Meeting basic needs
Unhoused students may need extra support because they are less likely to have their needs met while navigating unstable housing. At Monarch, an organization called The Monarch School Project is located on campus to help families access social services and housing. The organization partners with food banks, the housing authority and health centers to serve families.
Diana Rodriguez, a parent with three kids enrolled at Monarch, said it was important to feel like she mattered to the school as much as her kids do. “When you’re homeless, you see the cruelness of the world outside because everybody’s kind of shutting you down and you don’t have resources,” she said. “I cannot provide the best for my children if I’m not at my best.”
Afira DeVries, CEO of The Monarch School Project, recommended that educators and administrators lead with curiosity, rather than judgment, to discover what assets parents bring to the table and how they can be leveraged. Monarch has a dedicated area on the school grounds where caregivers can receive comprehensive support, including access to laundry facilities and health services. The center connects parents with staff members who can assist with everything from meeting with case managers or social workers to resume support and learning about job opportunities. It also offers a safe space for parents to regroup if they’ve had to leave their shelter early in the morning.
Improving students’ ability to focus
Students experiencing homelessness often lack the support they need to fully engage in learning, from basic needs to emotional and physical safety, according to DeVries. Additionally, these students may be dealing with trauma from life-threatening events or stressful environments. This often leads to interruptions in their schooling, requiring more support so that students have the mental space they need to focus on learning. “Each time they’re absent, each time they’re not staying in school consistently, they’re falling behind,” said Kristin Tanner, a literacy teacher at Monarch. Those interruptions can affect their ability to reach critical milestones, like third-grade reading levels.
Tanner remembers one student who had trouble adjusting to attending Monarch. “It would take her sometimes 20 minutes or half an hour to even get her inside the classroom. And then when she was here, it was head on her desk and crying or refusing to sit down or sitting somewhere else in the room on the floor,” Tanner said.
Consistency and a nurturing environment are key to supporting unhoused students, especially since studies show that students experiencing homelessness often lack access to adults or mentors they can trust. According to a recent survey by the CDC, students who experienced unstable housing had more persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year than their stably housed peers. For her student with adjustment difficulties, Tanner helped find a mental health therapist. Additionally, she said that Monarch students benefit from volunteers and tutors who offer extra classroom support. “Now I’m beginning to see the academic growth,” Tanner said of the student. “Now that we’ve dealt with those issues she was facing, she’s ready to learn.”
Cultivating students’ sense of belief
Constant mobility and lack of control over their circumstances can affect students’ perception of their ability to change their situation, according to DeVries. When students have not been in an environment that nurtures their individuality, they are less likely to develop a strong sense of self-belief. “Once that happens, it’s a lot of hard work for a teacher, caregiver or anyone in that child’s life to help them believe that their circumstances are temporary, but their potential is permanent and forever,” DeVries said.
Homeless students are often undercounted. They may retreat and hide in school settings, according to DeVries, because they are focused on neutralizing their impact on the world instead of cultivating their skills or sense of self. Educators can encourage students’ self-belief by exposing them to social programs and activities. “Make space for a kid to identify their own skills and then empower them to cultivate them,” DeVries advised. When students realize they are good at something, they start to believe they can impact the world around them, which boosts their dignity.
Azaiah, a recent graduate from Monarch, formed a close relationship with the volleyball coach after playing throughout his high school years. He now serves as an assistant coach for the team while attending community college. He credited the ability to take college courses at school and college visits as the main reasons he decided to pursue a degree in psychology to become a mental health therapist. “Coming to Monarch helped me change the way I think,” Azaiah said. “It helped me gain more confidence.”
Episode Transcript
Nimah Gobir: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Nimah Gobir.
Nimah Gobir: Diana Rodriguez was struggling with getting her son to school, but not for the reasons you might expect. It wasn’t traffic or that the alarm clock never went off, Diana and her family were experiencing homelessness.
Diana Rodriguez: Me and my kids dad and my kids were staying in a shelter.
Nimah Gobir: She lives in San Diego, a city that has seen homelessness rise by 14% in the last year alone. Insecure housing makes everything take longer.
Diana Rodriguez: It was kind of hard because I didn’t have a bus pass to take my son to National City. And we were like, literally walking from the from the trolley station.
Nimah Gobir: The US has a law called the McKinney-Vento Act. It was put in place to make sure students experiencing homelessness get what they need so they can have access to education. That includes support with getting children to and from school.
Diana Rodriguez: I asked the principal there for a bus pass and she didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, no, I heard the case manager said that we’re able to get assistance if we need it. She didn’t really know, she wasn’t educated.
Nimah Gobir: Even with an estimated 20,000 youth experiencing homelessness in San Diego, that school did not have the tools to help families deal with the challenges that come with housing instability.
Diana Rodriguez: When you’re homeless, you see the cruelness of the world outside because everybody’s kind of shutting you down.
Nimah Gobir: Diana’s story is not particularly unique, especially when California has experienced a 48% increase in unhoused students over the past decade. It’s a problem when schools don’t know how to support these kids because studies show they are more likely to struggle in school; They have lower chances of graduating; and they’re likely to fall behind because of chronic absenteeism. Plus, not finishing high school can actually increase their risk of ending up unhoused later on in life. It’s a cycle that’s really tough to break.
Nimah Gobir: Just when Diana was feeling hopeless about her situation, someone told her to check out Monarch School.
Nimah Gobir: Monarch started in 1987 as a drop-in center for youth experiencing homelessness. It was and continues to be funded by the San Diego County Office of Education and the nonprofit Monarch School Project. Back then, it was staffed by just one teacher, but the need to support unhoused students in the county was so great that over about a decade it grew into a K12 public school.
Dyane Plumly: So my full legal name is Dyane Plumly Nuñez, but at work I just go by Dyane Plumly. I am the principal at Monarch School. All the students who attend Monarch attend Monarch because they have experience or are experiencing being unhoused.
Nimah Gobir: The school serves about 300 students every year.
Dyane Plumly: Students and families choose to attend Monarch. We’re not like the neighborhood school. So a very wide representation of kids that live all across the county have a wide variety of experiences and prior school experience as well.
Nimah Gobir: Families find out about Monarch from shelters, social service agencies and by word of mouth. Students often leave Monarch to go to a traditional school when their living situations improve. However some students will stay enrolled for years and may attend until graduation.
Dyane Plumly: We have siblings and families at our school. So it really provides an opportunity to really get to know a kid, really get to know their family, and then thinking about that relationship that we have with their families and with our teachers and our partners to think about what it is that they want.
Nimah Gobir: Monarch uses the community school model to disrupt cycles of homelessness. That means it tries to meet the needs of families and students by having as many services as possible located on the school grounds – where they are easy to access. The school has a nonprofit organization on the school site to provide most of the services.
Afira DeVries: So my name is Afira DeVries…
Nimah Gobir: Afira is the CEO and president of the nonprofit located at Monarch.
Afira DeVries: They have access to a full scope of supports and services that are intended to stabilize the student so that they can learn in their classroom, and also support the evolution of the family so that they’re no longer in a position of conditional need.
[Intercom: Good morning, it’s a sunny morning…the only announcement that I have is we have Butterfly Boutique today, so you need to sign up if you want to go.]
Nimah Gobir: Butterfly Boutique is where students pick out brand new clothes. The school even has showers with toiletries.
Nimah Gobir: They also partner with other nonprofits in the community
Afira DeVries: We have really, really tight partnerships with organizations like Family Health Center here in San Diego. They provide us with a nurse practitioner. Partnerships with like Feeding San Diego and specialty foods to address food insecurity. The housing authority provides us with housing vouchers for our families.
Nimah Gobir: While community schools are popping up around the country. Schools like Monarch that are completely focused on students and families experiencing homelessness are pretty rare. Afira said having a school just for students experiencing homelessness might not work everywhere.
Afira DeVries: What’s essential are the practices and approaches that we utilize here.
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Nimah Gobir: The practices and resources implemented at Monarch could serve as valuable lessons for all schools, since students in many districts experience homelessness. For example, partnering with parents can lead to stability and improvement for the whole family.
Afira DeVries: There is absolutely nobody more creative or resilient than an unhoused parent, because they will stop at nothing to protect their child and to come up with ways to make it feel better than it actually is.
Nimah Gobir: Staff members are trained to assume each parent coming through their doors is doing the best they can with what they’ve got.
Afira DeVries: We don’t get in your way around things that we have no business getting in the way of. You need a bus pass. We got bus passes. Here’s the bus pass. Now what? Right now what? Because let’s talk about what you brought in the door with you. What are your strengths? What are your skills? What are you particularly good at? What have you tried that has worked for you? And everybody has an answer for those questions. And it feels completely different to be asked those questions.
Nimah Gobir: Remember Diana? The parent that was having trouble getting her son to school? When she came to Monarch, she had a completely different experience than the one she had at her son’s previous school.
Diana Rodriguez: I went one day and I said, how can I enroll my son? and I met Ms. Carina in the front desk, and Ms. Carina was like, so, like, welcoming. She’s like don’t worry, like, we’ll take care of you here.
Nimah Gobir: She felt like a huge weight was lifted from her shoulders. The school did really important things for Diana right off the bat.
Diana Rodriguez: They help me with the bus pass. They they just they even asked me, like, does your son need clothes? Does your son need anything? Like, and I was just like, “Oh my gosh, for reals, like for free?” And it was really, I was really thankful because I wasn’t used to that kind of help.
Diana Rodriguez: I felt like very like, thankful. But but like this, like overwhelming sense of like, you know what, like I’m not by myself. There’s a school for my child.
Nimah Gobir: They helped her get into stable housing and provided a safe place for her kids to be throughout the week. With those things taken care of Diana herself. could start to thrive.
Diana Rodriguez: In this day and age, especially living in San Diego, it’s very hard to make time for yourself because you’re too busy surviving. The next benefit would probably be helping me as a mom grow, because I cannot provide the best for my children if I’m not at my best.
Nimah Gobir: She credits the school as being a huge part of her success as a parent.
Diana Rodriguez: Part of me becoming a better mom is trying to further my education so that I can also be better for my children. Because of the resources that Monarch provided, I was able to get my associate’s degree with honors at City College, at San Diego City College, and then next year I’ll receive my bachelor’s degree from San Diego State University.
Nimah Gobir: Supporting unhoused students doesn’t stop with parental support. Coming up after the break, we’ll dive into strategies for supporting students’ academic development and agency. Stay with us.
Nimah Gobir : When students step onto the school campus, they’re not just carrying textbooks and pencils; they’re bringing their entire selves, struggles and all. Students who experience homelessness will often come to a school environment and feel an impulse to hide.
Afira DeVries: What that initially means is I need to be as unseen as possible in this environment.
Nimah Gobir: Here’s Afira, again. She’s the CEO of the nonprofit at Monarch.
Afira DeVries: I need to fly under the radar or I need to be absent.
Nimah Gobir: Classes and programs that connect students to the world outside of school can keep students invested in learning and help them build trusting relationships with adults or mentors.
Afira DeVries: So that they can have a concept of what their career might be and have direct access to feel and see what that might look like for them.
Afira DeVries: They are going to be the artist, the singer, the mathematician, the dancer, wha-the the athlete, the whatever they are naturally and organically, they’re going to pursue those, those skills because they’re in an environment that doesn’t force them or does not sort of organically make them feel like they need to hide under the radar.
Nimah Gobir: Some people are critical of having schools that are only for unhoused students. They say that students’ basic needs, like transportation and access to supplies, can and should be provided in a traditional school. They worry there is that keeping vulnerable students separated will increase stigma in the long run. But a report by UCLA revealed, students experiencing homelessness are often overlooked and misunderstood in mainstream schools. Typically, mainstream schools lack the specialized training and financial resources needed to support these students. On the other hand community-based organizations are able to get resources to families more quickly.
Nimah Gobir: Kaitlyn is a student who graduated from Monarch last year. before she came to Monarch, she remembers feeling like she had to hide the fact that she and her siblings were not well off.
Kaitlyn: We were, we should be embarrassed to like what we wore or how we did our hair.
Nimah Gobir: On the walk to school she would game plan with her siblings. Like, “How are we going to keep people from knowing our situation for as long as possible?”
Kaitlyn: I felt like I was in a shell. Me and my siblings were like don’t tell people this and that. If we needed something, I was we were all scared to ask for something.
Nimah Gobir: In a school with tools to address homelessness, she made friends quickly.
Kaitlyn: You could talk to everyone, like with open arms and I wouldn’t have to feel embarrassed about anything because we all had similar stories or like I remember we should do like story told my friends, all like I went through this to and this and that I don’t know, it was just like comforting to me.
Nimah Gobir: She can name adults from Monarch that she can go to for advice and help. One of which urged her to give college a try. Kaitlyn just started at Southwestern, a local community college. When students’ basic needs are met, It frees up their brain space so that they’re able to learn.
Afira DeVries: No matter what your style of learning is, you have to be able to focus.
Afira DeVries: But if you’re coming to school exhausted because you haven’t slept in three days and haven’t showered in a week and haven’t seen your mom or dad or someone that’s important to you or your siblings, and you’re getting to school. The very, very last thing you want to have to do is be in the present, in the now, and focus on what’s in front of you. You’re generally looking for other ways to self-soothe.
Nimah Gobir: Unhoused students may be experiencing trauma, a response to life-threatening events, harmful conditions or stressful environments.
Afira DeVries: Because they’re either born into or experiencing the circumstance of homelessness. That is, really… it will rob you of your sense of individuality and any sense of safety, right? Because that mobility is crushing and it does not allow a child to feel safe because there are no roots. Kids need roots to feel safe.
Nimah Gobir: It’s likely that unhoused students experienced interruptions in their schooling and require more focused support as they fill gaps in their learning.
Nimah Gobir: So it helps to have small classes and aides in each room. Kristin Tanner is , a 1-3rd grade literacy teacher. She remembers one student who had a hard time adjusting when she first arrived at Monarch.
Kristin Tanner: It would take her sometimes 20 minutes to a half an hour to even get her inside the classroom. And then when she was here, it was head on her desk and crying or refusing to sit down or sitting somewhere else in the room on the floor.
Nimah Gobir: Things started to improve when the young girl was able to experience the consistency of the classroom and understand that it was a safe place. Kirsten used a few approaches focused on connection:
Kristin Tanner: Building a relationship with her, with her mom, and then, additionally, really making sure that, having that connection with her therapist as well as with other support staff.
Nimah Gobir: Mental health services and building supportive relationships enabled the student to show up to the classroom differently.
Kristin Tanner: I look at her now, I, and I tell her every day, I’m I this, always just blown away by the growth in her. Her mental health and her emotional health and just her way, that she moves throughout the day because she’s not with me all day. She’s in other classes. And hearing that she’s doing well there is just a huge accomplishment for her. Now that we’ve dealt with those, those issues that she was facing, now she’s ready to learn.
Nimah Gobir: Creating a nurturing and stable environment within the school is essential for students who may be facing instability elsewhere in their lives. Here’s Afira.
Afira DeVries: A child begins to understand what their own capacity and potential is by the time they’re about ten years old. And that’s called the locus of control. And they either believe they’re in control of their lives, or they think that the world is in control of their lives. Kids who have not been in an environment that’s nurturing their individuality as a person, as an individual human being, are not going to cultivate self-belief, and they’re not going to feel like they’re in control of their life. And once that happens, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of hard work for a teacher, for a caregiver, for anybody in that child’s life to get them to believe that their circumstances are temporary, but their potential is permanent and forever.
Nimah Gobir: Azaiah is another recent graduate. His mom brought him to Monarch and used their services to find stable housing.
Azaiah: That was that was a really big help because my mom had, like, health issues, so. And she wasn’t able to, like, work.
Nimah Gobir: He remembers they helped him furnish his room.
Azaiah: When I got my room, they paid for, like all the stuff that I needed for, for like a bed, a TV and like a dresser and stuff like that. And they provided food and like, gift cards and stuff like that.
Nimah Gobir: Many students experiencing homelessness often struggle to find mentors who understand their circumstances. Azaiah played volleyball for the school and formed a strong bond with his coach. And when he graduated…
Azaiah: They hired me for the boys volleyball team so I can assist my coach, my old coach, and learn from him, and then hopefully coach the girls if possible.
Nimah Gobir: The school organized for folks from the Zoo to come and host interviews for any students interested in working there. So he was able to get a job at the San Diego Zoo.
Nimah Gobir:What’s your favorite animal there?
Azaiah: Red pandas. I love the red pandas.
Nimah Gobir: Oh, my gosh, they are so cute. I watch videos of them when I am sad.
Azaiah: Yeah, I’m working there, coaching here and yeah, just taking care of my mom.
Nimah Gobir: This year he started at Grossmont College.
Azaiah: My major is psychology, so I’m hoping to transfer after my two years and hopefully go to either Grand Canyon University, GCU or UCSD. I want to become a mental health therapist.
Nimah Gobir: Stories like Kaitlyn and Azaiah’s show that great things can happen when students’ are connected to robust social services networks and have access to trusted adults. Schools must learn how to serve unhoused students and their families because the likelihood of encountering a student whose family has fallen on hard times is high. This is especially true for schools in California, which has more than half of the entire country’s unhoused population
Nimah Gobir: Monarch is a prime example of how the community school model can provide the students and families with easy access to basic needs. Once students have these needs, ongoing mental health support is crucial. And – and I know you all know this – educational opportunities that interest kids and connect them to the outside world can make learning worthwhile.