Back to School Means Something Different When You Don’t Know Where You’ll Sleep

Across West Michigan, backpacks are packed. First-day outfits are laid out. Alarm clocks are being reset. Parents are filling out forms, figuring out bus schedules and trying to remember whether the kids need gym shoes on the first day.

Back-to-school season comes with its own particular kind of chaos.

But for hundreds of children in our community, there is another question hanging over the first days of school.

“Where are we going to sleep tonight?“

That was part of a recent conversation on WGVU’s The Shelley Irwin Show about Family Promise of West Michigan and the families we serve.

It is an important reminder that homelessness does not stop when the school bell rings.

A child experiencing homelessness may still walk through the same school doors, sit at the same desk and eat lunch beside the same friends as everyone else. What classmates and teachers may not see is everything that happened before that child arrived.

Maybe the family spent the night in a car.

Maybe they are staying temporarily with relatives or friends.

Maybe the child woke up in a shelter.

Maybe the family moved again, which means another unfamiliar neighborhood, another morning routine and another question about how they are getting to school.

Family homelessness is often much harder to see than people imagine. Families do everything they can to protect their children and maintain normalcy during extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

And children still have to be children. They still have spelling tests. They still have soccer practice. They still need their permission slips signed.They still wonder who they are going to sit with at lunch.They still want to tell somebody about the funny thing that happened in class. Housing instability simply adds an enormous adult-sized burden to a childhood that is already complicated enough.

A Home Is Part of a Child’s Education

We often talk about education as something that happens inside a school building. But a child’s ability to learn begins long before they reach the classroom.

It begins with sleep.

Safety.

Food.

Routine.

A place to keep their belongings.

A place to do homework.

A parent who has enough stability to focus on tomorrow instead of spending every waking hour trying to solve tonight.

That is why the work of Family Promise is about much more than providing a room.
We work with families across the entire journey of housing instability. That can mean preventing a family from entering shelter in the first place. It can mean providing emergency shelter when there is nowhere else to go. It can mean helping a parent navigate the difficult path toward permanent housing. It can also mean continuing to walk alongside a family after they have found a home so that their new stability lasts.

For children, that stability can change everything.

The Student Sitting Beside Your Child

Back-to-school season is a wonderful time to remember just how close family homelessness is to all of us. The child experiencing homelessness is not some distant abstraction.

It may be the student sitting beside your child.

The family may include a parent who goes to work every day.

They may have had housing a month ago.

A job loss, medical emergency, rent increase, family crisis or other unexpected event can unravel a household remarkably quickly.

The families who come through our doors are not defined by homelessness.

They are families experiencing it.

There is an enormous difference.

And with the right combination of shelter, resources, relationships and opportunity, homelessness can be a chapter in their story rather than the ending.

As Another School Year Begins

This week, thousands of West Michigan parents asked their children the same questions.

How was your first day?

Do you like your teacher?

Did you make any new friends?

What do you need for tomorrow?

At Family Promise of West Michigan, we want every parent to have the opportunity to focus on those questions instead of wondering where their children will sleep.

That is the promise behind our work.

Keeping families together.

Helping parents regain stability.

Giving children the opportunity to learn, grow and simply be kids.

And working together as a community to end homelessness, one family at a time.