The city’s homeless high school students face significantly greater health risks than their housed peers. | Getty Images New York City's homeless high schoolers face daunting health risks

New York City’s homeless high school students face a daunting array of health risks, including asthma attacks, unplanned pregnancies and self-harm, according to a study to be released Monday by the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness.

The report sheds light on the staggering needs faced by one of New York City's most vulnerable, and often overlooked, groups of students. The vast majority of the city’s 100,000 homeless students are in younger grades, so much of the flood of recent research about the ballooning homeless student population has focused on elementary school students.


But the nearly 18,000 high school students who reported living in shelter, foster care or doubled up with family or friends during the 2014-2015 school year experience a unique set of obstacles, further complicating the city’s plan to combat student homelessness.

Many of the city’s homeless high school students are recent immigrants, some of whom came to New York without their parents. Those children, some of whom were not literate even before coming to America, have particularly low high school graduation rates. About half of the city’s homeless high school students are Latino.

New York City’s homeless crisis has emerged as a defining issue for the mayor this re-election year, and the problems faced by homeless students — both young students and those in high school — only amplify de Blasio's broader challenge.

The ICPH study used data compiled by the Center for Disease Control in 2015. Of the 8,522 New York City high school students surveyed, 712 were either homeless or homeless and unaccompanied.

The city’s homeless high school students face significantly greater health risks than their housed peers.

About 40 percent of homeless high schoolers reported struggling with depression, compared to 29 percent of non-homeless teenagers. Homeless students are also three times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers; 20 percent of homeless high schoolers reported having suicidal thoughts or attempting suicide. And homeless high schoolers experience more unplanned pregnancies compared to non-homeless students; nine percent of homeless students reported unplanned pregnancies compared to housed students.

Jennifer Erb-Downward, the head policy analyst at ICPH, said the new data about rates of depression and suicidal ideations in homeless teenagers is “shocking.”

“No one has really been talking about the health of homeless students,” she told POLITICO New York.

This is the first year data is available for health problems among the city’s homeless high schoolers; there is currently no data available about health risks among homeless elementary school students.

“Right now we don’t even have the data to know what is happening,” Erb-Downward said.

But the information that does exist for homeless high schoolers is striking.

Many of the city’s high school students in temporary housing don’t get enough sleep, potentially impacting their academic performance; 42 percent of homeless students surveyed said they sleep four or fewer hours a night. A disproportionate number of homeless students come to school hungry; one recent graduate interviewed for the report said he was so hungry that he tried to steal food from M&M World. Forty-two percent of homeless students surveyed said they hadn’t had breakfast for at least a week.

And homeless high school students reported being bullied at school more than their peers. Twenty-four percent of homeless high schoolers surveyed said they were bullied, and four percent of homeless students said they avoided school due to fears about being bullied. Unaccompanied high schoolers were especially likely to be bullied; 28 percent of homeless high school students without parents or guardians in New York said they were picked on at school.

School-based health centers are essential to address the variety of health needs homeless high school students have, the report found. The city is currently building health centers on campuses with large numbers of homeless students.

“We recognize that students in temporary housing may face additional challenges and are dedicated to providing more supports – including investing $19.5 million in school-based health clinics and expanding medical, vision and mental health services – to ensure they have the resources they need to succeed,” Toya Holness, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said in a statement.

Homeless high school students are more likely to use health centers in their schools, the report found, but fewer students in temporary housing have access to one.

Additional health centers could make an immediate impact for the large number of homeless high schoolers who suffer from asthma attacks, for example. Forty percent of the homeless students surveyed said they had asthma, compared to 21 percent of non-homeless students.

Though de Blasio renewed funding for the health centers in this year’s preliminary budget, over $10 million in other supports for homeless students, including guidance counselors for schools with high homeless populations, was omitted from the January plan.

Now, as city officials start preparing for the executive budget, advocates are pushing the mayor to restore and increase funding for homeless students.

“With record numbers of students living in shelter, now is the time for the city to increase its investment in support for students living in shelter, and certainly not the time to cut funding,” the leaders of Advocates for Children, an advocacy group often allied with de Blasio, wrote in a letter to the mayor last week, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO New York.

Kim Sweet and Randi Levine, the group's executive director and policy director, respectively, called on de Blasio to baseline the $10.3 million for guidance counselors and add another $7.3 million to the executive budget to fund a total of 100 counselors for schools with high homeless populations.

Principals of schools where at least 30 percent of the students are homeless have described the guidance counselors as essential to their work.

When probed about the decision to omit the funding from his preliminary budget, de Blasio said the city was still assessing its value.

But Sweet and Levine said it was unrealistic for the city to expect immediate results from a brand-new program. “With only one year of funding, these programs have barely had a chance to get off the ground,” they wrote.

Holness, the department spokeswoman, said the city is “monitoring and evaluating the impact of these programs to determine how best to allocate additional resources in the future.”

Read the study here.