The number of homeless students has swelled by 70 percent over the past decade. For Darnell and Sandy, school is the only stable place they know.
The number of homeless students has swelled by 70 percent over the past decade. For Darnell and Sandy, school is the only stable place they know.
The New York Times
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New York|114,000 Students in N.Y.C. Are Homeless. These Two Let Us Into Their Lives.
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114,000 Students in N.Y.C. Are Homeless. These Two Let Us Into Their Lives.
ByELIZA SHAPIROandBRITTAINY NEWMANNOV. 19, 2019

114,000 Students in N.Y.C. Are Homeless. These Two Let Us Into Their Lives.

Written byEliza Shapiro; Photographs byBrittainy Newman
Darnell, 8, lives in a homeless shelter and commutes 15 miles a day to school.
Sandivel shares a bedroom with her mother and four brothers. She is 10 and has moved seven times in the past five years.
The number of school-age children in New York City who live in shelters or “doubled up” in apartments with family or friends has swelled by 70 percent over the past decade — a crisis without precedent in the city’s history.
By day, New York’s 114,085 homeless students live in plain sight: They study on the subway and sprint through playgrounds. At night, these children sometimes sleep in squalid, unsafe rooms, often for just a few months until they move again. School is the only stable place they know.
The New York Times followed Darnell and Sandivel for one day, from sunrise to sunset, to capture how much effort, help and luck it takes for homeless children to have a shot at a decent education.
Morning
Sandivel gets up just before 6 a.m. She shares a bed with her mother, Maria, and youngest brother, Jonni; three other brothers sleep on a thin mattress on the ground. With no space for a nightstand, the cellphone that doubles as an alarm clock is stashed in the bed.
They have tried to make their space cheerful. The walls, which are painted to look like the sky on a summer day, are plastered with posters of Barack Obama and the Virgin Mary.
Two at a time, the children brush their teeth. Staggering is essential — the family shares the bathroom and the kitchen of the two-bedroom apartment with another family of four.
“I have a lot of people with me, but they comfort me,” says Sandivel, who goes by Sandy.
Sandy has a collection of hair bows lined up on a wall in the bedroom. She picks a different one each morning on her way out.
Maria packs Sandy’s lunch: a bag of cheese puffs, from a huge tub in the kitchen she bought on a recent Costco run. The children make the sign of the cross and head out the door. Ahead of them is an hour commute from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Sandy is one of over 73,000 homeless students who lived “doubled up” last year. In one place Sandy’s family used to live, a roommate tried to kill a neighbor. In another apartment, the family was barred from using the kitchen by their housemates and had to eat in the bedroom.
Her mother is supporting the family on meager savings and spends each day looking for a steady job, but she is running out of money. Rent for her room is about $700 a month.
Maria commutes with her children to and from school every day, which means she needs to find a job with predictable daytime hours.
On the subway, Sandy looks up from her book and notices an exhausted-looking child standing in front of her. She gives up her seat.
The children enrolled at Public School 188 after Maria fled a relationship she said was abusive and moved into a domestic violence shelter in the neighborhood. Sandy says there was “violence” at home. “We got through it,” she says, pointing her index finger forward, “and we forgot all about it.”
Across the city in Queens, Darnell opens his eyes and knows something is wrong as soon as he sees the brightening sky. It is not yet 6:30, but he is already late.
His mother, Sherine, shouts for the school bus driver to wait, but the driver does not hear. The children slept only a few hours. Sherine’s phone was stolen, and the family spent the evening in a police station. They collapsed into bed after midnight.
Darnell is dreading the 90-minute subway commute from his shelter in Jamaica, Queens, to his school in Harlem. He and his family rode the F train for the first month of school, because their legally mandated school bus didn’t show up.
The shelter is dingy and far away from anyone Darnell knows. But it is safer and more spacious than the cramped room he used to share with his siblings and mother at his grandmother’s house. Darnell, who is in fourth grade, has already shuffled through four schools.
Like her son, Sherine has never had a home to call her own for long. She was raised by her grandmother until she was 12, then lived in foster care. She entered a shelter when she was 18, and has been in and out of the shelter system ever since.
Sherine, 35, has eight children. The five eldest were removed from her care years ago when she was living with their father, who she says was abusive.
Sherine, who recently found work as a home health aide, is desperate to get her own place. “No kid should have to grow up in a shelter,” she says.
Afternoon
English class is a haven for Sandy. She adores her teacher, her notebooks are meticulous and she keeps a log of the books she has devoured. But even though Sandy seems to breeze through her days, the principal, Suany Ramos, still worries about her.
Ms. Ramos says she is frustrated that at a school where about half of the students are homeless, there is only one social worker. The school’s staff, she says, is overwhelmed by children in acute crisis.
“No one is going to look at Sandivel and say, ‘She needs help,’” Ms. Ramos says, adding that Sandy will eventually have to confront her trauma.
After prodding from activists, Mayor Bill de Blasio added 31 new social workers who specifically focus on homeless students to city schools this year. That brought the total of social workers to about 100 — all of whom were hired under Mr. de Blasio — at a cost of roughly $14 million a year. The Education Department’s annual budget is about $24 billion.
There have been flashes of bullying in Sandy’s homeroom, but she mostly floats above it.
She gives a high-five to a boy in her class even after it is established among her friends that boys have cooties.
On the playground, Sandy grows upset as she watches a friend of hers mock another girl.
“She’s my friend, but I don’t know if she should be or not,” Sandy says of the bully.
At the start of recess at Public School 76, Darnell grabs a football with one end split open amid yelps of “Hike!” from the boys he usually plays with.
Within minutes, there is a dispute over the rules of the game, and the boys end up in a circle, shoving one another. The principal, Charles DeBerry, tries to talk Darnell down.
Mr. DeBerry says he is grateful that students, including Darnell, feel comfortable coming to him with problems. But he wishes there were an additional guidance counselor to specifically help the roughly 30 percent of his students who are homeless.
During lunch, Darnell peels the cheese off a slice of pizza and eats it. Then, his day begins to unravel.
He snaps at a classmate in the hall, telling him to hurry up. The boy spins around and pushes Darnell, who falls on the cold linoleum floor. After the fight, Darnell’s teacher notices that he is crying in class and she summons the guidance counselor.
“I kept my hands to myself,” Darnell says. Eventually, both boys apologize in a near-whisper. Darnell tells the guidance counselor he is bored and doesn’t want to go back to class.
School can be dull for Darnell, a fourth grader, because he often finds it bewildering. He has a learning disability and struggles to read.
Over 70 percent of the city’s homeless students failed state English exams last year, and less than 60 percent of homeless children graduated from the city’s public high schools.
Darnell comes to life in computer class, where he shows off his agility at math, matching patterns and filling in multiplication tables. He whispers “Bam!” whenever he gets an answer right.
Darnell spends the rest of the afternoon teetering on the edge of another scuffle and fidgeting in his chair.
After classes are finished, Darnell spends another three hours in an after-school program. His eyes are glazed over, but football practice is still to come.
Evening
After school, Sandy’s 15-year-old brother, Jesus, begins a daily ritual: walking through P.S. 188’s cavernous gym, picking up his younger siblings and making sure they use the bathroom before the long commute home.
For them, the crosstown bus is a mobile library. The children pull out homework, and Sandy flips through her younger brother Giovanni’s assignments. “Pretty easy,” she concludes.
The children race to embrace their mother when they meet her in Union Square during the evening rush. On the crowded subway, Sandy helps Jonni unbutton his sweater so he can slide off his backpack. Maria passes around a king-sized Kit Kat bar and a bottle of Gatorade for all of them to share.
At 6 p.m., Darnell bounds into the school’s main office to get ready for football practice with his brother, Thomas. Practice helps Darnell stay focused. He worships his coach and listens intently for instructions before starting drills.
Sherine is a “football mom,” a crucial part of the team. She helps stretch the boys’ jerseys over their hulking shoulder pads and walks the players to a field a few blocks north.
Darnell zips down the field with his arms by his sides, his fists clenched, daring his teammates to tackle him.
After years of being bullied, Darnell has made his first group of friends through football. “It makes me feel good that he feels safe now,” Sherine says. But, she adds, “I want him to have his own spot and have his friends come over.”
Sherine’s voice breaks. “I feel like a failed parent,” she says, adding, “I should have been able to provide everything that they need.” She has just spent her entire day helping out at the school.
Sherine’s heartbreak reflects that of parents who cared for the 34,000 students sleeping in New York’s homeless shelters last year — enough children to fill a small city.
Sandy stands on her tiptoes and squints across the East River as the N train pulls onto the Manhattan Bridge. She watches the skyline until the train dips underground.
She hopes the family will gather in the bedroom to watch an episode of “Cake Boss” or “Tom and Jerry” on the small television that sits on top of two dressers.
By the end of football practice, Darnell and his siblings are exhausted and hungry. Sherine is making a mental inventory of what is left of the food at the shelter; she hopes they will eat some defrosted chicken by 10.
They will be up before the sun rises to do it all over again.
Additional reporting by Andrea Salcedo. Produced by Andrew Hinderaker and Meghan Louttit
An earlier version of this article misidentified the neighborhood where Public School 76 is located. It is in Harlem, not East Harlem.

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