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Dive Brief:
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The Los Angeles City Council, after a request from Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, voted Tuesday to prohibit homeless encampments within 500 feet of public and private schools or day care centers. Several council members cited Carvalho’s support before deciding to expand the prohibition in a second and final 11-3 vote on the controversial move.
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Advocates of the provision said removing homeless tents would make the areas around schools safer for students by limiting drug exposure and sanitation challenges. Opponents and those on the fence, however, said the city should increase housing access rather than remove homeless persons from where they sleep.
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The controversial mirrors many that have cropped up around the nation over the past year in other districts like Colorado’s Denver Public Schools and Washington’s Seattle Public Schools and in areas such as St Augustine, Florida.
Dive Insight:
During the city council meeting that finalized the decision and prior to the vote, los Angeles City Council member Joe Buscaino said Carvalho approached the council “demanding we take action.”
At a May city council meeting, Carvalho said he was in a “very forceful, determined way” supporting the measure. “I think there is a balance to be struck between compassionate actions towards the unhoused — the homeless in our community,” Carvalho said, “but also balancing that out against the protective measures that we must take to ensure that students have a safe passage that’s undistributed.” Carvalho has openly spoken about his experience as a homeless student in the past.
Buscaino, during this week’s city council meeting, said students are “already traumatized with socioeconomic issues” and “should not be exposed to sex acts, they should not be exposed to open drug use, they should not be exposed to psychotic behavior that is taking place right next to our school yards.”
However, civil rights advocates say relocating homeless people away from school grounds does not address the core problem and can add to the stigma faced by students experiencing homelessness.
“Students pick up on stigma. That’s why they don’t tell anybody when they’re experiencing homelessness — because they know what the view is,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit that supports education for students facing homelessness . “It’s only going to make their feelings of shame worse.”
The issue of sweeping homeless encampments spread in the last year to 66 cities, with many citing public safety issues, according to Brian Davis, director of grassroots organizing for the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Davis said he is frustrated that school districts and local governments get federal funds “because they have homeless people in their classrooms and on their streets, and then they turn around and send police and security personnel after those people who stay outside.”
“It takes a lot of nerve to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve all the students and then send the police to harass the moms living in cars or RVs because they parked too close to the school,” Davis said.
During the Los Angeles City Council meeting, one attendee called the safety of students and housing of the homeless “competing issues.” Others said the two should not be mutually exclusive and that city leaders should address the safety of both the homeless population and students.
“People are focusing on literally who they’re stepping over or walking by with no consciousness that maybe the people in those encampments were once students in those schools that never got help early enough,” Duffield said. The the solution requires a holistic approach, Duffield said.
“But I think it’s incumbent on the entire community to come up with those solutions,” Duffield said.
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