The
Louisville Courier-Journal
2/18/2004
By CHRIS KENNING
ckenning@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
It began, Gina Hawkins said, as a dispute with her landlord: He wouldn't address problems that included sewage leaking into her apartment. Disagreements escalated, and soon she and her four children had to move out.
Hawkins, a single mother, didn't have the money needed to get into a new apartment, despite working at a nursing home and a restaurant. So the family lived with friends, moved to Southern Indiana for a time, stayed with relatives in Ohio and returned to Louisville — never able to find a stable place to stay or an affordable apartment to rent.
Meanwhile, her kids were in and out of three schools in a year. Her daughter, 15-year-old Whitley, failed eighth grade. "The impact on them was terrible," Hawkins said.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The Metropolitan Housing Coalition report, "Moving On: Student Mobility and Affordable Housing," made five recommendations:
- Develop an increased supply of safe, quality, affordable housing to create more stability for families.
- Increase housing subsidies for the lowest-income renters.
- Provide money for schools, through family resource and youth centers, to help parents with financial literacy and short- and long-term housing plans.
- Involve the school district staff in planning for major housing development or demolitions within the district.
- Adopt a consistent standard within the Louisville metropolitan region to measure student mobility.
WHAT'S NEXT:
Metro United Way will play host to a forum on March 8 for civic and community groups and officials to discuss ways to reduce student turnover in schools caused by shortages of affordable housing. For information, contact the Housing Coalition at 584-6858.
Last year a total of 9,681 Jefferson County Public Schools students — about 10 percent of the district's 96,000 enrollment — switched schools after the year started. About 5,000 of those also changed residences, and 30 percent did so more than once, according to a Metropolitan Housing Coalition report issued yesterday.
Most were concentrated in poor western Louisville neighborhoods where rent burdens — the percentage of income spent on rent — are high, the report said. And many of the children posted lower test scores.
With national studies showing that children who move frequently are more likely to experience academic problems, disrupt class or drop out of school, coalition leaders released the report to draw attention to the links among affordable housing, student turnover at schools and academic achievement.
Director Jane Walsh said that's important in a time of increased school accountability and at the start of a Louisville initiative that aims to get all students reading on grade level by 2008.
"We have enormous expectations of what schools can do," she said after a presentation yesterday at the Louisville Urban League office. "But maybe the community should do a better job of addressing the underlying barriers that affect learning."
The report, "Moving On: Student Mobility and Affordable Housing," also called for new efforts to reduce student turnover, or mobility, such as increasing the number of affordable housing units and offering tenant counseling in schools.
The school district does not track the reasons children move, so the report did not state exactly how many moves resulted from housing problems.
But Walsh said national studies show that housing problems tend to be a dominant factor. A Minneapolis study in 2001, for example, found that nearly 60 percent of school families who move do so to cope with housing or personal problems.
The local Housing Coalition report, prepared by Valerie Salley, a former analyst for Kentucky Youth Advocates, examined school district and housing data. Among its findings:
- Schools with the highest mobility rates, based on student turnover in a year, included Hazelwood Elementary (31 percent), Semple Elementary (25 percent), Southern Leadership Academy (31 percent) and Shawnee High School (24 percent). These are also some of the district's lowest-performing schools.
- Jefferson County schoolchildren who moved more than once last year posted lower reading scores on state tests.
- Most children who moved were poor or from single-parent households.
- Children from low-income families were twice as likely to move more than once in a single year than more affluent children.
- Although black students make up about 36 percent of district enrollment, they represented 55 percent of students who switched schools and residences.
Nearly half of students who moved now live in Metro Council districts 1, 4, 5, 6 and 15 — mostly western and southern Louisville and including neighborhoods such as Portland, California and Shelby Park. Those areas also have low home-ownership rates and low median family incomes, of between $14,000 and $26,000. And rent burdens there are high — about 20 percent of renters spent half of their total income on rent, the report said.
Walsh said the results show that housing and academic achievement are closely related — in a city facing a shortage of affordable housing.
For example: There are 8,000 Louisville households receiving federal Section 8 subsidies, but 12,000 are on the waiting list. There's also a waiting list for public housing, she said.
School board member Larry Hujo said at the presentation that if schools are "going to be about educational outcomes for young people, then we're going to have to address this."
June Hampe, director of the school district's parent assistance center, said school officials want to do that and haven't been ignoring the problem. For example, when transportation is available, the district tries to keep children in the same schools when families move.
Metro United Way will hold a meeting next month with civic leaders to discuss options and review ways that other cities have tackled the problem.
A program in St. Paul, Minn., provided housing counseling to families at schools with high turnover rates and raised $500,000 for housing assistance.