Homelessness And Poverty Essay

Homelessness and poverty is something that affects all communities from big cities to rural communities. In 2014, U.S. News, reported that more than 1.2 million school aged children were homeless with nearly 76,000 are living on their own without parents. A student’s home life has a direct effect on school performance. Children dealing with homelessness and poverty are especially affected. It can pose a tremendous amount of challenges for these students. The greatest of those challenges being a lack of basic necessities such as, food, clothing and medical services. These students also have lower attendance records than their peers. Without shelter students lack the resources to complete homework, or get restful night’s sleep. It should be remembered that school is sometimes the only place that these students will be getting a warm meal.

With that being said, students that do not have their basic needs met will struggle to focus on school, as well as building relationships with their peers. According to firesteel.org, research shows homeless preschoolers recognize fewer words than nearly 99 percent of the other preschoolers. Among this shocking statistic the research also found that one third of preschoolers that experience homelessness had motor-visual abilities that placed these students in the fifth percentile, and that 38% had emotional-behavioral problems. The developmental delays that these children face is incredibly harmful because they can cause children to fall behind and they slow down a child’s ability to progress to new learning and developmental stages, which could be lent to the statistic in 2008, that the dropout rate for students was nearly four and a half times greater than the dropout rate of their peers from higher income