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NEW BEDFORD — As city schools address the rising number of homeless students, local charter schools have barely identified any students experiencing homelessness. Charter school administrators and counselors say the enrollment process is keeping these kids out.
While New Bedford Public Schools have identified record numbers of students experiencing homelessness — more than 1,300 last year, or 10% of all students — and have scrambled to marshal resources toward the crisis, nearby charters have largely missed the problem — so they have not been part of the solution, either.
Alma del Mar and Global Learning, the two charters in the area, have collectively identified fewer than 10 homeless students in recent years, or less than 1% of their students.
“We believe that the real barrier here is the lottery,” said Taylor DeLoach, executive director of Alma del Mar. “Students experiencing homelessness don’t have the opportunity to automatically enroll in a charter the way they do in a public school.”
Across Massachusetts, charter schools are serving far fewer homeless students than comparable public schools. A new study from Boston College estimates that charter schools are either not enrolling or not counting up to 2,000 homeless students.
Earl Edwards, a professor at Boston College who led the study, said, “If we’re not accurately identifying students experiencing homelessness, then it becomes impossible for us to see it as a policy issue that needs to be addressed.”
“It’s not just a charity initiative, it’s required,” Edwards said.
In New Bedford, counselors and administrators blame features of the state rules for charters’ enrollment lotteries. They say homeless students are not overlooked here, but that they don’t get the same chance to enroll.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” said Karen LeBlanc, a school counselor and homeless liaison at Global Learning, “and I think part of it is that in order to apply to this school, [students] need to have their … proof of residency.”
Charter schools can admit students from anywhere in the state, but they must ensure local residents receive “preference” in the enrollment lotteries. The process for giving local families preference could be unintentionally keeping homeless students out, said LeBlanc, and it is codified into state law.
Homeless students, according to the state department of education, “must still provide reasonable proof of residency to receive an admission preference based on where they are temporarily living.”
If a homeless student cannot provide any proof of their temporary residence — which they are not likely to have, LeBlanc said — they can’t enter the preferred lottery. These students would have to wait for extra, open seats, which rarely open up at Global Learning.
“That would never happen,” LeBlanc said. “We have students on waiting lists.”
At Alma del Mar, DeLoach pointed out another flaw in the lottery system: the lengthy wait times. Students experiencing homelessness are frequently moving, and anyone arriving to New Bedford — whether a transient homeless child or a recently arrived immigrant — can’t directly enroll in a charter school. Instead, they must enter the lottery in the fall and wait until spring for results.
To DeLoach, the drawn-out process is the problem. The result: “We serve fewer [homeless students] based on the barriers of the lottery,” she said.
Fixing the problems with the enrollment lottery
The state department of education says that students experiencing homelessness cannot be barred from applying to charter schools because of their housing status. But in practice, the application process often blocks these students.
Despite being homeless, the students are required to provide documentation of a temporary residence to receive the same lottery preference as other local students.
Acceptable documentation “depends upon the circumstances,” but the department of education’s only listed suggestion is an affidavit, for which homeless kids would need a notary public.
Homeless students are also not allowed to cite a permanent residence that predates their homelessness: “The location of a student’s prior permanent residence does not provide a residency preference for admission.”
“That may be why families don’t apply. I don’t know,” said LeBlanc, counselor at Global Learning.
She added that the administrative hurdle could also be discouraging for many immigrants in New Bedford. “A lot of families aren’t forthcoming with information, and a lot of times it’s because of immigration status.” Recent immigrants and undocumented families often fear providing documentation to unknown organizations, LeBlanc said.
A bill in the state Legislature seeks to amend the enrollment process for Massachusetts charter schools to help students from vulnerable backgrounds receive enrollment preference. Representative Alice Peisch of Norfolk submitted a bill in February 2023 that would “offer enrollment preferences to certain high needs students.”
The bill has been stuck in a joint committee on education since a June 2023 hearing, with the deadline for that committee’s report twice extended.
A key provision would allow high-needs students to enroll in a charter school at any time throughout the year. The Light reached out to Peisch’s office to clarify how the proposed changes would work, and received a written statement that “logistics would be left to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to develop once the bill is enacted.” A spokesperson added that Peisch had no “inside knowledge” on whether the joint education committee was close to passing the bill this session.
DeLoach, of Alma del Mar, said the bill would lessen the impact of the lottery’s drawn-out timeline and give preference to vulnerable students, making it easier for charters to admit students experiencing homelessness. “We hope it passes, because it aligns with our mission,” DeLoach said.
At Alma del Mar, the short-term solution is better marketing and outreach, according to DeLoach. She says the school posts multilingual advertisements on and inside SRTA buses. In an email to The Light, DeLoach wrote that Alma also uses nonprofit partners — such as public libraries, the YWCA, and PAACA — to spread the word about applications.
Many charters rely heavily on marketing to attract students, with some spending millions of dollars on advertising. But a lack of advertising also can show the priorities of a charter school.
“Some schools found ways to avoid enrolling disadvantaged students, often by not marketing,” wrote Huriya Jabbar, now an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, in a 2016 study of New Orleans charter schools. Jabbar wrote that the pressure for high test scores led schools to ignore students in historically low-performing demographics during marketing campaigns.
Neither Alma del Mar nor Global Learning had posted information for homeless students on their websites or in their handbooks, the study from Boston College found. Since the publication of the study and questions from The Light, Alma del Mar has now posted that information. Global Learning said it would do the same.
Until the state’s charter enrollment system changes, homeless students must rely on these marketing changes and outreach efforts that Edwards called “the good faith of administrators.”
Schools are crucial to understanding the housing crisis, but data is lacking
The most salient feature of New Bedford’s homeless students is that they are “doubling up,” or temporarily staying on couches or floors with neighbors, friends, and family. It’s a risky situation that often requires a child to move every few weeks, making regular school attendance difficult.
More than 80% of New Bedford Public Schools’ homeless students, or more than 1,000 students, are doubled-up, according to district officials. That’s a higher number — and a higher rate — than in most Massachusetts cities and towns.
But doubling up is still the state’s and country’s most common type of student homelessness. It’s only captured in education data because of the McKinney-Vento Act, a federal law that compels schools to use a broad definition of homelessness.
By counting these doubled-up families, public schools have captured the homelessness crisis in ways that city and town governments have not. Traditional measures of street homelessness are not significantly changing in New Bedford, for example, so they do not reflect how residents are adapting to increasingly scarce and expensive housing.
But charter schools have been largely absent from these school-based efforts.
New Bedford’s charter schools are far from alone: 60% of charter schools across Massachusetts failed to provide information on homelessness and available resources to families, according to Edwards’ research. Furthermore, half of the homeless liaisons at charter schools hold five or more formal roles at their school.
For example, at Alma del Mar, the homeless liaison role was previously one of many held by the school’s chief of staff. Now, the lead family engagement coordinator holds that title, “due to recent staff transitions,” according to DeLoach.
No schools — charters or traditional public schools — are required to publicly report the number of homeless students alongside other student demographic data (such as English learners or low-income students).
There’s an overall “lack of urgency to report this information,” said Edwards, the Boston College researcher. The missing data “prevents [school administrators] from doing a better job and being accountable.”
In his research, for example, Edwards was not able to compare the graduation, absenteeism, or suspension rates among homeless students and their peers. The ultimate effect is that it’s hard to know the needs of these students.
It’s also difficult to know how much money schools could be leaving on the table if they are failing to report homeless students, Edwards said. Not identifying or reporting homeless students means that schools “don’t qualify for McKinney-Vento subgrant money.”
The 2,000 homeless students that Edwards estimates are missing from inside Massachusetts’ charter schools could be a small sample of how schools are, in effect, denying relief funds and services to homeless families.
In New Bedford, like most of the state and country, that means denying one of the only sources of aid to the increasing number of doubled-up homeless families.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
Charter schools do not offer what regular public schools offer. My nephews go there and they are very secluded from sports and activities that regular public schools offer. Their differences are clearly visible when they interact with other kids from public schools. They don’t have the same interactions and are awkward around other children. It’s concerning when I think of how they will be when they enter the public high school. They don’t know sports, they only know the kids from the charter school they will have no other friends.
The Light appears biased against charter schools in its not subtle digs!
This is one of the only times the Light actually covered charter schools.
Illegal immigrants should not be I. Our schools!!!!! Or get any resources that are meant for Americans it’s hard enough for Americans as it is !!
Honestly, they should count themselves lucky not to go to charter schools. Charter schools are the worst of the worst. Children’s education is severely compromised by their lack of resources. I’ve seen ESL children from those schools without the proper tools needed for them to succeed. I’ve seen children coming out of charter schools with strait A’s that can’t compete educationally with children supposedly at the same level in public and private schools. Also, they do tend to prey on lower income families that think this is a better option to public school. Charter school are always the worst of options for good schooling in New Bedford.