To the editor: Visitor contributor Margaret Olmos is correct to applaud California’s historic funding in serving to faculties determine and assist college students experiencing homelessness (“California schools are on the frontlines of fighting homelessness. Now they have funding,” July 15). Educators are sometimes the primary to acknowledge when a household’s housing instability turns into seen, and people early connections matter. Working with the Orange County Division of Training and faculty districts, my group has seen firsthand how faculties and neighborhood companions can work collectively to determine and stabilize at-risk households early earlier than a disaster turns into lifelong homelessness.
But when we actually wish to change the trajectory for these kids, we should additionally make investments additional upstream. By the point a scholar is recognized as experiencing homelessness, the household has usually exhausted each possibility to stay housed.
Many households are only one sudden expense, lease enhance or job loss away from dropping their houses. Offering emergency monetary help, housing stabilization and supportive providers earlier than households turn into homeless not solely helps preserve kids housed, but additionally retains them of their school rooms, related to their lecturers and on observe academically.
California has demonstrated daring management by investing in college students experiencing homelessness. The subsequent step is guaranteeing extra households by no means attain that time within the first place. Prevention and intervention aren’t competing priorities; they’re complementary methods that collectively might help break the cycle of homelessness for the following technology.
Christy Cornwall, Aliso Viejo
This author is chief govt officer of Households Ahead, a nonprofit addressing homelessness and housing insecurity in Orange County.
