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Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students [chalkbeat.org]

 

By Amy DiPierro and Corey Mitchell, Photo: Matt Manley/Center for Public Integrity, November 15, 2022

For months, Beth Petersen paid acquaintances to take her son to school — money she sorely needed.

They’d lost their apartment, her son bouncing between relatives and friends while she hotel-hopped. As hard as she tried to keep the 13-year-old at his school, they finally had to switch districts.

Under federal law, Petersen’s son had a right to free transportation — and to remain in the school he attended at the time he lost permanent housing.

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Homelessness is typically accompanied by poverty, and [if I recollect accurately] childhood/pre-adulthood poverty counts when tallying one's ACE score.   

Homeless people include many who have been evicted from their rented residence while, if not due to, suffering significant mental health tribulations. From there they can become long-termed homeless.

Seemingly, some people can be considered disposable. Even to an otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nation, their worth(lessness) is measured basically by their 'productivity' or lack thereof. Those people may then begin perceiving themselves as worthless and accordingly live their daily lives more haphazardly. 

Albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, a somewhat similar inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes toward the daily civilian lives lost in protractedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations:

The worth of such life will be measured by its 'productivity', overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers. Thus, those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news.

P.S. For me, it is additionally offensive that people who cannot afford/maintain an official residence are, by extension, too poor to be permitted to practice what's frequently described with plenty platitudes as all citizens' right to vote in elections.

Last edited by Frank Sterle Jr.
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