4.5% of Osceola County students face housing insecurity. How the school district tries to help
By Debbie Daniel
NOTE: This story originally appeared on the Osceola News-Gazette website.
Among the 73,558 students in Osceola County schools, there is a segment of students—3,314, at last count—who struggle with more than projects, peer pressure, testing, and tardiness. These students face all those things in addition to some form of homelessness.
According to the School District, 756 students currently live in hotels or motels; 86 live in emergency or transitional shelters; 129 live in parks, temporary trailer parks or campgrounds, train stations, etc.; and 2,343 share the housing of other persons. That amounts to 4.5% of the student population, giving Osceola County one of the highest percentages in Central Florida.
Experts say the high homeless numbers in Osceola County can be traced to one primary factor: unaffordable housing.
“(The high rate of homelessness) is because we had a sudden increase in rents,” said Martha Are, CEO of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida. “We have been warning the community for many years that we were going to see an increase. The Central Florida region has been identified by the National Low Income Housing Coalition as having one of the worst housing markets in the country, and that’s been a very consistent place for us for the last six or seven years.”
Teacher Dawn Jones has seen the effects that housing insecurity has on her students, from intangible struggles like emotional difficulties to other, more tangible ones.
“If you give a project, you have to give them the materials. Otherwise, they sometimes won’t do a project,” she said. “Going to the Dollar Tree and getting their stuff … it’s not that easy for them, whether it’s transportation, whether it’s financial, or maybe there’s a parent at home that’s working two jobs or whatever just to just scrape by.”
The School District has a department that helps with things like project supplies and much more. Angela Burdue with the Families in Transition Department says FIT provides immediate enrollment, uniforms, transportation that allows them to stay at their school of origin, and more, to provide these students with as much stability as possible. There’s also mental health counseling to help the students deal with the emotional toil that homelessness takes. And the District’s SMART Bus visits different locations throughout Osceola County, including hotels and other housing accommodations, to provide homework assistance and healthy habits and activities to promote a wholesome lifestyle to students.
Still, the hurdles remain. “Housing instability definitely causes challenges associated with them getting to school regularly, so many times our students who are considered families in transition have attendance difficulties,” Burdue said. “They may be late to school, or they may miss school frequently. They may also have some of the challenges associated with meal instability, maybe not getting adequate sleep if they’re in a home with many people. Those kinds of things can really impact their ability to do well in school.”
The FIT Department isn’t alone in helping these students. Local groups like St. Cloud Cares provide bags of food for the students to take home on the weekends when they don’t have access to the free breakfasts and lunches at school. Some schools have set up closets of food, clothing, and supplies for students who need it. And teachers like Jones and her coworkers step up whenever they can to support the 70 FIT students at her school.
“We do an Angel Tree every year. We have at least 30, 40 names on the tree,” she said.
All of that assistance, though, is just a band-aid on the current housing crisis Osceola students are experiencing. Jones believes a more permanent solution would be the creation of more Section 8 housing, or Section 8 subsidies to help pay for hotel rates, allowing families to save up for a deposit on an apartment.
“Hotels are charging anywhere from $400 to $500 a week, and they have to pay weekly, so that’s usually almost $2,000 (a month),” Jones said. “And if they have bad credit or other circumstances, they have to have more of a down payment into an apartment. If they were to get financial support for their housing … then maybe they would be able to afford, with their record of their payment at the hotel, to get into another place.”