Every year for the past ten years, Debra Manteghi, the homeless liaison for Akron City Schools has budgeted how much money she thinks she'll need to bus several hundred homeless students to their classes. This year, for the first time, she ran out of bus money by January and had to ask the district for help.
Debra Manteghi: General funds just recently provided $2400 for bus passes because we had so many more students that we were providing transportation for and that was kind of scary because the law does mandate that we make accommodations.
The McKinney-Vento act of 1986 provides federal funding to districts that register homeless students and offer free transportation to school. Last year, Akron City Schools identified and helped nearly 600 homeless students. This year, Manteghi thinks the district will serve over 800 living in temporary shelters.
Debra Manteghi: Back in the 80's, when McKinney Vento was enacted there was a lot we heard about family homelessness and it kind of disappeared. But it's emerging again because of the economy, this foreclosure crisis, credit card debt and even some breakdown of the family.
Dayton, Canton and Cleveland are also watching their homeless student numbers rise. Marcia Zashin is the homeless students liaison for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. As of April 1, Cleveland public schools served more than 2,100 homeless students, a 30 percent increase from last year.
Marcia Zashin: We began to see a lot of people who were losing their homes or losing their housing actually, because the landlord that was renting them the property was losing the property to foreclosure.
Barbara Duffield of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth says districts from Minnesota to the DC suburbs are starting to notice children temporarily without shelter because of the housing crisis.
Barbara Duffield: It's hugely disruptive to children's health and development to lose their housing and to be in these mobile situations. I think that may be the least visible but maybe even the farthest reaching impact of this.
Most who go through foreclosure find alternate housing, says Brian Davis of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. He says foreclosure hits poor tenants who are just getting by the hardest.
Brian Davis: It's usually somebody who is living in a duplex or multi-family apartment building that's been foreclosed on. And usually the tenant is the last to know in the process and then they have trouble finding a place to live.
One of those tenants is Clarice Hicks. Last March, the 25-year-old and her four children were evicted from the Cleveland house they were renting when it went into foreclosure.
Clarice Hicks: From there I was at two different shelters to over at my mom's house. And now we're staying with an Aunt right now.
But that's just temporary and crowded. Her aunt has four kids of her own and it's only a two-bedroom apartment. Stability for her means a place to stay and a good job. She says she wants to work in childcare and someday own her own business.
Clarice Hicks: That way my kids won't ever have to worry about being homeless. They could have something of their own.
Thanks to federal homeless programs and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, Hicks' school age children are bussed to school no matter where they go. And school - this single mom says - is the only thing her kids have right now that's stable. Mhari Saito, 90.3.