More than 4,000 Santa Cruz County children were homeless at some point during the 2012-13 school year ā a number equivalent to the combined student enrollment of Live Oak and Soquel school districts.
Whether crowding into the homes of relatives or friends at night, staying in shelters or transient motels or sleeping in cars, their education is imperiled, officials and advocates say.
The lack of permanent and adequate housing creates trauma in children, said Jo Ann Allen, Student Support Services manager at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education.
"The stress that situation creates manifests itself in school, in the inability to focus, or study," Allen said.
The county education office provided its data about homeless children Wednesday as a similar statewide report was released by the California Homeless Youth Project and kidsdata.org, a program of the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health.
The statewide report counted nearly 270,000 homeless children in California's public schools, about 4 percent of the state's public school enrollment and double the national average. More than half are elementary school students.
[For more of this story, written by Donna Jones, go to http://www.santacruzsentinel.c...tudents-are-homeless]
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