This story about students experiencing homelessness was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

On a Friday evening in the fall of 2019, Maria Flores stood waiting with her “crazy heavy” duffel bag and her teenage son outside the office of a man whose home she cleaned.

After being evicted, “every single day I was looking for a place to live”, Flores said.

The man had offered two air mattresses, keys to his office, and permission to sleep there on weekends. But on this Friday, someone was working late. If Flores and her son went to a motel, they’d have no money for food, but she didn’t want to go to a shelter.

“Everything that I heard [about shelters], it was something about drugs, it was something about people being in a quarrel,” said Flores, who asked to use one of her two surnames to protect her privacy.

There was one other option. A few months earlier, she’d heard about a family shelter inside an elementary school gym. Every evening, after the students and teachers left, partitions were snugged to the back wall, creating three-sided squares for kids and caregivers to set sleeping pads on the floor. Cafeteria-style tables in a connected room hosted dinner and, later, homework. Only families with a child enrolled in San Francisco Unified School District could be admitted. Flores’s son, who asked to go by Mateo, his middle name, was a high school junior at the time.

“I didn’t want to,” Flores said of calling the shelter that Friday night, “but I was so tired.” Standing on the sidewalk in a neighborhood known for open-air drug dealing, with the sky growing darker, she decided she and Mateo didn’t have a better option. She took out her phone.

A shelter in a school: ‘We were the folks willing to do it’

The idea of optimizing school district property for evening and weekend use isn’t new, but Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community school (BVHM, for short) appears to be the first modern public elementary school to have hosted a long-term, overnight family shelter.

“As far as our knowledge in the entire country, we are the first people to do it,” said Hillary Ronen, San Francisco city supervisor, who was instrumental in advocating for the program.

Some objected: shelter should not be the responsibility of a school, they argued.

And yet, “we were the folks that were willing to do it”, said Nick Chandler, the BVHM community school coordinator.

In the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, three blocks from the exclusive Adda Clevenger school and across the street from a restaurant serving a $16 roasted octopus appetizer, BVHM serves approximately 600 students. Just under 60% of them are English language learners, and just over 60% have been deemed socioeconomically disadvantaged. Many of the families are also undocumented or under-documented, according to the school’s staff.

One night in 2017, a desperate parent talking to Chandler in the front lobby asked: “Can we stay here?”

The answer that night was no, but the question hung in the air. The school’s wellness team had noticed more and more families in crisis. They’d try to make referrals to the city and nonprofits, but said often nothing would come of it. Sometimes the waitlists were too long and sometimes it wasn’t clear what list a family should even be on.

“The process is so intense and it requires so much documentation and follow-through and systemic understanding,” said Claudia DeLarios Morán, the principal at BVHM. “So, it was a frustrated group of social workers and counselors and teachers saying, ‘What happened to this child?’”

BVHM’s staff had been trained in trauma-informed care, but they wanted to help kids not just to overcome, but to avoid altogether the experience of sleeping in a car, living in an overcrowded apartment, or having a parent stay in an abusive relationship to keep a roof over their heads. They knew housing families in the gym wouldn’t solve everything, but maybe it would solve something.

“This is a Band-Aid,” said Ronen. “This is not a root-cause fix of the problem of childhood homelessness in this country.”

A vocal minority worried that a shelter would draw an unsavory crowd to the neighborhood, that the gym would be left smelling like urine, the playground littered with needles and cigarette butts.

To address these concerns, school administrators created an online FAQ document using questions submitted during and after in-person meetings.

“How will the administration guarantee … that no drugs, alcohol, or weapons will come on to the premises?”

“Will people with a criminal record … [or] mental illness be allowed to sleep in our school?”

Much of the pushback centered around, “Why us?”

For DeLarios Morán, a different question loomed: “How could we not?” the principal asked. “We have the space that’s not being used at night, a warm, dry, big enough space that would allow service, but it’s also a space that’s known and trusted by students.”

The idea that schools can act as resource hubs for students and their families is known broadly as “community schooling” and has proven successful in schools across the country.

“A vast body of research shows that schools and communities can mitigate the effects of poverty by providing support to children and families to address basic needs such as housing instability,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California.

Students experiencing homelessness are more likely to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression – even behaviors that look like ADHD, according to a report by the Learning Policy Institute.

Students without a safe and reliable place to sleep at night are more likely to be referred for discipline, including suspension. They are more likely to attend schools with concentrated poverty, and they score significantly lower on state testing than other economically disadvantaged students. Students experiencing homelessness are also less likely to graduate high school and less likely to attend college. They are more likely to change schools and be chronically absent.

“For English language learners experiencing homelessness,” the report concludes, “fewer than 9% met or achieved state standards in mathematics.”

A 2020 report from UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, funded in part by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, found that several indicators of educational distress – including suspensions and absenteeism rates – are, on average, worse for Black, American Indian, Pacific Islander, and multiracial students experiencing homelessness. Thanks to a racial knowledge gap in the data, it’s unclear whether that pattern extends to Latino students, said UCLA’s Edwin Rivera, co-author of the 2020 study.

Maribel Chávez, a first-grade teacher at BVHM, said that before one of her students started sleeping in the gym, he usually arrived late to her class and with no breakfast in his stomach. He would routinely miss the class’s opening song and the preview of the day’s schedule. She’d try to give him a quick recap and “scrounge up some snack”, but it wasn’t enough. He threw objects, tried to leave the classroom, and hit other students.

After the boy landed in the Stay Over program, with its 9 pm lights-out policy and easy access to the school’s before-care program, his teacher said, the six-year-old had breakfast every morning and she found him “in my line and ready to go”.

Chávez noticed a shift in his demeanor (“happier”) and behavior (“so much calmer”). And soon the benefit of small group instruction and literacy interventions kicked in.

“The other day we were reading together,” Chávez said, “and I was like, ‘Wait! Wait. Wait. Did you just read that?’”

More than just a temporary home: ‘We had community’

A joint use agreement allows a Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing program to be operated on school district property by Dolores Street Community Services, an independent nonprofit. The city foots the bill.

Nationally, public schools are required to offer a handful of services to students who are experiencing homelessness by federal legislation known as the McKinney-Vento Act, after two US congressmen who championed the legislation. But the funding that comes with the mandates has long been grossly inadequate and cannot be used for housing.

That said, other federal funding streams are available to support a district-city partnership like this one, including money from Fema and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. State dollars are often at hand. And in San Francisco, a business tax passed in 2018, a 2020 health and recovery bond, and private donations together provide hundreds of millions more.

Ronen, the city supervisor, said other prerequisites for a Stay Over program include having a principal and staff who aren’t scared of innovation, maintain a problem-solving mindset, and see basic needs as part of their mission. But none of that is specific to BVHM, she said.

There’s a caveat for others wishing to replicate the program though: “It should only happen if that is what your community is asking for,” Ronen said, “If this was top down, if I have this idea and impose it upon the school and the school district, it would not have worked. But is San Francisco a unicorn? I don’t think so.”

DeLarios Morán was more bullish: “They just have to follow the blueprint,” she said. “We’ve done it now. So, it’s not like they have to create the wheel.”

The Stay Over program has several features that make it especially appealing to families with school age children. There is no limit on the number of nights families can stay, absence for a night or two doesn’t result in removal, and families can reserve spots rather than needing to line up for first-come, first-served entry each night.

These policies might be responsible for the program’s unusual continuity. A January 2020 evaluation by the San Francisco controller’s office found that families stayed a median of 20 days, more than six times longer than those at San Francisco’s most comparable shelter. But it could be the site. Of the families surveyed by the evaluators, 79% said it was “very important” to be able to stay somewhere familiar, like their child’s school or another school in the district.

One of the program’s core components is to do more than offer temporary shelter. Walking through the door brings with it entry into a robust case management system. When she first arrived at BVHM in fall 2019, Flores wanted nothing to do with attempts to find new lodgings – she thought she’d just be shuffled to another shelter. But she appreciated having a reliable place to stay. Her headaches started to subside. She was sleeping again.

“We were making jokes,” she said, “We had that community.”

In some ways, it felt like a home. But it wasn’t, and eventually Flores welcomed case management help from Jacqui Portillo, the program director from Dolores Street Community Services.

“The way she talks,” Flores said, “that’s what convinced me that I can trust her. Jacqui is like an angel for me.”

A trained nurse in El Salvador, Portillo came to America with her three children and had little money after separating from her husband. They stayed, for years, in one half of a garage. For newcomer families especially, Portillo offers empathy, not sympathy. And empathy is what fuels her determination to make the program’s small budget stretch as far as possible.

Soon after Flores agreed to accept Portillo’s help, she was placed in a residential shelter with a private room for her and Mateo. It wasn’t what she’d envisioned. “When I saw the room, it was like what’s in the military,” she said. “A small room, and it has – what do you call it? – bunk beds.”

Disappointed, she sat down and cried. So did Mateo. “I felt like I was so abandoned,” Flores said.

She had kept all her meetings, done everything right, and still had so much further to go to reclaim the type of home she’d had prior to being evicted.

Flores’ experience is a reminder that the stability and community offered by the school-based shelter is temporary. The path to stable housing is as long and frustrating for each individual family as the pursuit of eliminating homelessness has been for San Francisco and the nation.

“We will not fix homelessness until the federal government believes that housing is a human right,” said Ronen, the city supervisor. “Hopefully we will not need [a program like] this in the future, but right now we do.”

Flores and Mateo hadn’t been abandoned, though. They continued to get help from caseworkers and moved into a subsidized studio apartment in November. There are no more creaky bunk beds. They have a bathroom they can access any time and showers without a time limit. They got boxes out of storage. “I have my furniture,” Flores said, “my vacuum!”

Mateo is getting the sleep he needs to focus on his classes at the City College of San Francisco: math, English, and criminal investigation. But he still doesn’t have his own room, and Flores said they won’t stay here permanently.

“It’s another stop,” she said. “We are getting closer.”