“I just don’t know how we can continue like this for much longer,” said Duncan, 45, who was carefully dressed when I spoke to her, wearing a black sweater and matching scarf and eye glasses with rhinestones set into the frame. “My kids are at a breaking point.”

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Dealing with the logistics of getting to school can be a major challenge for the increasing number of children in New York City who are homeless, many of them shuffled from shelter to shelter, according to a recent report by the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO). The location of shelters is one major obstacle, as families are often placed in shelters far from their children’s original schools. On top of that, parents are often bogged down by bureaucratic procedures that they must follow so they can stay in shelters. These are challenges faced by homeless families across the country.

Roughly 73,523 homeless people—defined as those without a consistent place to sleep who might stay in shelters, transitional housing programs, or safe havens—live in New York City, a 38 percent increase from 2007, according to Shantae Goodloe, a spokesperson for the U.S. department of Housing and Urban Development. Another recent report, by the New York City-based Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness (ICPH), found that more than 127,000 New York City public-school students—or one in eight—have been homeless at some point in the last five school years, more than the total population of Boston and Seattle’s school systems combined. On the national level, homelessness remains a problem, although by some measures it’s on the decline. The national rate of homelessness in 2015 fell to 17.7 homeless people per 10,000 people from 18.3 in 2014. About 1.36 million students in the U.S. were homeless in 2014, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The vagaries of New York’s shelter system often force families in shelters to make tough decisions. Under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, students have the right to continue at the school they attended before they entered a temporary shelter. But if a family is placed in housing far away from the school a child originally attended, parents must choose whether to put their child in an unfamiliar school close by or to keep their kids in their original school and deal with long commutes.

The IBO report found that during the 2014-15 school year, only about half of homeless families in New York City were placed in housing located in the same borough as their youngest child’s school, which represents a decline of 30 percent since 2011. Many children end up bouncing from one school to another as they relocate from shelter to shelter: During the 2013-14 school year nearly 1,500 homeless children attended three or more schools, according to the IBO report.