Since COVID-19 hit, more homeless children have been identified in Youngstown. Here’s why
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the number of homeless children living at city shelters has increased significantly.
Youngstown City Schools officials have also identified three times as many students in need of assistance this year, compared to 2019.
John Muckridge, Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley president and CEO, said shelter workers expected to take in more women when the shelter moved to its new, 50,000 square-foot facility along Martin Luther King Boulevard in Youngstown, which offers more bed capacity.
But they didn’t expect the number of children who came with them.
In 2019, Youngstown City School buses were only picking up a handful of students living at the rescue mission. But in the last few months, that number has tripled, Muckridge said.
On March 8, there were 44 children staying overnight at the rescue mission. That means that for the first time in the mission’s history, there were more children than adults in the Women and Families department on any given day since it opened in 1982, according to a news release from the rescue mission.
There are 86 total beds in the family department. The mission counts the number of children by the amount of beds occupied each night, rather than by a head count.
The monthly average of child overnight stays increased from 225 stays in 2020 to 680 stays in just the first few months of 2022, according to rescue mission data.
Though there are fewer individual children who spent at least one night at the shelter — 90 in 2020, down to 68 this year, the mission reported — the large increase in overnight stays suggests they’re staying for longer.
‘Help each other as much as we can’
Susan Molleken, a 40-year-old Youngstown resident, and her six children lived with her mother, until Molleken began arguing with her mother over custody of the children. Since both have pending cases with Mahoning County Children Services, Molleken was forced to live elsewhere, she said.
“Since we both have a [children services] case open, we can’t live together,” Molleken said.
She’s been living at the mission since December 2021 with her 3-year-old son, who has a disability. She said the mission has helped her son, who needs speech therapy before starting in the city’s school district in a few years.
In her first month, there were only about seven other kids and their parents living alongside them. That number has been growing, she said.
“We learn different parenting tricks from each other and watch over each other’s kids just to help each other as much as we can,” she said.
Youngstown schools identified 400 homeless students in 2019-20
While homeless women and children are waiting for housing, their children still have to go to school.
There were about 60 homeless students reported in the Youngstown City School District when Martin Freeman started there in August 2019. By the end of that school year, the district had identified 400 homeless students.
Now, more than 200 students are reportedly in need of assistance this school year, he said.
Freeman is a student advocate supervisor for Youngstown City Schools’ McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance program, established by the No Child Left Behind Act. It’s for students who don’t sleep in the same residence each night or are sleeping in temporary places like motels, shelters or even cars.
If there is no room at local shelters, the district will put students up in a hotel for up to three days, Freeman said. Students who are separated from their parents also qualify, he said.
The school district picks up students at the mission each morning in dedicated vehicles, to protect their privacy, Freeman said. This way, even if children have to move due to homelessness, they can still stay in their school district.
But many students who meet the criteria for homelessness aren’t reported to the McKinney-Vento program, Freeman said. Now, more administrators, counselors, teachers and other support staff have been trained to identify them, he said.
“[Staff] realize there are more students that are homeless than being reported, so that has caused an uptick again as well,” he said. “Now we are able to identify more scholars who are homeless because the staff now know the criteria.”
‘Families ending up in hotels’
Garrick Matlock, liaison for the McKinney-Vento program, works alongside Freeman to identify and report students who are showing signs of homelessness like chronic hunger or tiredness, irregular school attendance or poor grooming or clothing, or students whose personal records aren’t on-file with the district.
The day he spoke to Mahoning Matters, Matlock began working with four new students who were sleeping in doubled-up bedrooms, he said.
Amid the pandemic, there were new initiatives to help struggling households, like mortgage relief programs and moratoriums on evictions. But those have since ended.
“We’re seeing a lot of evictions and families are ending up in hotels,” Matlock said.
Muckridge said when the monthly Child Tax Credit expansion expired at the end of last year, more families were in need of services to care for their children.
It provided families $250 for each child ages 6 to 17 years old, and $300 for children 6 years and younger. All they needed to do was file a 2019 or 2020 tax return. They didn’t need an income or permanent address to claim the tax credit, according to the IRS website.
The credit was estimated to lift more than 278,000 Ohio children out of poverty, The Columbus Dispatch reported in March 2021.
The McKinney-Vento program receives funding through the American Rescue Plan — which provides things like bus passes for students to get around the city — but both the district and the Ohio Department of Education declined, when asked, to tell Mahoning Matters how much funding the program receives.
The district also uses Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds, said an ODE spokesperson.
Getting the necessities
For the students now living at the mission, the district works with the mission to make sure the students’ academic needs are met. Muckridge said the mission also offers them school supplies and clothing, as well as quiet rooms where they can do homework, and private rooms for older kids.
Freeman helps students get school supplies, public bus rides and gift cards for food and clothing, he said.
Also, the district waives homeless students’ fees for extracurricular activities or sports, and uses donations or district funding to cover other costs, Freeman said.
Freeman said once the district makes contact with the family of an eligible student, the student is given a backpack filled with school supplies and personal items like undergarments, soap, deodorant and hair products.
But in the face of the ongoing pandemic and the city’s lack of affordable housing, Freeman said the school district expects the number of homeless students in the district will continue to rise.
Rent is up, housing stock is down
Muckridge said when families stay at the rescue mission, a case management liaison helps them find resources for permanent housing.
Molleken said she is working with the shelter to get her own apartment, but she’s been on the wait list for four months.
Rent is going up in the Valley and there’s also a lack of affordable housing, making it harder for women who are homeless and their children to get into a place of their own, said Susan Burnett, program director for the Catholic Charities Regional Agency.
The agency opened its new Voice of Hope Shelter along Glenwood Avenue in Youngstown early last year. Before moving to the shelter, its women and children were jumping from place to place, or living with family, she said.
“The way the market is right now, when an apartment comes open, there are six people that want it and [landlords] can ask whatever they want for it and someone will pay for it,” Burnett said.
Ian Beniston, executive director for the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, said YNDC is developing more rental properties, but it’s not fast enough. They’re rented out “very quickly.”
“There’s definitely a lot of demand out there, but not necessarily the inventory at this time,” he said.
YNDC points clients to Mahoning-Youngstown Community Action Partnership for assistance with rent, mortgage or utility payments.
Beniston said YNDC has also been increasing rent this year — due to inflation, he said — but the increases have been minimal, about $50 at a time.
“We’re not doubling someone’s rent,” he said.
Mahoning Matters left multiple messages with the Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority seeking details on housing vouchers and rent increases, but never received a response.
Agencies want to work with landlords to help
The rental hunt is especially difficult for people with low or fixed income, Burnett said.
“We have a few landlords that work with us very well and we have [monetary] incentives that we offer to help them take our clients and keep them housed,” she said. “It’s nice we have a group of landlords, but the problem is that places are getting full. So it’s more difficult to find places our clients can afford.”
Colleen Kosta, coordinator for the Mahoning County Homeless Continuum of Care, said it’s also difficult for families with more than three or four children.
“The housing stock primarily within the city is getting older, in terms of rental space and just normal wear and tear,” she said. “We want to make sure kids are going into safe homes and larger spaces that are either meeting our fair or quality standards.”
Kosta there are few units available now for larger families.
“People probably weren’t likely to move like they were before the pandemic,” she said. “People coming into the area looking for a new place — they are having problems finding landlords and [unit] space.”
There are few landlords who have partnered to help low-income families find stable housing, Kosta said. The continuum, Catholic Charities and Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board are now reaching out to landlords interested in renting to low-income families with children in need of affordable housing.
The agencies want to show interested landlords how they can help residents now receiving local shelter services and benefit in return, according to a news release. Interested landlords can meet with the agencies at 5 p.m. Wednesday, May 11, at Catholic Charities, 319 W. Rayen Ave., Youngstown.
“We will help pay for a portion of the rent for a period of time, and help them foster a relationship with their landlord,” Kosta said. “Our agencies make sure that [residents] are able to maintain their house.”
Shelters opening to meet the need
In response to the wait for housing and overcapacity of the local mission, Catholic Charities opened the Voice of Hope Shelter in January 2021, said Nancy Voitus, executive director for the Catholic Charities Regional Agency.
The agency bought and fixed up a seven-bedroom home built in 1960 for families to live in, using CARES Act funds awarded by Mahoning County commissioners, Voitus said. Now it’s run with emergency shelter grant funds from the city, she said.
Madison Goske, social worker at the Voice of Hope Shelter, said she works with clients one-on-one to assess their personal needs and create a plan outlining their efforts to find permanent housing and any mental health and drug and alcohol resources they might need.
Goske said the shelter can house 15 residents, and right now its wait list is not that long. But at its longest, there were 25 people waiting to get in, she said.
Right now, the average stay for shelter residents is between three-and-a-half and four months, mostly because they can’t find housing, Goske said. She and the shelter manager check in with them every month, she said.
Voitus said as long as clients are showing progress with their housing stability plan, they can stay at the shelter as long as they need.
But they still can’t help everyone in need. Goske said the agency will most likely build another small shelter down the road.
“I think that’s why there are more kids in the shelters because families that need two or three bedrooms can’t find affordable housing,” Voitus said.
Catholic Charities tracks job openings for women in the shelter. Some of them are working full-time, but still not making enough to pay rent, she said.
“You see a lot of help wanted jobs out there but a lot of them are minimum wage, and not full-time,” Voitus said.
Learn more about sheltering at Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley on its website, or call 330-744-5485 to ask about availability. To donate or volunteer at the mission, visit its donations and volunteer pages.
Click here for more information on services the Valley’s Catholic Charities various locations can provide. To make an online donation to Catholic Charities, visit its website.
This story was originally published April 25, 2022 at 5:00 AM