Homeless kids, families deserve improved help
KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Here’s a crummy number: On any given night in Washington state, 20,000 people, including 9,000 kids, don’t have a safe place to stay.
That’s 9,000 kids without their own beds, without the most basic sense of security, without the little routines on which they build their idea of how a family works.
Measured another way, schools in the state are serving about 24,000 homeless students a year, according to David Bley, director of the Pacific Northwest program for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Compared with other kids, those who have been homeless are three times as likely to have emotional and behavioral problems, and twice as likely to have learning disabilities.
Half are withdrawn, depressed or anxious. One in three develops a serious mental disorder by age 8.
Kids suffer, and the public pays long term for that grief and trouble.
Given the economy, there’s no reason to think life for these people will get anything but worse in the near future. That’s why a new statewide partnership is, literally, a life-saver.
The Washington Families Fund and Building Changes, backed by state and local governments and foundations, are launching an effort to reshape the way services and agencies help homeless families. Their goal is to cut family homelessness in half in 10 years.
Pierce, King and Snohomish counties will work on three pilot programs. They’ll work not with hearts and hunches, but solid data. For seven years, the Gates Foundation’s Sound Families Initiative developed housing and services for homeless families. It built up information on what works and what doesn’t.
“We learned that while we stabilized lives, we didn’t quite get it right,” said Alice Shobe, deputy director of Building Changes. “Families are very complex.”
They’re almost as complex as the system we’ve built to help them.
That’s the problem.
People who’ve lost their homes and are trying to figure out how to get their kids under a roof don’t have the energy or know-how to negotiate for the resources they need. They depend on their first contact for that.
“How you get help depends on who answers your phone call,” Shobe said.
Even when they land with an organization that’s connected with, say, domestic violence experts, or addiction treatment, or special-needs education, they still run up against natural barriers.
Shobe told of Helping Hand House clients who wanted to get job-skills training at a technical college. But the state required them to take a job – even a minimum-wage, dead-end job – to qualify for family support.
Helping Hand House staff in Puyallup gathered resources that allowed them to train for a family-wage job. But it was a leap of faith for the families.
That state regulations would trap a family in low wages and public assistance was likely not the intent of the officials who put those rules into place.
Bley said it costs $400 to $500 a month to transport homeless children to their school of origin, as federal law requires. That money would likely be enough to keep the family from losing their home in the first place.
The $200,000 planning grant for Pierce County should help identify these kinds of blockages within the human services network, said Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy.
The pilot program also will explore ways to intervene when families are at risk of losing their homes. That could include negotiating with landlords or developing funds to help pay bills.
It plans to develop a one-stop access system that tailors services to the family’s needs. It wants to settle families in long-term housing rapidly, rather than putting them in shelters. It aims to ease access to training for family-wage jobs. And it will support development of affordable housing.
You bet that’s ambitious. Pulling this off as the recession wears on will be doubly challenging.
The payoff is worth the risk and the expense.
Every family that settles into stable housing, finds good jobs and gets off public aid is a bonanza for taxpayers.
And if, on any given night, some of the 9,000 Washington kids are spared the trauma of being homeless, well, that’s just common decency.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
