Homeless housing hits schools much harder in wallet than classroom


The Department of Housing and Community Development emergency assistance program that houses transitional families in the Bedford Plaza Hotel is impacting the Bedford Public Schools on all levels, but it is hitting the school system much harder in the wallet than in the classroom.


According to Bedford School Superintendent John Sills, as of Friday, Sept. 30, 103 homeless children, from kindergarten through 12th grade, were being housed in the Plaza Hotel. Most are being serviced, in one capacity or another, by the Bedford Public Schools either by being bussed daily UGG GLOVE back to their home school districts, or by being educated in Bedford Schools.


At the first School Committee meeting of the year, held on Thursday, Sept. 10, Sills announced that the number of schoolage students residing in the Plaza Hotel jumped from a high of 66 last year to 108 this year, while simultaneously announcing an unforeseen boom in kindergarten enrollment. In the aftermath, the staterun program and, vicariously, the children living in the Plaza Hotel, have been blamed for overcrowding in the school system and overtaxing the school budget.


But according to Sills, that is only partially true: The cost of either educating or transporting children is a financial burden on the school system, but students coming from the Plaza Hotel make up a fraction of the Bedford Public School population and are not the cause skyrocketing enrollment.


According to Sills, 44 children are being bussed back to their home school districts; an additional 13 are being transported by their families back to their home schools. The cost for transporting students back to their home school districts for the month of September alone was $45,000.


Bedford Public Schools is supposed to be reimbursed by the state at the end of the school year for the cost of transporting students back to their home school system. According to Sills, state reimbursement is contingent on funds being available in the state budget and by no means a sure thing.


"The law is the town is supposed to be reimbursed a year later, but that is subject to appropriation," explained Sills.


However, according to the Department of Housing and Community Development, moncler winter jackets the legislature approved a provision in the state budget to reimburse towns for their expenses cheap ugg shoes from transporting students. In the summer of 2012, Governor Deval Patrick approved $11.3 million dollars to reimburse towns for costs incurred during the 2013 fiscal year. But questions remain at the local level as to weather that amount will cover all of the costs across the state.


The Department of Housing and Community Development emergency assistance program that houses transitional families in the Bedford Plaza Hotel is impacting the Bedford Public Schools on all levels, but it is hitting the school system much harder in the wallet than in the classroom.


According to Bedford School Superintendent John Sills, as of Friday, Sept. 30, 103 homeless children, from kindergarten through 12th grade, were being housed in the Plaza Hotel. Most are being serviced, in one capacity or another, by the Bedford Public Schools either by being bussed daily back to their home school districts, or by being educated in Bedford Schools.


At the first School Committee meeting of the year, held on Thursday, Sept. 10, Sills announced that the number of schoolage students residing in the Plaza Hotel jumped from a high of 66 last year to 108 this year, while simultaneously announcing an unforeseen boom in kindergarten enrollment. In the aftermath, the staterun program and, vicariously, the children living in the Plaza Hotel, have been blamed for overcrowding in the school system and overtaxing the school budget.


But according to Sills, that is only partially true: The cost of either educating or transporting children is a financial burden on the school system, but students coming from the Plaza Hotel make up a fraction of the Bedford Public School population and are not the cause skyrocketing enrollment.


According to Sills, 44 children are being bussed back to their home school districts; an additional 13 are being transported by their families back to their home schools. The cost for transporting students back to their home school districts for the month of September alone was $45,000.


Bedford Public Schools is supposed to be reimbursed by the state at the end of the school year for the cost of transporting students back to their home school system. According to Sills, state reimbursement is contingent on funds being available in the state budget and by no means a sure thing.


"The law is the town is supposed to be reimbursed a year later, but that is subject to appropriation," explained Sills.


However, according to the Department of Housing and Community Development, the legislature approved a provision in the state budget to reimburse towns for their expenses from transporting students. In the summer of 2012, Governor Deval Patrick approved $11.3 million dollars to reimburse towns for costs incurred during the 2013 fiscal year. But questions remain at the local level as to weather that amount will cover all of the costs across the state.


But, when it comes to the snowballing size of the Bedford student body a genuine issue faced by the district according to Sills the impact of Plaza children is minor.


"They represent a pretty small proportion albeit real but when you spread the kids out across 12 grades, they are a very small percentage of our students," said Sills.


As of Sept. 27, 46 of the 103 children living at the Plaza Hotel (down from 108 at the beginning of September) were being educated in Bedford, or an average of less than four per grade level.


Bedford kindergarten class, where the biggest population spike has occurred, totaled 202 enrolled students as of Friday, a jump of nearly 50 students from the previous year. Of those 202 students, only six less than 3 percent came from the Plaza Hotel.


According to Sills, the spike in kindergarten enrollment is due to an influx of new families who moved to Bedford over the summer.


"We analyzing those numbers because clearly the big jump took place over the summer and was based, as far as we can tell in our preliminary analysis, on a Moncler Cheap lot more moveins," said Sills. "The unexpected surge really came in the summer. We couldn predict what happened in the summer, and hopefully an anomaly."


According to Sills, other than the kindergarten, Bedford class sizes fell within their predicted numbers.


"Our overall class size numbers are quite good," said Sills.


Sills added that there are a few classes that exceeded predicted enrollment for example, an Algebra II Level 5 honors class that jumped up to 32 students. But he added that an unforeseen increase in students taking toplevel mathematics classes isn exactly the worst problem a school can have, pointing to last year MCAS scores in which 80 percent of Bedford High School 10th graders tested "advanced" in math.