Homelessness Law Blog

In the run-up to next Thursday’s McKinney-Vento Awards, we’ll be featuring a series of posts on our honorees and distinguished guests.  Make sure you keep checking back!

As a national policy organization, we focus on the big picture, working to create new and enforce existing federal laws.  Thanks to the McKinney-Vento Act, homeless children have the right to remain in the same school, regardless of where they rest their head at night.  When schools and school districts fail to uphold that right, whether out of ignorance or through purposeful evasion, the National Law Center works to enforce the law.

But there’s more to it than that.

Imagine for a moment that you’re seven years old.  Your father tells you he’s lost his job, and that everything around you – the house, the family car, your bedroom full of posters and toys – is about to vanish.  You pack up what you can carry and move into a homeless shelter.  The people there are kind, and they do everything they can for you, but this still isn’t home.  It lacks the warmth and comforts of your old house.

Now imagine that your school says you don’t belong there anymore.  They say that because you lost your house, you can’t see your friends or your teachers.  If you want an education, you’ll have to find it elsewhere.  You didn’t do anything wrong, but inside of a month, all the things you called your own have been ripped from your grasp.

That was the reality facing the Elzer family.  That is why this work matters.

When the Carlynton School District unlawfully refused to enroll the Elzer children, the family fought the ruling, with the support of the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania and the National Law Center.  The Elzers ultimately won the fight, settling the case.  The district agreed to reenroll the children, and the Pennsylvania Department of Education issued new guidelines to prevent this from happening to the state’s 43,000 other homeless children.

We hope you’ll join us to honor the perseverance of the Elzers and the Education Law Center at our 12^th Annual McKinney-Vento Awards on Thursday, October 14, at 6 pm.  The evening’s keynote address will be delivered by U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan.

Click here for more information and to purchase your tickets.

- Andy Beres, Grant Writer & Communications Assistant

Today was an incredible, inspiring, heartbreaking day of site visits to three key sites for the movement for housing rights in South Africa: an active squatters building, two buildings where squatters have been relocated, and an informal shack dweller settlement in Kliptown, in the Soweto suburbs of Johannesburg.  Though there’s so much I wish I could share, for now, the lesson for today is: litigation can achieve huge victories in protecting the human right to housing, but it will require much more to see the right fulfilled.

Our first visit was to the 115 Main Street building in downtown Jo’burg, where three floors of a former garage have been turned into dark warrens of essentially indoor shacks constructed of plywood, metal, and fabric.  The approximately 120 residents, including 20 families with children, live without running water or regular electricity, and were threatened with eviction by the building owner, who wants to upgrade this building in a gentrifying area.  Because of South Africa’s phenomenal constitutional protection of the human right to housing and the supporting Prevention of Illegal Evictions Act, local lawyers were able to stop the eviction until the city proposes alternative accommodations for the residents. (more…)

One of the first cases I brought as the newly-minted Children & Youth Staff Attorney back in 2008 involved a child staying at a day shelter in Carlynton, a suburb of Pittsburgh, who was prevented from enrolling in the school district. The school superintendent didn’t want this shelter to be open in his neighborhood, so he penalized her educational progress, arguing that because she sometimes slept outside the district, she was not eligible to attend his district’s schools. Despite clear law to the contrary, the district wouldn’t negotiate.

We brought the case to the state dispute resolution process and got the child provisionally enrolled. But before the state could make a final ruling, the family found permanent housing, and we had to drop the case. We warned the state that a similar situation was bound to arise, and they should issue guidance making clear that schools were obligated to accept these students, but they declined, and I was left both personally and professionally with a loose end.

Sure enough, last fall another family came to the shelter, and their four children were prevented from enrolling. We again turned to the state process, but the state, incredibly, ruled that not only were the children not entitled to attend in Carlynton, they couldn’t tell us which district the children were eligible to attend! We filed a federal lawsuit with our partners at the Education Law Center, getting the children immediately enrolled. Soon after, realizing the law was on our side, the State began negotiations with us.

Today, we settled the case. The district admitted they were wrong, and the state created new official guidance to make clear that homeless students can’t control their overnight accommodations, and must be allowed to any school where they have a substantial connection to the area.  I’m very happy for the students of Pennsylvania, and the Law Center will be promoting this guidance nationally as model language for other states to adopt.  But since this was one of my first cases – and interrupted at that – I’m today celebrating that I’ve closed this loose end, and justice has finally been served.

-Eric Tars, Children & Youth Attorney