Christine Quinn & Daniel Russo on Homelessness and Education

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Imagine if your school is really your only home. According to federal data, more than a million students in the United States’ public school system are homeless. That is up 70 percent over the last decade. Christine Quinn, the very same New York politician who once ran against Bloomberg for mayor, is currently president and CEO of WIN, the city’s largest provider of services to homeless women and children. And Daniel Russo is a school principal in the Bronx in one of the poorest congressional districts in the U.S. And they sat down with our Hari Sreenivasan to talk about their own experiences with this disturbing trend.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christine Quinn, let me start with you. Around the country, there are more than 1.3 million kids in schools that are homeless, and that’s up 70 percent in the last decade. How did this happen?

CHRISTINE QUINN (D), FORMER NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL SPEAKER: Well, I think this happened for a number of different reasons. One, we know, in New York City, but across the country, we have an affordability crisis, and we have seen that grow. But we never really took a moment to stop and say, where does it end up? Well, an affordability crisis and an income inequality crisis end up with apartments and homes being too expensive for families. And where do families go when they can’t afford a home? They end up homeless. Yes, we have very good unemployment numbers in this country. But we never take a moment to look at the underbelly of them and how much of that includes minimum wage workers, fast food workers, people with two or three full-time jobs. So I really believe the heart of this crisis is caused by no one accepting the reality that homelessness and affordability crisis are two sides of the same coin. And until we connect them as it relates to economic development and housing policies, we’re going to be in a hamster wheel. And what most people don’t know is that the majority of the homeless in New York are families with children; 70 percent of the people in shelter are families with children. You don’t see that on the street. It’s a crime to have your child on the street, but that’s the reality.Fifty-three percent of our mothers in shelter are working. They’re working, and they couldn’t pay the rent. And this, I hope, not-held view anymore that homeless people or homeless mothers are lazy and drug addicts and criminals and brought it on themselves, there is no truth to that. And let me tell you, the hardest-working, most resilient people I have ever met are the homeless moms in our shelter. They can’t and don’t pull the covers over their heads, because they have children to take care of. And I’m telling you New York stories, but I have colleagues I work with all over the country. These are universal stories.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. What are the physical effects? How does this manifest at a school level? What happens?

DANIEL RUSSO, PRINCIPAL, PS 294: So, I mean, obviously, each case is different, each child is different, and the circumstances under which a family ends up homeless is different. But some of the recurring themes that we see at our school is students with impacts on their mental health. So students can become withdrawn, depressed, pull back from their peers and their classmates. That’s usually driven by anxiety, a sense of the security has been shattered. Imagine being a student who gets picked up by his mother in the afternoon, and you walk home just a couple blocks from the school, only to find that the house, the apartment door is padlocked with an eviction notice on your door, and everything that you own is inside. Imagine the insecurity that that family feels. They look at their children, and what did they do? Oftentimes, they go back to where they came from, which is the school. And they count on the school staff to help them work through getting to the shelter system, being processed through PATH here in New York City, and all of the challenges they are about to encounter being homeless.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me about some of your kids.

RUSSO: I have 500 beautiful children in the South Bronx. This particular population requires a lot of support, not only around the academics, like Christine said, but we have to have a food pantry inside of the school, so that families that are approaching the weekend or a school holiday can come into the main office and literally say: Mr. Russo, we don’t have food in our house to get our family through the weekend. We can take them down to the food pantry and make sure that family is cared for, for the rest of the time until school resumes and breakfast and lunch at the school continues. Our children get — all get free winter coats as the cold weather sets in. They all get free eyeglasses — eye exams and eyeglasses. There’s a lot of services, but you have to think about the partnerships that you could bring into a school in a strategic and organized way to make sure that you reach all of the children’s needs.

SREENIVASAN: What about kind of the infrastructure that plays into all of this? I mean, there are mayors around the country that say, hey, we have got more shelters on the way. But there’s a lot of not in my backyard, right? It’s all great to have more shelters. Let’s fix the homeless problem. But then you realize the map includes something that’s six blocks from your home. No.

QUINN: Well, a couple of things. One, the ultimate goal is to get everyone living — living independently permanently in affordable housing. So the shelter is not the overall answer. That is. But until that affordable housing is built and exists, people need a place to be. And they also, in that place, the shelter, need to have services that deal with what they have been through, domestic violence; 80 percent of our moms have experienced domestic violence in their adult lifetime, and on and on. So shelters shouldn’t be seen as this place of evil. They’re actually places of healing and growth. And the not in my backyard people, get over yourself. And the elected officials — and I used to be elected official. And I know those crowds are scary, no question. We need to get over ourselves, because this is a — first of all, they don’t put the shelter 10 blocks from you, where are they going to put it? Where are people going to go? Do you want to wake up and see a mother and her children sleeping on the street on the block you live on? People need to go. And who the heck are you to look in the face of a 5- year-old child in America and say, you know what, you are evil and I don’t want you near me?

RUSSO: You know, it also manifests itself in disproportionate numbers of homeless people being housed in certain neighborhoods in New York City, right?

QUINN: Yes.

RUSSO: Certainly, there are communities across the city that are a little bit louder in not in my backyard, and they end up with less homeless families being housed in their neighborhoods. In my school, 30 percent of our students live in temporary housing. So we have over 100 families that we’re supporting through that every single day. Obviously, it’s a big lift. It’s a heavier lift than a principal might have, we will say, another part of the city.

QUINN: Yes. Yes.

RUSSO: But you can also develop a skill set for that. There’s opportunities there to really hone and refine not only what the services are that you provide, but the way in which you provide them.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me what an average day is like for a student to get to your school, because the proximity sometimes of shelters and schools, at least at a city like New York, it’s not down the block.

RUSSO: Right. So, Christine and I were talking about this earlier. New York City is one of the only cities in the country where citizens have a right to shelter. So, if you’re processing through intake, and you end up going from the Bronx all the way to Staten Island to a motel to be housed, I mean, that’s a wonderful service that the family is provided. But the family also wakes up the next morning with no way to get the child two hours back to the school in the Bronx. The Department of Education does provide transportation for students back to their families — to their school of origin, because there’s a lot of information to suggest that keeping at least the schooling consistent for the child, as they go through this very uncertain time with their family, is beneficial for them. But, of course, there’s — that’s a double-edged sword, right? Perhaps you’re putting your child on the bus at a 5:30 pickup time in Far Rockaway, or the Bronx, or in Staten Island, two neighborhoods that are quite far from us, and sending them all the way back to our school. And that child is getting dropped off at 6:30 or 7:00 at night. It’s a great service, but it adds a layer of challenge that sometimes makes things a little bit more difficult for the students.

SREENIVASAN: What are the some of the challenges? I mean, if you’re in a shelter, for example, they have curfews. There might be restrictions on Wi-Fi to do homework, right?

(CROSSTALK)

RUSSO: No, no, no, Wi-Fi here is a huge issue.

QUINN: There’s not restrictions on Wi-Fi in shelter. There is no Wi-Fi in the shelters in New York City. And I’d be shocked if it was anywhere else. So that’s a huge issue for a mom looking for a job, for homework. We had a young man. We had 39 children from WIN facilities go to college in August and September, which is our highest ever, which is amazing. But one of the young — a young man who got into a bunch of schools, he wrote his letter, his essay, on his phone. That’s unconscionable. So that’s like a big challenge. We were even talking about, how do parents know it’s parent-teacher night or whatever? They send out e-mails.

RUSSO: Can’t message them on an app if there’s no Wi-Fi.

QUINN: Yes.

RUSSO: You can’t message them on Facebook or post something online if the families in the shelters don’t have access to that kind of information. So it’s the good old-fashioned knocking on door, posting up signs, backpacking letters home, trying to get information to parents, if there’s a communication gap.

QUINN: Right. I just want to mention one other thing which works we do at WIN, Dan does at his school, but it’s really something all over the country that needs to be more embraced, is trauma-informed care and trauma-informed care training for people who interact with populations like the homeless who are traumatized. At WIN, everyone gets trauma-informed care, from the entry-level security guide to the Ph.D. who’s head of our social service programs. It is a no- blame model that goes into a situation assuming that the client is being triggered.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me about some of the types of discussions you have had with your students. What kind of trauma do they come to you with?

RUSSO: So, with little students in a K-5 school, they just — they want to feel secure and know that their needs are going to be met. Some of their parents try to shield them from what is going on. But they’re intuitive. And they know if they have arrived at the door and it’s padlocked and they’re heading back to the school, something is not right. And so what does that look like in the classroom the next day? That looks like a student who won’t hang that backpack in the closet because they don’t know that they’re going to have access to that at the end of the day. That looks like a student who’s stealing milk off of another child’s tray at lunch because they don’t know what’s waiting for them in the shelter. There’s all kinds of different ways that this manifests itself, and most of them become barriers to learning. And that’s, I think, the main problem that we, as a school system, are trying to work through in a city where the homeless numbers continue to rise.

SREENIVASAN: Now, you went out to or you still go out to places where the kids live, partly because sometimes it’s hard to get in touch with them.

RUSSO: Sure.

SREENIVASAN: And one of those occasions, I read that there was a group of students that weren’t coming to school.

RUSSO: That’s right. They weren’t coming to school. We run — monitor our attendance very closely, of course, and we pay particular attention to our students in temporary housing, because we want to know, why aren’t these children coming to school, if they have been given a roof over their head by the shelter system? When you notice that students — influx of students from the same building are not coming to school, that’s a red flag that something is up. So we went. We knocked on doors until one mother answered and told us that her child had not bathed in several days. And so she wasn’t sending them to school, because, quite frankly, he smelled. So we rallied the parents together, got them…

SREENIVASAN: They didn’t have water?

RUSSO: There was no water in the building for several days. So we rallied the parents. I knocked on every door I could find, every, student plus other families that were not involved in the school, and told them, walk down the block to our City Council office and demand this something be done in this building to restore water. And the next day, the water was flowing again in that building. It only took them to go make some noise and stand up for the rights. It’s not right for any family in New York City, less alone some of our most vulnerable populations, to be living without water.

SREENIVASAN: Do you see — you see hundreds of moms and kids. Do kids carry this as if it’s their fault?

QUINN: Homeless children believe they bear the responsibility for why mom and they are in shelter. They carry it with — if I — with them. If I had been better, whatever that means, dad wouldn’t have hit her. If I hadn’t wanted those sneakers, we wouldn’t have gotten evicted, we would have been able to pay the rent. Add on to that 80 percent of the women, domestic violence, that means the children saw it, experienced it, lived in that terror. So they absolutely carry it with them, absolutely. We see it — this is — when you go to intake, PATH, as Dan has mentioned, you bring — get to bring two bags of your stuff with you. But you’re leaving your apartment in the middle of night. You’re getting evicted. You usually bring them in garbage bags, Hefty bags. We can’t use Hefty bags around the shelter where the kids are, because we would bring them into a room, and the children would freak out. Who’s getting kicked out? Who are you throwing out? Just those — simple sight of those bags from intake triggered it all for them. So it’s all with — inside of them with blaming themselves, which is why you need trained, focus staff who are going to help them work through that.

SREENIVASAN: Look, somebody’s going to ask, listen, she was in previous administrations. What is so tough about this problem? Why did it get worse over the last 10 years?

QUINN: Well, there’s a number of reasons. One, I don’t think we have a highest level of care that we should have, attention to it, so to speak. When I was the speaker of the City Council, we had to sue Mike Bloomberg, and we beat him, around a policy he put in place that would have kept homeless individuals who are single out of the shelter, not even allowed them to get in the door. We have had prior administrations who cut out the rental voucher that tenants use — homeless people use to get an apartment that we, in the council, fought against that for years. We now — thankfully, Mayor de Blasio put it back in place, but it took them almost three years to put it back in place. So I think there have been champions in government around this issue, and I would credit the members of the City Council when I served as some of them. But we need this to go to the highest levels, at the highest levels of attention.

SREENIVASAN: You’re running a school that is still, even with the populations that you’re serving, compared to other populations in similar schools, you’re doing better than average by a long shot. So how did you start to turn this around? How do you budget differently? What are the kinds of resources that you’re putting in your school that perhaps can be replicated elsewhere?

RUSSO: So, you know, when we really — when we started the school, we were really focused on strengthening the instructional core, teaching and learning, right? As we have got into that work in the beginning years, we saw that we couldn’t get to those important issues if students were not ready to learn, if they were not setting the conditions for learning inside of our school.

SREENIVASAN: If they’re hungry in the morning.

QUINN: Yes.

RUSSO: If they’re hungry in the morning, if they’re coming to school cold and thinking about the cold walk home, because they don’t have a winter coat. So I think that the school really started to find success when myself and the rest of the staff certainly began to think about, what do children really need to be their best selves, to show up, to be able to tend academically to rigorous work, rigorous standards that we have here in New York City, and overcome the challenges that are in place against them, by no fault of their own? The Department of Education has increased their supports to schools with a large number of temporary housings. We do have a social worker through a program called Bridging the Gap in New York City, where we have a social worker in the building devoted full-time to supporting our students who are living in temporary housing, partnerships with the New York City…

QUINN: That’s the program I talked about, yes.

RUSSO: Partnerships with the New York City Food Bank to ensure that we have the food pantry, with New York Cares. It’s about finding the partnerships and making the time to bring the needs of the children, academic and social-emotional, to the forefront of the work, and creating a staff culture, like Christina said, that believes in a trauma-informed approach, so that if you see a child acting out or not attending to their work, you’re not assuming that they’re lazy, distracted or disinterested, but that maybe there’s something internally going on that the guidance counselor or social worker can certainly help with.

QUINN: Yes. Yes.

RUSSO: But even you, as the teacher, can begin to attend to, so that that child can get to the reason why their parents sent them to school in the morning, which was to learn.

SREENIVASAN: Christine Quinn, principal Daniel Russo, thank you both.

RUSSO: Thank you.

QUINN: Thank you.