The Need For School on Wheels

There are over 200,000 homeless children in California.

Homeless mothers and children are now the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population, and the percentage of kids who are homeless in the U.S. is greater today than at any point since the Great Depression.

In Los Angeles alone, there are almost 14,000 homeless kids from Kindergarten through Grade 12 enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District and we know that this under-represents significantly the size of the school-aged homeless population in Los Angeles.

Every child needs an education to have hope and a chance for success, and the homeless child is no exception. If School on Wheels can close the gap for these kids, our program has the potential to help stop the cycle of homelessness and to relieve school districts of a tremendous capacity and resource burden.

Homeless Statistics

Finding accurate statistics regarding the number of homeless children is very difficult. Most counts do not specifically identify numbers of children or include families staying in motels or children in group foster homes. Some statistics are point in time and do not fully capture the number of people who experience homelessness over the course of a year. Many parents and children do not identify themselves as homeless because of prejudice and shame. For all of these reasons, no one estimate is the definitive representation of the number of homeless people. We provide some of them below to present the magnitude of the problem.

United States

  • 1,350,000 children are likely to experience homelessness in a given year. (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2004, www.nlchp.org)
  • Of the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness over the course of a year, nearly half is part of a family seeking shelter.
    (National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness, 2007, www.studentsagainsthunger.org)
  • Over 907,000 homeless students were reported enrolled by Local Education Authorities in 2005-06.
    (Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program

California

  • 200,000 children in California experience homelessness over the course of a year. (California Schools Magazine, Spring 2007: Getting to the Heart of the Homeless Problem)
  • 32,000 children are in foster care in the State of California (Data on foster care in California, 2007, http://cssr.berkeley.edu/ucb_childwelfare/)

Los Angeles County

  • 1 in 9 homeless persons in the nation is in Los Angeles County (Homelessness in Los Angeles: A summary of recent research. Tepper P., 2004)
  • 250,000 individuals are homeless over the course of a year in the county (Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, 2005, http://www.lacehh.org)
  • 32% of homeless school-age children are not attending school. (Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, 2005, http://www.lacehh.org)
  • 13,521 homeless children are enrolled in Los Angeles Unified School District and the average age of a homeless student is 9 years young. (Los Angeles Unified School District http://www.lausd.net)