Patrick Marquis

I mean, right now in New York City, we have more than 100,000 people sleeping each night in our shelter system.

Two-thirds of that is families.

Of that 100,000 people in shelter each night, 35,000 of them are children.

And half of those kids are really young kids, like five years of age.

No, it's stunning.

I mean, it's stunning to think that we've got 35,000 kids sleeping in shelters each night.

And then, as I think you mentioned...

The Federal Department of Education uses a broader definition of homelessness, which doesn't include just homeless kids sleeping in shelter, but also includes homeless kids who are living doubled up, right?

So who are, you know, sleeping maybe on the sofa or on the living room floor of, you know, of a relative or a friend.

So that broader definition then accounts for 150,000 homeless students in our public school system.

So that's, again, one of every eight kids in the New York City public school system is homeless.

There's an elementary school in my neighborhood in East Village where half of the kids in that school are homeless.

And there are other schools around the city that are in sort of the same boat where you've just got an extraordinary number of homeless kids.

At the same time, we also know that homelessness just creates incredible negative impacts on kids.

Study after study has shown that homeless kids

even compared to other low-income kids, have much higher rates of physical health problems, particularly respiratory health problems, much higher rates of emotional and mental health problems.

They do much more poorly in school.

They miss school at a much higher rate.

And I used to see this firsthand in working with, you know, kids who are in the shelter system, you know, who would sometimes, particularly at the point when their families were applying for shelter,

Trying to kind of enter the shelter system would get bounced sometimes night to night from one shelter to another or from one sort of grim intake office, you know, to another or to a single night placement, you know, in a hotel or in a shelter and then back to the intake office the next day.