Posted on page 11 of the Virginian Pilot June 20, 2010
The obituary page of Tuesday's Virginian-Pilot included a short article about the rising number of children living in extreme poverty in our community. Its placement was sadly appropriate. We are watching a generation of children being lost to poverty and homelessness while our public officials eliminate the resources to save them.
At ForKids we have seen family homelessness explode in the past three years. In April 2007 ForKids assisted 66 individuals, including 36 children. But we turned away another 134 people. Working with the cities of Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Chesapeake, we began prevention programs, added more supportive housing units and took on the family shelter for Suffolk and Western Tidewater. Then the recession hit. In April, ForKids assisted 610 individuals, including 459 children, but still turned away 248 people.
Two hundred forty-eight turned away. And that number will continue to grow in the summer heat, when family homelessness peaks. When schools close, families living in poverty lose their free child care, and thus their employment, and their fragile worlds collapse.
Why should you, or anyone, care? When a family becomes homeless and stays homeless, you don't see them on the street, and they rarely inconvenience you by public begging. Instead they move from place to place, from family member to friend to boyfriend. If they are lucky enough to have a car, they sleep in it. They spend precious money for a few nights in a hotel. But no matter which options they pick, the common denominator is that they will keep moving. That migrancy and poverty have a devastating impact on children.
According to the National Center on Family Homelessness, children experiencing homelessness are four times more likely to show delayed development and twice as likely to have learning disabilities as children who have a home. They are sick four times more often, go hungry twice as often, and have three times the rate of emotional and behavioral problems. Even more daunting, fewer than one in four homeless children graduate from high school.
In short, homelessness turns bright kids into not-so-bright kids and healthy kids into sick kids. They will fill up your public schools, emergency rooms and juvenile justice programs at enormous expense.
Homelessness is not inevitable. It is preventable. In ForKids' Norfolk prevention program, funded through the Dragas Grant, 84 percent of the families in danger of losing their home were stabilized after receiving a rental subsidy and prevention services provided at a fraction of the cost of emergency shelter.
The impact of homelessness on children is also reversible. Intensive afterschool programs coupled with physical and mental health interventions make a measurable difference. Last year, 85 percent of the children in ForKids' residential programs advanced to the next grade despite overwhelming odds.
But the programs and services that made these results possible are now at risk due to deep cuts at the local and state level. Governmental support is plummeting while ForKids and our local nonprofit partners are scrambling to meet a flood of need.
Our government and institutional partners must commit to the battle to end homelessness, not just when a grant is available, but because they understand that homelessness erodes the foundation of our community, exacting an exorbitant economic and human toll.
We can fix the problem through thoughtful, efficient solutions like prevention, education and affordable housing. Or, if we look the other way, we can shovel money downstream into costly emergency shelters, prisons, emergency room health care, and remedial education.
Service providers must have dependable funding sources to run quality programs and deliver longterm measurable results that build a healthy community. Great programs started one year and defunded the next won't give Hampton Roads a competitive work force or parents equipped to nurture the next generation.
Why should you care about the number of children ForKids turns away?
In April 2009 a bright, sweet little girl came to our Norfolk shelter who had not been to school for the entire year. She was held back in June, but we worked with her, and by October, she advanced to the next grade.
This past April we turned away 155 kids just like her.
Thaler McCormick is chief executive officer of ForKids, a regional nonprofit agency for homeless families and children.
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