The Sunday Read: ‘Young and Homeless in Rural America’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Sandra Plantz, an administrator at Gallia County Local Schools for more than 20 years, oversees areas as diverse as Title I reading remediation and federal grants for all seven of the district’s schools. In recent years, though, she has leaned in hard on a role that is overlooked in many districts: homeless liaison. Ms. Plantz’s district, in rural Ohio, serves an area that doesn’t offer much in the way of a safety net beyond the local churches. The county has no family homeless shelters, and those with no place to go sometimes end up sleeping in the parking lot of the Walmart or at the hospital emergency room. Homeless students have the worst educational outcomes of any group, the lowest attendance, the lowest scores on standardized tests, the lowest graduation rates. They all face the same cruel paradox: Students who do not have a stable place to live are unable to attend school regularly, and failing to graduate from high school is the single greatest risk factor for future homelessness.

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Samantha Shapiro and I'm a contributing writer at the New York Times magazine.
0:10.6	In 2020, I wrote a story for the magazine about students experiencing homelessness in New
0:15.6	York City and how hard it was for them to stay in school.
0:19.6	I initially wanted to write about the educational obstacles all American kids experiencing
0:24.6	homelessness face.
0:26.5	But I found that the situation in New York was in many ways really, really different
0:30.3	from that of the rest of the country.
0:33.0	New York is the only city in the entire country with a right to shelter.
0:37.6	This means that in theory, the city has to house anyone experiencing homelessness.
0:42.8	So in New York City, we have this ever-growing labyrinth of city departments and support
0:47.2	systems, including a vast network of shelters.
0:51.0	By contrast, if you look outside New York City and outside other major cities, you'd
0:55.4	find that a shelter system and the support and infrastructure that come with it hardly
1:00.1	exists if at all.
1:02.7	But in fact, in rural areas, people experience homelessness at about the same rate as they
1:07.3	do in cities.
1:09.3	That's what I wanted to cover in this week's Sunday read, which you're about to hear.
1:13.7	It's a look at homelessness in rural America and for students in particular.
1:20.6	So to do my reporting, one of the trips I made was to Galiah County in rural Ohio, just
1:25.8	across the border from West Virginia.
1:28.6	With my New York City story, people were living in places that may have had mice or rats
1:33.5	or roaches.
	...

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