According to the report, during the 2013-2014 school year almost 1,500 homeless children attended three or more schools, a phenomenon “that is rarely observed among the permanently housed.”

The problems begin at the Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing office in the Bronx, which every family entering the shelter system must visit. While there is an official from the city’s Education Department available to meet with families during the intake process, not a single parent interviewed said they had spoken with anyone at the office about a child’s education.

Once a family is placed, more logistical hurdles await. Some shelters require that parents be present for room inspections, which sometimes occur at night, keeping the children up late, or in the morning, when they need to be readied for and taken to school. One person quoted in the study described applying for public assistance benefits, something many homeless families do, as “death by appointment,” leading to obligations that can consume much of the day and make it difficult to get children where they need to be.

The report also describes many of the programs put in place to help homeless students as underfunded, and communication between the relevant agencies as lacking. For example, the report says, though attendance reports are compiled on the same student by staffs at different agencies, “it was not clear who exactly was accountable for analyzing attendance data or for developing or implementing attendance improvement plans once reports were generated.”

During the 2013-14 school year there were 117 family assistants in the Education Department’s Students in Temporary Housing program, whose duties include helping families navigate the enrollment process and providing transportation to school. Those 117 workers were responsible for almost 30,000 school-age children, or an average of 256 each. The starting salary for a family assistant is $13.22 an hour.

The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has taken steps to increase support for students living in temporary housing. The city is hiring attendance teachers, who keep track of absentees, to work in 23 shelters and sending social workers to 32 schools that serve large shelter populations. It has set aside $10.3 million to fund initiatives like helping families in shelter navigate the middle- and high-school application process. And the Department of Homeless Services is instituting new rules for registering at the temporary housing office in the Bronx, requiring fewer visits with children in attendance.

“Homeless New Yorkers are best served when they can stay in their communities, near work, school and their support systems,” Steven Banks, commissioner of the Department of Social Services, said in a statement. “Right now, the city has a very limited ability to keep homeless households in their home borough due to capacity issues — that’s why we are continuing to expand our homelessness prevention and permanent housing programs and working to open more shelters across the city.”

In the meantime, there are homeless students who, as one attendance teacher put it in the report, just “disappear” from school.