NEW YORK -- Last year, New York City introduced a 60-day shelter limit for families living in Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelters, forcing students and their families to relocate. As of 2024, approximately 28,000 children living in DHS shelters are affected by this policy.
Student homelessness has long been an issue in the city. The number of homeless students has been increasing in recent years, reaching over 145,000 — meaning 1 in 8 students are living in temporary housing.
Among these students, English Language Learners (ELLs) are particularly vulnerable. Many come from immigrant families already at heightened risk of housing insecurity. When analyzing Department of Education data, we see that schools with higher percentages of ELL students tend to have higher rates of student homelessness.
Karla Pina, a social worker at Pan American International High School in Queens who primarily works with Hispanic immigrant students, said many of her students share homes with other families—often strangers to them—or live in shelters.
Pina has served as the first point of contact for new student families at Pan American International High School for the past 10 years. The school enrolls a majority of Hispanic students, as it only admits those who have been in the U.S. for less than four years and come from Spanish-speaking countries.
“Many of them, unfortunately, are undocumented, so they don't have the criteria to be able to rent an apartment of their own,” Pina said. She also noted that many families don’t have a stable income or a job to afford rent.
This has left immigrant families navigating both the shelter and education systems in a foreign language they barely speak, with limited institutional support.
“The majority of my students were newly arrived from the Dominican Republic. You would think that we're such a diverse school district, we would have more language support. But we didn't have enough teachers or staff who were fluent in Spanish,” said Anasofia Trelles, a former Brooklyn educator and now a program manager at SchoolHouse Connection.
“The support for English language learners needs a lot of work in New York City,” she added.
Trelles also shared how survival often takes priority over education for these families. “They're overflooded—You're just thinking about where you're going to sleep that night. So, you don't really have that time to do all of these steps to get services.”
While New York City has a legal right-to-shelter policy, the actual process of accessing that shelter is far from straightforward.
The intake system itself presents major challenges. To apply, families have to show up and wait at the intake center in person. For families with children there is only one intake shelter in the city.
“For some of the parents that we worked with, they were working in a supermarket or some other job where they couldn't just take paid time off and go spend a day waiting for intake,” she said, “Some of them had younger children and so the child is also physically with them for this whole grueling process.”
Federal law, specifically the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, is in place to help the families experiencing homelessness but undocumented are often hesitant to claim those rights.
“They resist being identified because they’re worried—‘this is a federal law, and I don’t want to be associated with that. What might that mean for me and my status?’” said Trelles.
“We’re seeing that even more now with the new administration and some of the concerns,” Trelles added. “It’s always been there, but I think now there are even more fears.”
In addition to language barriers and concerns about immigration status, immigrant families—along with many American families experiencing homelessness—must also navigate the challenges of frequent relocations, school transfers, and long commutes.
A new city policy has added another hurdle: families living in Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelters are now subject to a 60-day shelter limit. One exception applies to families with children in grades K–6, who are allowed to relocate only once after their initial 60-day stay. After that, they may remain in the same shelter, provided they reapply.
Still, even a single move can be deeply disruptive to a child’s education. For families with students in grades 7 and up, this policy means they are likely to face relocation every two months.
“Relocation could result in absenteeism. It’s very common for us to see absences in the first couple of days after a housing move, because everyone’s just trying to get situated,” Trelles said, “so if you're doing it every 60 days, you can imagine what that does for a student's academics and attendance and potential to graduate.”
Pina also witnessed the disruption caused by relocation. A nearby shelter serving her school was shut down, forcing students to move to a more distant location. In this case, the students chose to remain at the school because they liked it, but the commute became significantly longer.
Pina said she always encourages families to go through the “tedious” process of reapplying to the shelter they currently live in after the 60-day limit, but noted it’s “very unlikely” that they’d be placed in the same shelter.
In similar situations, some students may choose to transfer. During the school year 2023 to 2024, 8,412 students in DHS shelters have transferred between schools.
“What I see in our work is a lot of kids transferring schools repeatedly — and they fall through the cracks,” said Jennifer Pringle, project director at Advocates for Children.
Transfers can impact a child’s academic development, limiting their ability to build relationships with teachers, staff, and peers. Adapting to a new environment is never easy.
Whether to transfer or not can be a double-edged sword: staying in the same school may mean students have to endure long commutes.
To support students who are forced to move into shelters far from their original schools, city law guarantees students in temporary housing the right to stay in their original schools and to receive busing for their commute. But in practice, those rights are often out of reach.
“There are protections in the law that allow for kids to stay in the same school, that give them the right to busing — but oftentimes those rights are empty in practice because of structural barriers that make it impossible for a parent to actually exercise them,” Pringle explained.
The problem spans multiple agencies. The Office of Pupil Transportation has long been criticized for its outdated systems and inefficiency.
“The Office of Pupil Transportation has been plagued with problems,” Pringle said. "They have school bus contracts that date back over 40 years. They have antiquated routing systems. They have an extremely cumbersome and bureaucratic process for arranging transportation for students in temporary housing.”
DOE data highlights the disparity: out of more than 140,000 students in temporary housing, only about 18% received school bus assignments. The number of students in DHS shelters receiving busing dropped from 6,359 in January 2024 to 5,811 by June.
For one parent living in Brooklyn—who Trelles worked with—getting their child to school in the Bronx was a daily logistical challenge.
The school bus picked up students as early as 6 a.m., but the parent—who worked overnight shifts—was still on the job at that time. Shelter regulations prohibit children from being left alone, so a parent must be present when the bus arrives.
“It was super challenging for them to find a bus route that would even work,” said Trelles, who works closely with families experiencing homelessness. “It was a small child, so they couldn’t just go to the bus stop alone.”
The delay in arranging transportation left the family in limbo. Until a bus route was confirmed, the parent had to choose between missing work or making sure their child got to school safely.
“That was a huge barrier,” Trelles said. “The parent would try to make it work, but it would hurt their employment—almost like developing the cycle of poverty and homelessness.”
Even after the transportation issue was resolved, more challenges remained. “Most parents who do have a job—their day doesn’t end at 3 p.m. when their student gets out of school,” Trelles noted. “There needs to be some kind of after-school program or childcare available, so they’re not forced to leave work in the middle of the day to pick up their child.”
“In theory, the Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Education should work more closely together specifically for these situations. Does it actually happen? Not really,” Trelles said, “The two systems have been really siloed.”
Some efforts have been made to connect the two systems, the city now has 100 shelter based community coordinators, who are tasked to ensure students get the resources they need, instead of being lost in the system.
“I think it was a really great effort but also there were so many drawbacks with it. Coordinators were not getting paid enough. There were stories of some community coordinators who were themselves in shelter because it was just not funded well,” Trelles said.
The shelter-based community coordinator positions were originally created with funding from the American Rescue Plan during the pandemic. The City has since committed to funding the roles through the FY 2025 budget.
Advocates hope the initiative will become a sustainable, long-term effort. Without these coordinators, many families would be left without a clear point of contact to help them navigate the education system. While shelters typically have case managers or social service staff on site, their primary focus is securing permanent housing—not providing educational support.
“In New York City everything is so ridiculously complicated that you really do need somebody who knows the ins and outs of the DOE to be able to support them,” Trelles said. “Currently, besides the community coordinators, that doesn't really exist in the shelter.”
With the rising number of students in temporary housing, bridging the gap between housing and education is more urgent than ever. Without permanent funding and structural integration between city agencies, efforts like the shelter-based community coordinator roles risk becoming temporary fixes—rather than the lasting solutions families desperately need.
“We have a city-run shelter department. We have a city-run school system. The city needs to be doing a better job so it’s not working at cross purposes — where it’s creating a temporary housing system that is actively undermining the education of students living in those shelters,” Pringle said.