The rise in homelessness among school-aged children is the underside of our current financial crisis
The Blind Side of the Economic Crisis:
One Million Homeless School-aged Kids
by Devona Walker | TheLoop21
Many of you may have seen The Blind Side where a benevolent Sandra Bullock takes a homeless black kid into her home. He’s a big boy and with a little TLC, he is transformed into a professional football player. Well that story, though it sounds pretty fantastical, is actually based on real people and events. Unfortunately, that Hollywood ending bears no similarity at all to the struggles an estimated one million homeless school children currently face in the U.S.
To understand the magnitude of that number, think about this, there are only 40 million African Americans in the U.S. And when you drill down the numbers of those homeless kids, nearly half of them are black, roughly 47 percent. So that means at least 500,000 black school-aged children are currently homeless.
The rise in homelessness among school-aged children is the underside of our current financial crisis. According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, the number of students identified as homeless by public school districts rose more than 40 percent during the 2006/2007 and 2008/2009 school years to 956,914. And this year, with steady and unprecedented increases in foreclosures, 10 percent unemployment and roughly twice that in the most economically vulnerable communities, i.e. black communities, the projections actually look much worse.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
The Blind Side of the Economic Crisis:
One Million Homeless School-aged Kids
by Devona Walker | TheLoop21
Many of you may have seen The Blind Side where a benevolent Sandra Bullock takes a homeless black kid into her home. He’s a big boy and with a little TLC, he is transformed into a professional football player. Well that story, though it sounds pretty fantastical, is actually based on real people and events. Unfortunately, that Hollywood ending bears no similarity at all to the struggles an estimated one million homeless school children currently face in the U.S.
To understand the magnitude of that number, think about this, there are only 40 million African Americans in the U.S. And when you drill down the numbers of those homeless kids, nearly half of them are black, roughly 47 percent. So that means at least 500,000 black school-aged children are currently homeless.
The rise in homelessness among school-aged children is the underside of our current financial crisis. According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, the number of students identified as homeless by public school districts rose more than 40 percent during the 2006/2007 and 2008/2009 school years to 956,914. And this year, with steady and unprecedented increases in foreclosures, 10 percent unemployment and roughly twice that in the most economically vulnerable communities, i.e. black communities, the projections actually look much worse.
Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com
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