Losing your home, losing your school: how evictions affect kids' educational trajectories
This piece from Eviction Lab shows a direct relationship between evictions and lower academic performance. In 2024, Speaker Todd Huston announced that the General Assembly’s primary focus was going to be 3rd grade reading skills. Many of us in the advocacy community said the answer is an obvious, systemic issue - stable housing. In conversations with teachers, I learned that many say they spend more time onboarding new students than teaching. Some students attend 6 different schools in a school year. How could it be possible to learn when a child doesn’t know if he or she will have someplace to go after school? Want to improve reading scores and general learning? Stop evicting families!
“As we have seen that kids are disproportionately impacted by the eviction crisis, policymakers could explore ways to provide additional eviction protections for families with school-age children, whether by reforming the eviction process or providing emergency rental assistance.”
The Eviction Lab reported 3 findings:
Eviction filings put students at increased risk of switching schools and leaving the district. Switching schools is hard on kids. We found that 12.3% of kids whose parents were filed against for eviction finished the current academic year in a different school than they started in. This is almost three times higher than students not facing eviction.
Eviction-led school moves tended to be to campuses of lower quality, as measured by per-pupil budgets, standardized test scores, and other factors related to student disadvantage.
We found that both eviction filings and school moves led to increases in absences, especially in the year in which the eviction case and/or school move happens… Students facing eviction also get suspended more often, but we only find this effect for students who switch schools.
None of these findings are surprising if one takes a minute to think about the impacts of losing one’s home. It’s horrific for adults - devastating for kids. We must make it clear that band-aids are not a solution to poor student performance since they don’t address systemic issues.
