Giving Compass' Take:

• Nonprofit Quarterly examines alarming new data about the number of homeless students in New York City and the lack of philanthropic support in the region to address the problem.

• Youth homelessness isn't just limited to NYC, but the problems and there could provide a much-needed wakeup call. How can we mobilize resources to address this growing crisis?

• Start here: a coordinated community approach has made an impact on youth homelessness.

When you start from the fact that more than 10 percent of public school students in New York City are homeless, and that number has risen by more than half in the past five years, where do you go from there?

The New York State Technical and Education Assistance Center for Homeless Students (NYS-TEACHS), a project of Advocates for Children of New York (AFC), added new and disturbing data to their ongoing assessment of the number of students in New York City identified as homeless during the 2017–2018 school year. The data come from the New York State Education Department’s Student Information Repository System (SIRS).

More than one in ten students (114,659) in New York City schools were identified as homeless, a record number representing an increase of 3,097 students from the 2016–2017 school year and an increase of 66 percent since the 2010–2011 school year. Chalkbeat and the New York Times focused on the need for these vulnerable students in the nation’s largest school system to have the vital support only skilled social workers and counselors can provide. Chalkbeat reports that when students across the country protested the shooting in Florida, “high schoolers in the Bronx didn’t call for more gun control.” Rather, they shouted, “We need more social workers and counselors in all schools!”

Read the full article about homeless students in New York by Jim Schaffer at nonprofitquarterly.org.