Her son spent four months in New York City schools without receiving his legally required services while school officials developed a new IEP from scratch and family memory. Asking his school back in Delaware for a copy would have been too risky – the abuser could contact the school to figure out where they’d fled.

The family, whose names are being withheld for safety reasons, is one of many whom school systems have failed to serve properly due to a lack of clear safety plans and policies for families experiencing domestic violence, a persistent driver of homelessness. 

Nationwide, at least 80% of women with children experiencing homelessness also experienced domestic violence, and . In alone, roughly 40,000 people became survivors in 2022. 

In fact, more families entered the city’s Department of Housing Services shelters due to domestic violence () than evictions (11%). 

With at least 146,000 children experiencing homelessness in New York City and domestic violence on the rise, advocates, experts and families are and urging schools to develop clear safety plans with shelter staff to better support survivors. 

Even when families disclosed instances of domestic violence to schools and asked them to alter contact information, New York City schools failed to immediately update student profiles and contacted dangerous individuals on several occasions. Some survivors were forced to seek emergency shelter and school transfers out of their borough as a result, said Janyll Canals-Kernizan, director of the Robin Hood project with Advocates for Children of New York.

Some school staff have misguidedly asked survivors for confidential domestic violence shelter addresses, or refused to set up busing because they claimed P.O. box numbers are unacceptable. The lack of clear guidance has produced harmful ripple effects on families, including limiting kids’ ability to get to school and feel safe and stable once there, as well as parents’ ability to attend work.

“I’ve had families have to pick between participating in an economic empowerment program or taking their kid to school because the bus has never been set up and now they can never get to their economic empowerment program, which means then that they can never really establish independence and get out of shelter … All of that is interrelated in a way that we don’t talk about,” said Canals-Kernizan, an attorney who represents families facing school-based discrimination.

Beyond the challenge of affording housing, survivors navigate “long lasting” consequences of physical, psychological and financial abuse, which requires individualized case management and makes finding secure housing even more difficult, said Gabbi Sandoval Requena, director of policy and communications with New Destiny Housing, a nonprofit providing permanent housing and social services to survivors in NYC.

“Abuse and gender-based violence is really all about power and control. It usually starts gradually, and it’s really hard for a survivor to sometimes acknowledge that they’re in a situation of abuse,” she told ����Ӱ��. 

Abusers often isolate their partner from finances, managing any money they earn from work but not letting them access accounts. Some use the survivors’ Social Security number to open credit cards without their consent, destroying their credit score. The survivors may have no history of being on a lease, leaving them unable to provide rental references. 

These are the “consequences that are often undealt with because they’re in crisis mode, trying to just survive day by day,” Sandoval Requena said. 

Today, nearly all residents in NYC’s Human Resources Administration-run domestic violence shelters – the largest network in the country – are Black and brown families with children. The facilities are often at capacity, housing about 10,000 people, and have a stay limit of 180 days, while offering specialized programs for kids and parents. 

In the Department of Housing Services shelters, open to all NYC residents without homes, about a third are families with kids. Altogether, one in three of New York state’s unhoused residents are children. 

Statewide, experience intimate partner abuse, considered a leading cause of traumatic brain injuries by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2023, 10% more people were entered into New York’s Domestic Violence Registry for orders of protection. Around the same time, homelessness . 

Although any children experiencing homelessness should have protections to accessing stable education under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, in reality, their experiences vary. 

Families facing shelter limits are moved frequently, sometimes across boroughs, posing an inordinate strain on childrens’ education. From safety scares and hour-long trains to needing to work to help support the family, unhoused students comprise a disproportionate amount of chronically absent students. Overall, about 43% New York City students missed 10% or more of the 2022-23 school year. For students experiencing homelessness, .

One Brooklyn mother and survivor from the Caribbean recognized how disruptive school transfers would be on top of her family’s housing instability. She insisted on keeping her son in the same school even as they moved among shelters across the boroughs four times. 

“I experienced domestic violence all my life,” said the 45-year-old survivor, whose name is being withheld for safety reasons. She witnessed her father abuse her mother, and left her partner her first year in the United States. 

She and her “energetic” son lived in shelters for three years, moving every six months. Twice, seeing her abuser outside of the domestic violence shelters triggered emergency transfers. 

With her then 5-year old in tow, she’d leave her upper Manhattan shelter by 6 a.m. on the dot to get to his Brooklyn elementary school by 7:45. 

She never received any MetroCards from the schools or shelters, commonly provided for free. Over the years, she had to attend housing court and incurred three fare evasion tickets, which her mother helped pay from the Caribbean. 

Against the urging of the shelter staff, she insisted on keeping her son, now 9, in his Brooklyn school. Changing schools “would not have done him any good,” she said. “We all need stability, especially children.”

With the help of a case manager from New Destiny Housing, the mother navigated the process of applying for apartments until securing one of the nonprofit’s 377 units. “She stood by my side, all the way. She took me very seriously,” the survivor said, adding that each time they checked in biweekly, she felt certain something would get done. 

At New Destiny Housing, over 1,000 New Yorkers receive on-site services like financial coaching, food pantries and art therapy. Family residents can opt-in for field trips to Broadway shows, baseball games and museums – efforts to challenge the cycle of abuse and “for kids to be kids and to enjoy the joy of living in New York City, something that they never had access to before,” said Sandoval Requena. 

The survivor said that her son is now “outspoken … he knows what he wants.” She attends support groups with other families, hearing and sharing what they’ve gone through, and credits the case manager as critical in their journey. 

Their new home is about a 25-minute commute from her son’s school, a far cry from the nearly two-hour, one-way commute from their Manhattan shelters. 

“I’m there at every PTA meeting, every parent teacher conference. Every show that they are having, every Funky Friday. I am here for every single thing.”  

Careful study is required to tease out the causes, but it seems clear that during this period of global upheaval, children have been marinating in the same that affects their families and communities after being cut off from many of the social connections and services that help steady them in normal times. Such trauma, including violent victimization, is a for adolescents committing violent offenses and becoming involved with the criminal justice system. 

This week is , which aims to raise awareness about the roots of youth violence and ways of stopping it before it starts. At LISC, a national community development nonprofit, I lead a team that works closely with residents and local organizations, including schools, to tackle the root causes of crime and promote safety. Our experience suggests it would be a tragic mistake to double down on zero-tolerance school discipline policies that rely heavily on suspension, expulsion and referrals to law enforcement. 

Accountability is important, but without supportive interventions, the consequences tend to be punitive and push kids out of learning environments and into the criminal justice system — what is often termed the school-to-prison pipeline. One study showed that students in were more likely to drop out, less likely to go to college and more likely to end up being arrested and incarcerated than those in schools with less tendency to use suspension and expulsion. These policies typically have the harshest impact on children in and , especially Black boys — kids from the very communities that have suffered most in the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of sickness, death, unemployment and small-business closures.

Instead, schools — the frontline organizations for child development — can be the starting place for forging relationships with community partners to meet the needs of individual children and help them navigate challenging environments without descending into a cycle of violence that’s likely to upend their young lives.

The most promising school-based interventions do two things. One, they enlist mentors or counselors who are relatable to the kids they serve, who look like them and have experience that allows them to speak credibly to specific children’s struggles and hopes. Two, they reach out into their communities in an all-hands-on-deck approach to a problem that educators cannot address alone.

The Spokane, Washington, school district, for example, hired a director of community relations and diversity training who has 17 years’ experience in the local juvenile court system and a deep understanding of how children of color in this majority-white city tend to experience disproportionately higher rates of school exclusions and arrests than their white peers. With help from a , and her colleagues created the RISE program, which connects individual students with community-based services they may need and has paired more than 130 kids with a relatable mentor who supports their journey in a close-up way. One mentor, , actually puzzles out solutions alongside his mentees in their algebra class, encouraging friendly competition over who can score highest on tests. “They just need a connection to someone,” he says.

Kids in RISE are building more positive relationships with administration and staff, sharply reducing the need for exclusionary punishments. Mentors have averted fights in real time — like one brewing recently in a school cafeteria, where a girl on the receiving end of some nasty insults was ready to fight her tormentor. Her friend ran for a RISE mentor, who rushed in to defuse the situation. Another Spokane teen, who had never achieved more than a 2.0 average, scored a 4.0 last semester and is accumulating credits toward graduation.

Several years ago, school administrators in Lompoc, California, became concerned about an increase in gang violence. They created the , which includes the school district and various local service, health and faith-based organizations. The coalition holds regular community dialogues that, among other things, helped to identify specific street locations where safety is a concern. This information, coupled with training from the , is informing a Safe Passage initiative in which trusted adult “peacebuilders” will work to defuse conflicts and keep an eye out along kids’ routes to and from Lompoc schools. The group also inaugurated a class for the parents of sixth graders who, under the influence of local gangs, had been getting into trouble. The class, in the format of a peace circle that flattens power hierarchies and encourages sharing, promotes open collaboration between parents and schools to address individual problems and help children succeed. 

In Florida’s Broward County Public Schools, the country’s sixth-largest district, there was an uptick in problematic student social-media posts — not just bullying, but outright threats. So the district is deploying its curriculum on internet safety, , both in schools and in other community settings around the district. 

All these interventions lie outside the traditional mission of teaching and depend on schools’ ability to engage community partners and sometimes hire “credible messengers” to intervene before fear, frustration and groupthink lead to violent outbursts and victimization. There’s strong evidence from longstanding programs like the Massachusetts and (formerly CeaseFire) that this grassroots-led, collaborative, non-punitive approach can reduce youth arrests for violent offenses and neighborhood gun violence. 

Schools are a natural home for such interventions, but districts need dedicated resources and an engaged community to carry them out. With these programs, educators can send an important message to all kids, including those who may be at risk of hurting others and being hurt in turn: You belong right here with us, learning and growing, in peace and safety.

Mona Mangat is vice president for safety & justice at , a national community development nonprofit

It was only Feb. 27, 2020 — a mere 17 months ago — that the first school in the United States due to COVID-19.

Somehow it seems longer in pandemic time.

For students, like everyone else, that temporal elasticity could be chalked up to a host of things, from the monotony of quarantine to isolation from family and friends to the mostly invisible barriers between the spaces where we worked, played and dreamed.

In March 2020, ����Ӱ�� launched “Pandemic Notebook,” an intimate series designed to capture, in their own words, how students are living through this strange period.

Few understood how long it would last. Initially, it just seemed like Spring Break was taking . But then the goalposts for a return to normalcy kept shifting: the end of the school year, the fall, the conclusion of Biden’s “First 100 Days.”

It still hasn’t happened.

For students in a once-unthinkable year two of pandemic school, the stories deepened as quarantine wore on. Some grappled with young love in a time of virtual connection; others, locked inside their homes, experienced the deep trauma of parental abuse. They faced issues that are perennial: privilege, college and equity, making new friends. They also tried new things. A fifth-grader in Michigan took advantage of learning from home to care for a neighbor’s ducks and chickens. A high school junior in Chicago recommitted to education and his love of physics after a 3 a.m. epiphany watching Neil deGrasse Tyson videos on YouTube. And a New York City senior who scoured her apartment building for a decent Wi-Fi signal discovered something better: her neighbors.

Here are their stories.

‘Returning’ to school

WELCOME TO PANDEMIC SCHOOL, YEAR TWO: For students starting a new school year, there are advantages to going virtual. An extra 45 minutes of sleep, for one. Not having to pack a lunch. Avoiding the disgusting bathrooms that are seemingly impossible to avoid in any building occupied by so many adolescents. But as Sadie Bograd writes, much is lost: “Going back to school simply didn’t feel like much of a meaningful shift after a similarly Zoom-filled and homebound summer.” Her school in Lexington, Kentucky, started the semester entirely online. But as she started school, moving from class to class, or link to link, she found several small reasons to be hopeful. Some teachers adorned their Canvas pages with virtual Bitmoji classrooms, their avatars guiding students to important links. Others went on fascinating tangents and rambling digressions. “In short,” Bograd writes, “my teachers’ personalities managed to come through the small box they occupied on my laptop, reassuring me that even without the possibility of face-to-face interaction, I’ll still be able to make meaningful connections.”

Read Sadie’s story here.

Pain and loss

A GRANDFATHER’S DEATH & A MEDITATION ON COVID’S MENTAL HEALTH TOLL: “The day I found out my grandfather died, I cried so hard I threw up,” Cindy Chen writes. “Two days later, I went back to school.” When Chen’s parents, both Chinese nationals, tried to start a new life for their family in New York City, her grandparents raised her in China, where she lived until she was 5. It was her grandparents who “took me to the park, cooked my favorite meals and tucked me in at night.” She remembers mischievously hiding her grandfather’s cigarettes and how he’d chuckle and call her a “bed egg.” His death, a world away and during the pandemic, was devastating. “I walked through the front doors holding back tears,” the New Jersey high school junior writes. “It wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable crying in public. I just wanted to avoid combining a mask with a runny nose.” In this piece, she reflects on the pandemic’s mental health toll and how the effects have fallen harder on young people, like her, who suffered from loneliness and depression even before COVID-19.

Read Cindy’s story here.

DOMESTIC ABUSE DURING QUARANTINE: “For as long as I can remember, I was a bird trapped in a golden cage. On the outside, my world was a glittering array of debate trophies, academic titles, college scholarships and a picture-perfect family. But no one knew the fractured portrait that was my abusive household.” So begins one student’s story of coping with toxic parents as COVID-19 took away the safe haven of school. As of 2020, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 children reported being victims of domestic abuse, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the pressures of quarantine are likely to worsen those grim statistics. The author, who wrote anonymously out of concerns for her safety, said that like many teens who have been victims of abuse, being forced to stay at home was a prescription for danger: “In essence, my home life was a ticking time bomb.”

Read the full account here.

Trying something new

HOW NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON SAVED MY YEAR: Shortly after the pandemic began, Chicago high school senior Jimmy Rodgers “fully expected everything to just continue going downhill as the world made less and less sense.” The idea of being locked in the same room made him unimaginably depressed. The only time he got to leave the house was to bury his grandmother. But everything changed one day at 3 a.m., when he watched a video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube. “I came to a startling conclusion,” he writes. “I was the person needed to solve the mysteries of the universe.” Tyson’s optimism and passion were infectious, Rodgers said, pushing him to do better in physics and commit himself to a career teaching and helping others in the Black community. “To my surprise,” he writes, “education gave me something to be happy about, rather than numb, at a time when all my days felt the same.”

Read Jimmy’s story here.

FOR THIS FIFTH-GRADER, SCHOOL WAS FOWL: For Zora Borcila-Miller, a fifth-grader in East Lansing, Michigan, the pandemic has sometimes been lonely. Once, she got so bored she made a twin out of her clothes, a pillow and some broomsticks. She’s been learning remotely since the pandemic began, but when she and her dad moved to a new house in downtown Lansing, six blocks from the Capitol, she met her neighbor’s ducks and chickens. Zora describes the “hands-on and interactive” education she got while school was virtual. “When I’m at school, I’m usually on the couch with my computer,” she writes. “I have never talked to my teacher in person, only on Zoom. And it’s OK. But, in school, we never got to meet a duckling born the day before.”

Read Zora’s story here.

Equity and privilege

COVID-19 RAISES STAKES FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS: Bridgette Adu-Wadier always knew she would enroll in college — the more prestigious, the better. But as the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, she didn’t always know how. For her family, education was the Way Out, she writes. “It was also a way to set a precedent for my younger siblings, lift my family up from poverty and potentially change their economic trajectory for generations.” The pandemic placed fresh obstacles in the way of that pursuit. Because of her parents’ work schedules, she had to homeschool her younger siblings. That, in addition to her rigorous academic routine, caused her to lose sleep. “I discovered a glaring similarity between college admissions and the pandemic,” she writes. “Both are difficult for everyone, but harder for some students than others.”

Read Bridgette’s story here.

MASK CONFUSION, AND A LESSON ON PRIVILEGE: In May, high school senior Ianne Salvosa crossed the graduation stage at Liberty High School, outside St. Louis, and accepted her diploma. But the lessons she’ll be taking with her to college will go far beyond academics. The past year of fighting over mask requirements has left her with some uncomfortable feelings about her classmates. Students, many of whom openly doubted the efficacy of vaccines, fought with teachers over wearing masks. Long before vaccinations were commonplace, administrators frequently walked the halls with masks down. “Like all seniors who have lived through the past year, I understand burnout,” she writes. “But it appears our academic fatigue has seeped into our response to the pandemic.” The cavalier attitude toward masks, she said, “feels like some sort of show we put on so that the rest of the world can believe we did our part. It’s an ugly feeling I’ll take with me into college and beyond the current crisis.”

Read Ianne’s story here.

Making connections, finding love

SEARCHING FOR WI-FI, STUDENT DISCOVERED HER NEIGHBORS: When New York City’s schools went remote in March 2020, Ilana Drake was stuck. Knowing the strongest Wi-Fi signal in her family’s small apartment emanated from the front closet, she set up base camp in a common hallway outside, across from the elevator. Then a strange thing happened: She began to listen. “You can hear everything in the hallway,” she writes. “I heard snippets of conversation from nearby apartments: marital arguments, frustrated parents, stock trades, kids engaging in homeschooling and, of course, a symphony of barking dogs.” She also got to know her neighbors and the building’s staff. Drake has a learning disability and recently graduated from the city’s High School for Math, Science and Engineering. But in the hallway, she learned that everyone had some sort of “academic backstory,” including the neighbor who dreaded standardized tests and the service technician who had been an engineer in the Dominican Republic and helped her with calculus. “Working in the hallway,” she wrote, “provided me with a passport to conversations that went beyond ‘hello’ and ‘have a good day.’”

Read Ilana’s story here.

YOUNG LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19: Ila Kumar remembers her pre-pandemic dating life with a whiff of nostalgia: the “charming absurdity of pretending you are older than you are, wearing itchy sweaters in bad restaurants, knowing the 15-year-old across from you is going to insist he pays for your slice of pizza.” Now, Kumar writes of the difficulties of navigating the tricky waters of teenage romance at a time of swiftly changing guidelines regarding masks and social distancing. “Maybe I forgot what it means to get to know someone — to uncover their secret talent for impressions, learn the way their hands move when they dance to music in the car and remember how they smell,” she writes. “Every corner of a relationship requires work, and the specter of something as small as unanswered messages, wanting eye contact and being left without it, and midnight arguments requires the singular power of trust.”

Read Ila’s story here.