Claudia DeLarios Morán, the principal at BVHM, stands with Jacqui Portillo, the Stay Over program director from Dolores Street Community Services. Many of the families are also undocumented or under-documented, according to the school’s staff. Just under 60% of them are English language learners, and just over 60% have been deemed socioeconomically disadvantaged. In the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, three blocks from the exclusive Adda Clevenger school and across the street from a restaurant serving a $16 roasted octopus appetizer, BVHM serves approximately 600 students. Some objected: shelter should not be the responsibility of a school, they argued.Īnd yet, “we were the folks that were willing to do it”, said Nick Chandler, the BVHM community school coordinator.
“As far as our knowledge in the entire country, we are the first people to do it,” said Hillary Ronen, San Francisco city supervisor, who was instrumental in advocating for the program. The idea of optimizing school district property for evening and weekend use isn’t new, but Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community school (BVHM, for short) appears to be the first modern public elementary school to have hosted a long-term, overnight family shelter. A shelter in a school: ‘We were the folks willing to do it’ “I didn’t want to,” Flores said of calling the shelter that Friday night, “but I was so tired.” Standing on the sidewalk in a neighborhood known for open-air drug dealing, with the sky growing darker, she decided she and Mateo didn’t have a better option. Flores’s son, who asked to go by Mateo, his middle name, was a high school junior at the time. Only families with a child enrolled in San Francisco Unified School District could be admitted. Cafeteria-style tables in a connected room hosted dinner and, later, homework. Every evening, after the students and teachers left, partitions were snugged to the back wall, creating three-sided squares for kids and caregivers to set sleeping pads on the floor. A few months earlier, she’d heard about a family shelter inside an elementary school gym.
Photograph: Marissa Leshnov/Courtesy the Hechinger Report When Maria Flores was looking for shelter for her and her son, the Stay Over program at Buena Vista Horace Mann school in San Francisco was the answer. “Everything that I heard, it was something about drugs, it was something about people being in a quarrel,” said Flores, who asked to use one of her two surnames to protect her privacy. If Flores and her son went to a motel, they’d have no money for food, but she didn’t want to go to a shelter. But on this Friday, someone was working late. The man had offered two air mattresses, keys to his office, and permission to sleep there on weekends. California proposal would force unhoused people into treatment On a Friday evening in the fall of 2019, Maria Flores stood waiting with her “crazy heavy” duffel bag and her teenage son outside the office of a man whose home she cleaned.Īfter being evicted, “every single day I was looking for a place to live”, Flores said. This story about students experiencing homelessness was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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