Hi, my name is Samantha Shapiro and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.

I wrote a story in this week's issue about homeless students in the New York City public school system.

I got interested in this story when my son was in kindergarten at our local public school

and his best friend became homeless. His family was evicted from their apartment

and then went through a long process of trying to use a housing voucher that the city provided

to find another rental of trying to appeal the eviction of doing anything they could to try to stay

in the community where they were known and loved and had a lot of resources.

And that process really opened my eyes first to the fact that the majority of homeless people

in New York City are not the people that you see on the street or in the subway

and they don't look any different than other families who are out and about. And I was not

aware of that fact and I was also not aware of the extent to which housing instability

interrupted and damaged homeless children's education.

Most of I reporting took place before the pandemic and I saw the enormous challenges

that homeless students face in getting an education and obviously the pandemic has brought a whole new

set of challenges. Most significantly that at home learning is incredibly challenging if you don't

have a home. The Children in the Shadows, written by Samantha Shapiro, read by Julia Whalen

with original music by Dan Powell. When schools in New York City abruptly closed in March because

of the coronavirus pandemic, Prince, a bright, chatty nine-year-old bursting with kinetic energy

found himself at home plotting through the Google Classroom app on his mother's phone.

The limbo that came with the shutdown was not a new experience for him. He and his mother

Fifi, who is 29, had been homeless for nearly his entire academic career. To protect their privacy,

their personal nicknames are being used to refer to Fifi in Prince. He had attended five different

...