The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is considering a profoundly generous and undoubtedly controversial way of fulfilling its mandate to provide education for all children and youth, regardless of their economic status.
Facing a growing population of homeless families with school age children, the school district is questioning the physical foundation of the city’s schooling.
The conventional framework of providing the bricks and mortar for education is failing homeless youth. Schools are built to serve neighbourhoods based on demographic profiles.
But whether moving from shelter to shelter (both temporary and permanent), camping in tent cities, or couch-surfing with friends or family miles away, school aged children who are homeless cannot be easily supported by a neighborhood schooling model. Building for a homeless ‘neighbourhood’ is highly impractical.
So the LAUSD is taking a leaf from the old saying. “If the Mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the Mountain.”
Schools cannot go to the homeless, so the LAUSD is considering bringing homeless children, together with their families, to school properties. The idea combines the shelter that homeless school aged children and their families need with the schooling the students must have.
Read more on this extraordinary and visionary idea in LA School Report: LAUSD Board Approves Study Of Housing Homeless Students And Their Families On District Properties
