For some Atlanta Public Schools students, school is the most reliable shelter and food source—and as rents increase, so do the number of homeless students, district officials told Atlanta Civic Circle last week.

More than 2,000—or over 4%—of almost 50,000 total APS students reported that they were homeless during the 2022-23 school year. Per federal guidelines, APS counts as homeless the students who are living on the streets or in shelters, residing with non-immediate family members or friends, or staying in hotels, motels, and short-term rentals. 

“We expect our number to be higher than last year’s,” for the 2023-24 school year that began Aug. 1, APS spokesperson Seth Coleman told Atlanta Civic Circle in an email. “Traditionally, our numbers grow each year,” Coleman said, as rent increases far outpace wage growth. Single mothers with multiple children account for many of these cases, officials noted.

“Additionally, many of our families are fleeing domestic violence or have experienced a natural disaster [such as fires or floods where they lived], which resulted in their homelessness,” he said. Single mothers with multiple children account for many of these cases, he added.

It’s not unusual for school districts’ homeless populations to increase each year, said Christina Endres, a program specialist with the National Center for Homeless Education.

Public school districts began reporting enrollment data for students experiencing homelessness in the 2004-05 school year. Since then, Endres told Atlanta Civic Circle in an email, “[unhoused] student counts have only gone down four times.”

The rare downticks happened twice after major natural disasters, once when a large state had a data-collection glitch, and during the COVID-19 pandemic for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, she said. “Those were extraordinary situations, and the typical trend is for an annual increase.”

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