NEW BEDFORD — For a student like Ana, an immigrant from Cape Verde, New Bedford could be complicated. Though the city has welcomed more Cape Verdean immigrants than anywhere else in the United States, Ana’s arrival last fall as a senior at New Bedford High could be lonely, confusing, and strange.
During the day, Ana did her best to navigate new classes and, despite her limited English, was motivated by her long-standing goal of becoming a dental hygienist. But at night, she faced an unstable living situation. Ana temporarily stayed with extended family members, or sometimes may have crashed with friends and neighbors, according to a counselor familiar with her situation.
Ana was homeless.
Far from alone, Ana (whose real name is not given to protect her privacy) was one of 1,340 New Bedford Public School students who experienced homelessness last year. It’s the highest number ever recorded. In a school district of almost 13,000, that means any classroom of 20 students, on average, will have two faces experiencing homelessness.
The current school year is on track to break that record. Already, 1,277 students have been identified as homeless at some point this year, according to data the district shared in January.
These students have a higher risk of dropping out, among other emotional and academic struggles. Whether it’s finding a new place to sleep each week or a quiet place to study, students experiencing homelessness face significant hurdles, especially students of color and immigrants.
Yet as student homelessness spikes, the official city statistics show no growth — or even declines — in the homeless population. Every winter, a huge community effort called the “point in time” count provides a snapshot of homelessness on the street and in shelters. This year’s count, in late January, saw “no huge growth or leap,” according to city officials, though data has not yet been released. Recent years have actually seen declines in the city’s counts.
Students like Ana explain this apparent contradiction. Ana was dependent on temporary accommodations in other people’s homes, a phenomenon known as “doubling up.” Students and families who “double up” are often transitory, moving frequently until their welcome wears thin. Simple tasks like getting to a school bus or making a doctor’s appointment can become a huge challenge.
Most official homelessness statistics do not include doubled-up children and families. Nor does the majority of federal aid available to alleviate homelessness ever reach them. Students like Ana have become the unseen faces of the housing crisis in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and the nation.
Being “doubled up” is by far the most common type of homelessness. Across Massachusetts, 25,000 students are homeless. Nearly two-thirds — or 16,000 — are doubled up.
In New Bedford, 80% of homeless students are doubled-up — or about 1,000 kids. In total, New Bedford students are almost four times more likely to be homeless than students across the state.
Schools have become the last line of defense for doubled-up families because of a legal mandate. The federal McKinney-Vento Act gives districts a broader definition of homelessness than the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) normally uses.
The McKinney-Vento definition includes any student who lacks an adequate, fixed, and long-term place to lay their head at night. Without it, schools would not have the resources to track or help these students.
Ana, as a newcomer from Cape Verde, was identified as homeless during her registration process. At the central administration building, a warm, wood-paneled room with colorful flags and a multilingual staff would’ve been welcoming and discreet.
Still, Ana didn't trust the schools right away. Like many in her situation, she couldn’t be sure that revealing her situation was the right thing to do. Landlords often evict tenants for hosting long-term “guests” or exceeding occupancy limits. Why were these people any different?
That’s why Ana’s first meeting with Vanda Lopes, her assigned counselor, was so crucial.
Finding solutions … and looking for new ones
When Ana walked into Vanda Lopes’ room last year, Lopes spoke to her in Crioulo, or Cape Verdean Creole. And right away, Ana opened up.
Based on dialects alone, the two could tell which island the other had come from. Their lifelong journeys were divulged by the smallest inflections and intonations — travels across the same ocean, finding this same city, and meeting in this same, small office.
“To be able to communicate with somebody in their language is huge,” Lopes said. “We all go through different struggles, but to have that communication ... knowing that we come from the same culture — that’s huge.”
Lopes’ own journey to New Bedford was a years-long saga. As a little girl in Cape Verde — the archipelago and former Portuguese colony 350 miles off the coast of Africa — Lopes said goodbye to her father before her sixth birthday. He emigrated to the United States in search of more lucrative work, finding it first in Boston, mostly as a mechanic.
After years of hard-won savings, the family reunited in New Bedford in 1992. Lopes graduated from New Bedford High in 2001 before eventually earning a master’s degree in social work. Today she and her three siblings all live in the area.
Decades later, Lopes is back inside New Bedford High as a guidance counselor. She advises hundreds of high school juniors as they select courses, register for the SAT, and start to plan their lives. But she is also responsible for between 40 and 50 homeless students, as one of the high school's four homeless liaisons.
Throughout the district, every school has at least one homeless liaison like Lopes. Each connects dozens of students to resources throughout the city, relying on the Homeless Service Providers Network (HSPN).
A partnership of more than 30 organizations — from Catholic Charities to PAACA, from the YWCA to the Community Health Center — the HSPN works in monthly meetings and late-night phone calls to crowdsource help for students and families: food, school supplies, tutoring, or a lead on an apartment.
If Ana had never trusted Lopes, she would have faced a daunting maze of paperwork alone. The path out of homelessness often requires the full-time expertise of a seasoned administrator who can help apply for SNAP food assistance, MassHealth insurance coverage, immigration and visa paperwork, state and federal housing assistance, local rental agreements with landlords, scholarships, and school supplies.
Lacking any of these can push students into a cycle of long-term homelessness that can extend into their adult lives.
Many factors contribute to increasing student homelessness in New Bedford: a limited housing stock, rapidly rising rents, and already strained shelters. An influx of immigrants, refugees, and migrants has exacerbated those effects.
Newcomer students in New Bedford — the broad label for all immigrant arrivals — increased more than 500% between 2008 and 2022, according to a November report from Brown University. Across Massachusetts, newcomer arrivals tripled over that same period, an astonishing increase largely concentrated in Gateway Cities like New Bedford, Lynn, and Lowell.
According to Julie Mador, who oversees New Bedford’s homelessness programs, there are 1,050 recently-arrived immigrant students and 78 migrants in New Bedford today. (“Migrant” is a separate designation for the children of traveling agricultural and fish workers.) The rates of homelessness in these groups are high — half of all the migrant children are homeless.
The partnership among New Bedford’s aid organizations is a model in the region for getting these students help, several of its members say. But one thing they can’t do is put students directly into housing — at least not yet.
“We need more housing,” Mador said. “I can’t do that. I can’t put folks in housing.”
But in Boston, the school department changed that.
Could Boston’s model help New Bedford?
A partnership between Boston Public Schools, the city, and the Boston Housing Authority has provided vouchers that helped more than 1,500 families find housing over the last four years. For the partnership to work, different agencies and departments had to agree to use the same definition of homelessness: one that would include unhoused schoolchildren.
“There was a will and a way,” said Brian Marques, who manages Opportunity Youth, a department of Boston schools that focuses on helping students overcome barriers. The city changed its policy to include doubled-up families, he said, which made them “part of the pipeline.”
The partnership was announced in 2020 as part of a broad response to the pandemic. Within a year, hundreds of families were placed into new apartments, some owned by the city housing authority, some on the open market with voucher assistance.
“Not only is it viable, but it’s a huge benefit and creates a lot of efficiencies,” said Marques. When multiple agencies working on the same problem use the same definition, he said, it became easier for funding to flow where it was needed. And fewer programs were duplicated.
“A voucher is a great intermediate step. But it really comes down to building more space and ensuring that more people in the community can actually afford to live there long-term.”
Earl Edwards, researcher of student homelessness and an assistant professor at Boston College
All it took, Marques said, was “leaders being willing to step out of the box.”
New Bedford’s Housing Authority director, Steve Beauregard, said he hadn’t heard of the partnership between Boston’s schools and housing authority. But he said he’d be eager to collaborate on new solutions: “If there’s something we can do to help, we’re all on board,” he said.
“I think it’s amazing that they can place students” into housing, said Mador, of New Bedford Public Schools. Asked if a similar system could work in New Bedford, she said, “I’m sure it would work.”
However, Earl Edwards, a researcher of student homelessness and an assistant professor at Boston College, highlighted some reservations.
“The most innovative piece is the collaboration in various institutions,” Edwards said. “There’s a challenge between having two different operational definitions of homelessness for students and others.”
But he said vouchers won’t solve homelessness.
“A voucher is a great intermediate step. But it really comes down to building more space and ensuring that more people in the community can actually afford to live there long-term,” he said.
The causes of homelessness are complex, and solving it even more so. Vouchers, for example, can be ineffective if there’s not available housing to use them, Edwards said. And giving families more priority through vouchers might displace others on the waiting list.
Real solutions will be long-term, Edwards said. The opportunity that comes from a partnership like Boston’s is getting all resources to work together. That partnership could then address the many reasons — medical costs, rising rents, substance use, or simple language barriers — that keep people from accessing housing in the first place.
“Schools are one of the few places we have to identify people experiencing homelessness,” Edwards said. “If we already know who those students are in schools, why aren’t we doing more to support them and set them up for success?”
Intervening while students are still in school can help break cycles of poverty and homelessness that escalate over time. Research shows that helping students to graduate high school is among the best antidotes to homelessness, as lacking a diploma or GED makes a person 346% more likely to experience homelessness.
Where New Bedford goes from here
If Ana’s family had joined the waitlist at the New Bedford Housing Authority, they would have been put near the bottom of a statewide list of over 30,000 people.
Living in New Bedford may have afforded them some priority for nearby housing, but Ana would not have received any priority for being homeless. According to the HUD definition that housing authorities use, Ana — like the thousands of Massachusetts school kids sleeping on couches and floors — was not homeless.
The city also won new HUD funds this week, but that money may not ever reach doubled-up students.
Even without counting these doubled-up students, the Housing Authority’s Beauregard said he thinks New Bedford needs an additional 8,000 to 10,000 units of public housing.
New Bedford is already changing — and pretty fast, too. On Union Street, the historic downtown artery, at least three large developments are underway. The former Holy Family school transformed into new housing, too. That, plus this summer’s long-awaited arrival of MBTA commuter rail, is creating more options for people to live and move around.
A new housing plan from Josh Amaral, the city’s director of housing and community development, has helped the city aggressively pursue more development and other creative solutions, like assistance to first-time home buyers.
But student homelessness has grown regardless — including street homelessness, too.
Protections from the state’s progressive “right to shelter” law, which had all but prevented families from experiencing street homelessness, are weakening. Since Gov. Maura Healey placed a cap on the shelter system this fall, Amaral has said he’s heard of families in the area living on the street for the first time.
“All roads lead back to housing inventory,” Amaral said — meaning that until New Bedford has enough affordable homes, homelessness will persist. But the short-term needs of families are more dire than at any time in recent memory, and Amaral said a voucher partnership could help.
As for Ana, she’s now graduated from New Bedford High. The school district connected her to local tutors to help with her schoolwork. One group, School on Wheels, helped find scholarships that made college possible.
By the end of high school, Ana was accepted to community college, where she’s now taking classes — one step closer to becoming a dental hygienist.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
Record homelessness requires creative ideas … like providing housing for those who don’t have any.
The system is broken. Allowing people to go without housing, food, and healthcare – so that the wealthiest Americans (i.e. people who own capital) can continue to widen the wealth gap between the haves and the have-nots – driving the economy into an ever further state of in sustainability, ripe for yet another economic another crash – requires more than creativity. It requires an overhaul of the entire system.
How many of these new homeless students are here illegally? My guess is nearly all of them. Stop encouraging economic migrants to come to Massachusetts, and many of these downstream negative effects will be solved as well.
So many growing societal problems are ultimately connected to the unprecedented stream of economic migrants coming in from overseas. Stop letting these people hurt our society and take up all of our social service money and resources. Get illegal economic migrants out of the South Coast!
Anymous comments,are a vent NOT a solution.New Bedford has always been a,refuge for immigrants whether via the underground railroad or immigrants coming from Europe to labor in the mills and lately from places like Carbo Verde or Guatemala seeking a,better life for their children.The solution for student homelessness might be in the schools themselves..buildings like NB high Votech and the middle schools are largely empty at night why not w supervision open them to students needing shelter..tutoring after class..activities and study at nite and shelter..how to fund? well if we can give vouchers for section 8 why not to schools districts to help w this..really 150 apts on union st mostly not affordable for students is not a short ot even long term solution to the housing shortage! Using our schools as a resource might be.
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