Lowell Elementary School sits across from million-dollar houses on a quiet street in Capitol Hill. But this school serves some of the poorest children in the city. The percentage of homeless students in Seattle Public Schools has doubled in the past five years. As of spring, 7 percent of the student population lacked a permanent address. That number is much smaller at some schools, and much larger in others. At Lowell, 20 percent of students were homeless at last count. Fourth-grader Matthew Hicks said that despite those high numbers, being without stable housing still carries a stigma among children at Lowell. "The goal is to not let them know that you live in a shelter, so they can’t really judge you about it," he said. "When they ask you where you live, you just say, 'I don’t wanna talk about it.'"

Nearly three-quarters of homeless families with children in King County are people of color. Like more than one-third of homeless families in the region, Hicks and his younger sister, second-grader Mariah, are black. The school district wouldn’t let me visit classrooms at Lowell. But it was easy to find students like Matthew and Mariah at Mary’s Place, the shelter where they were living. Lowell is the assigned elementary school for all of the downtown homeless shelters. That means as shelters swell with families who’ve lost affordable housing, so does the population of homeless students at Lowell. Tiffany Hicks, Matthew and Mariah's mother, said the kids living at shelters go to school with a lot on their minds: "You got to go through the shelter life, and then you go to school with all that stuff inside: 'Why are we still here? Why do we still have to go through this communal eating? Why don’t we have our own stuff?' And they're bitter, and they’re hurt, and they’re angry." Hicks saw how those feelings manifest at school when she got hired as a recess monitor at Lowell last spring.

"It's just a big mess," she said. "It really is. And it's sad because students are not getting what they need." Parents and staff report children regularly storming out of class to wander the halls. They say there are brawls on the playground, the school bus and in the cafeteria. And they describe classrooms in a state of near-anarchy. Matthew Hicks said he gets picked on a lot, and that turning to adults at the school is often a dead end. "They’ll be like, 'Yeah, yeah, you guys gotta settle it. You’re fourth-grade now. You guys gotta do it by yourselves.' Do it by ourselves? We’re still little. I can’t do that!" Tiffany Hicks said the school isn’t even close to having the resources to handle students’ tremendous needs, which was hard to watch as a school employee. She quit after a couple of months.

"If I had known that it was that dysfunctional I would have never agreed to do it, because those kids, they deserve better than that," she said. Staff turnover is high at Lowell. By one count, 15 teachers and administrators have left since January. Na’Ceshia Holmes is among them. She was the assistant principal at Lowell, someone parents and staff told me was “the heart of the school.” She said she was also the only person of color in the school administration. "I like to say Lowell has everything worth fighting for," Holmes said. "That’s where the most important work and need was in education." Lowell has a medically-fragile population, visually-impaired students, many special education classrooms, and a large population of students still learning English.

But Holmes says working there turned into a struggle. She said the amount of uncertainty in the lives of homeless students makes them feel powerless. "And so when they arrive into the classroom, they bring all that angst with them, and for the most part don’t come in with those coping skills to kind of get them to a place where they can access the learning," Holmes said. She said many kids who’ve been through that much trauma can be easily set off, and most teachers lack the training to prevent and deescalate those eruptions. Holmes said there was an endless stream of upset children in her office. And only one of her. "Teachers are asking — begging — for more training on how you work with students to teach them coping strategies and self-regulation strategies," Holmes said. " That’s a hard place for a teacher to be, when you can recognize what the kids need, but you don’t have the skills to give them that." Like all high-poverty schools, Lowell qualifies for extra funding, primarily federal Title I dollars. But the school gets little special attention or funding to reflect its high homeless population. Last year there was just one half-time counselor for the whole school. There is a social worker, but no school psychologist. A behavioral intervention specialist was hired last year, and parents and staff praise his work.