A couple of weeks ago for this column, my colleague Dr. Roscoe Scarborough wrote the first piece in a collaborative Murphy Center series on homelessness. Dr. Scarborough wrote about the many institutional contributors to the problem of homelessness. From among those contributors, the one that stands out to me, as it intersects with my work in child welfare, is that “Homelessness is often a direct result of lacking strong ties to relatives or a family of affinity.”
For this reason, teens in foster care are at significant risk of homelessness and other economic and healthcare crises if they age out of the child welfare system without being placed with a forever family. According to the National Foster Youth Institute (NFYI), 20 percent of teens who age out of foster care become homeless immediately upon leaving the system. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that 31-46% of young adults who age out of foster care have been homeless at least once by their 26th birthday. And, NFYI report that fully half of the homeless population in the US were at one time in foster care. They describe the child welfare system as a “highway to homelessness.”
This is no doubt a large contributor to youth homelessness more generally. We know that not only are former foster youth at increased risk for homelessness, but they also are at increased risk for teen pregnancy. A study in Children and Youth Services Review found that among former foster youth, 55% of females and 23% of males had become parents by age 19. This is in contrast to about 20% of females and, from the best data I can find, 7-9% of males in the general population.
When homeless young adults are also parents, we begin to see cycles of generational homelessness, poverty, and involvement with the child welfare system.
In the 2019-2020 school year, Glynn County schools served 234 homeless students. This is 1.5% of all school-aged children in Glynn. This is slightly lower than the state-wide figure of 1.71% of school-aged children living in homelessness (36,678 homeless children in Georgia). In Camden County, 0.63% of school-aged children (68 children) are homeless. McIntosh County seems to have a much greater problem, with 3.19% of school-aged children (69 children) reported as being homeless.
The Department of Education classifies a student as homeless if they “lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” In Glynn County, many of our homeless students are living in hotels or camping trailers. Though they do technically have roofs over their heads, the volatility of their living situations qualifies them as homeless and puts them at increased risk for involvement in the child welfare system, which, in turn, increases their risk of returning to homelessness and poverty.
Regardless of whether one approaches the causes of homelessness in terms of individualistic problems or institutional problems, as described by Dr. Scarborough, I believe we all can agree that youth homelessness is a tragedy, and it is a tragedy occurring far too frequently in Coastal Georgia.
I encourage readers to consider how you can get involved in transforming child welfare and ending the highway to homelessness. One organization I work with that is making significant strides in this area is Hope 1312 Collective. Check out their website (www.hope1312co.org) for some practical ways to join efforts to rewrite the story of child welfare in Coastal Georgia.
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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu.
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