better for its most vulnerable students?
Illinois once proudly embraced at least the principle of ending poverty and doing the best for its people. As members of the Responsible Budget Coalition (fighting for reasonable tax increases as embodied in Illinois House Bill 174), CCH staff listened earlier this year to a supporter who turned to the Illinois Constitution for inspiration:
We, the People of the State of Illinois ****in order to provide for the health, safety and welfare of the people; maintain a representative and orderly government; eliminate poverty and inequality; assure legal, social and economic justice; provide opportunity for the fullest development of the individual; insure domestic tranquility; provide for the common defense; and secure the blessings of freedom and liberty to ourselves and our posterity - do ordain and establish this Constitution for the State of Illinois.
Let’s meet our constitutional obligations to Illinois’ homeless students and provide services that allow them to enroll in, attend and succeed in school.
- Rene Heybach, Director of the Law Project
