To the editor: Visitor contributor Margaret Olmos is correct to applaud California’s historic funding in serving to faculties determine and help college students experiencing homelessness (“California faculties are on the frontlines of combating homelessness. Now they’ve funding,” July 15). Educators are sometimes the primary to acknowledge when a household’s housing instability turns into seen, and people early connections matter. Working with the Orange County Division of Training and college districts, my group has seen firsthand how faculties and neighborhood companions can work collectively to determine and stabilize at-risk households early earlier than a disaster turns into lifelong homelessness.
But when we actually wish to change the trajectory for these youngsters, we should additionally make investments additional upstream. By the point a pupil is recognized as experiencing homelessness, the household has usually exhausted each choice to stay housed.
Many households are only one surprising expense, lease enhance or job loss away from dropping their properties. Offering emergency monetary help, housing stabilization and supportive providers earlier than households change into homeless not solely helps maintain youngsters housed, but in addition retains them of their school rooms, related to their lecturers and on monitor academically.
California has demonstrated daring management by investing in college students experiencing homelessness. The following step is making certain extra households by no means attain that time within the first place. Prevention and intervention should not competing priorities; they’re complementary methods that collectively may also help break the cycle of homelessness for the subsequent era.
Christy Cornwall, Aliso Viejo
This author is chief government officer of Households Ahead, a nonprofit addressing homelessness and housing insecurity in Orange County.
