The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) recently published a report showing that there are nearly 1,000,000 homeless children enrolled in U.S. schools. This represents an alarming 41% rise from just a few years ago. Most people don’t imagine a child’s face when they think of the face of homelessness, but the average age of a homeless person in our country is nine!

Click here to read a report by NAEHCY with more details.

When my husband and I launched Reach And Teach, one of our first areas of focus was homelessness. Homeless children face very unique challenges when attending school and it is critical for teachers, administrators, social workers and medical staff to be aware of those challenges to help these children succeed in school. Imagine, for example, a teacher handing out materials to children for a homework project and saying “Now make sure you put all these materials in a very safe, dry, place! You’ll need them to be perfect if you want to get the best grade.” Where will a homeless child keep anything that won’t fit into her backpack?

Hopefully, a shocking statistic like 1,000,000 homeless children in America’s schools will help raise people’s awareness of the issue and also help organizations like NAEHCY continue to advocate for those children and the educators working with them.

NAEHCY has incredible resources to help professionals work with homeless children including:

My call to act? When you walk around in the next few days, look at the people around you. There are some you will assume are homeless, because of how they look. Stop. Look at all the children who pass by and think about this. If one million children in America’s schools are homeless, that means that one child in every classroom of 30 is homeless. If you see 100 children in the next few days of walking around, could that help change your perception about what homelessness looks like? I hope so, because the face of one of those children IS the face of homelessness.