0.12 Safer, l., wilhite, r., sims, p., mann, s., & Kroeger, t.  (Page 2/5)

Duffield and Lovell in their December 2008 report, The Economic Crisis Hits Home: The Unfolding Increase in Child and Youth Homelessness, documented that in a survey of 1,716 school districts nationally that 330 districts identified the same number or more homeless students in the first few months of the current school year than they had reported the entire previous year; 459 school districts had an increase of at least 25% in the number of homeless students identified between the 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 school years. Exemplary of this are statistics reported by the Clark County Public Schools in Nevada (including Las Vegas) and the San Bernardino City Unified School District (CA) where the former had a 43% increase in homeless students between the 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 school years while the latter showed a 33% increase in homeless students for the same time period (Duffield&Lovell, 2008).

The academic consequence of homelessness is staggering. Twenty-two percent of homeless students have repeated two grades, vis-à-vis 8% of permanently housed children ( Rog, Holupka,&Patton, 2007). Homeless students are 1.5 times more likely to perform below grade level in both reading and spelling, and they are 2.5 times more likely to perform below grade level in math. Third grade homeless students are more than two times as likely to fail a grade as their permanently housed peers. Moreover, some research suggests that homelessness can reduce the chances of high school graduation by more than 50 percent (Duffield&Lovell, 2008). Rafferty and Shinn in their 1989 examination of 9,659 homeless school-age children in New York City between 1987 and 1988 reported that the percentage of homeless children at or above grade level in reading to all school–aged children was 42% to 68% and in math 28% to 57% citywide. (p.1175)

Initiating success

To address this pressing and growing educational vacuum, in 2006 the Chicago Public Schools’ Educational Support for Students in Temporary Living Situations Department (formerly Homeless Education ) , through a grant funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service, added AmeriCorps VISTA ( V olunteers i n S ervice t o A merica), members to the department as a viable response to the lack of services and intervention processes for homeless youth within the City of Chicago. Prior to this initiation, educational intervention programs for homeless children living in shelters were essentially non-existent within the public schools. The newly-assembled group of AmeriCorps VISTAS’ designed Chicago HOPES ( H eightening O pportunity and P otential for E ducational S uccess) with the goal to create after-school tutoring programs based in the Chicago shelters that serve families with children to combat the negative effects of child homelessness on education. In fall of 2009 Chicago HOPES expanded its tutoring programs into 26 shelters throughout the city.

Building success

The goal of Chicago HOPES is to empower students to succeed academically despite the challenges of homelessness. Its core values – literacy, math and independent learning , as well as homework guidance and personal enrichment – shape its highly structured curricular programming, which aims to bring stability to the students’ education, to build their basic skills necessary for academic success and to develop positive attitudes toward learning.