Diana Rodriguez often thinks back to when her family of six would sleep in her car. After her husband lost his job, they spent five years in shelter lines, at soup kitchens and scavenging for resources while she and her husband looked for work in San Diego. She felt hopeless that things would never change.
Then, one day, she went to the Monarch School, where she heard they gave out free bus passes. It was there she learned that Monarch is the only K-12 school in the country focused on serving unhoused youths and their families. She immediately enrolled her eldest son in its first-grade program.
“Everyone that goes there is going through the same thing, and it’s a shared understanding,” Rodriguez said. “They are meeting you where you’re at and going from there.”
Established in 1987, the school provides education and services specifically geared toward students without homes, including financial literacy, a food pantry and clothing and hygiene products. Serving more than 300 K-12 students, the Monarch School Project operates year-round. Students can transition to neighborhood schools at any time.
“Creating space for kids to have the ability to let down their guard by not having to carry their trauma and hide that trauma from others has been beneficial for our students,” said Afira DeVries, the school’s president and CEO.
The school has had an impact on the greater San Diego community, as its graduation rate is consistently over 90%, compared with the national average of 65% to 69% for unhoused students.
Its model helps students break cycles of poverty and achieve success. Over the past 37 years, more than 86% of students have gone on to attend college, DeVries said.
“The school has an impact on students’ ability to cultivate an awareness of their own potential and to give them a window into the kind of life that they could live if they tap into their skills and are supported by systems in their community,” she said. “These students are breaking cycles that have been part of their families’ condition, oftentimes for multiple generations.”
A focus on mental health support
Around 1.2 million U.S. public school pre-K-12 students experienced homelessness during the 2021-22 school year, a 10% increase over the previous year, according to the National Center for Homeless Education at the University of South Carolina at Greensboro.
Aside from not having stable roofs over their heads or reliable meals, unhoused kids can disproportionately face mental health issues, substance abuse, criminalization and barriers to education and employment. Experts say students often find it difficult to concentrate on schoolwork when their basic needs aren’t being met.
“Kids can’t learn when they are not prepared to be in spaces to absorb information because they’re in a traumatic state, and so that’s what we take care of first here,” DeVries said.
Although Monarch is the only K-12 school for unhoused students, there are other schools in the country giving homeless students support beyond academics, like Positive Tomorrows, a free K-5 private school for homeless students in Oklahoma City, and Children First Leadership Academy, a K-8 charter school serving students at the poverty line, including homeless students in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona.
While public schools are also legally bound to support houseless students, they often don’t in reality. According to the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, passed in 1987, every public school district across the country must designate a “homeless liaison” whose role is to identify and support unhoused youths to ensure they receive the help they need. However, an ACLU California and California Homeless Youth Project report on the state’s homeless liaisons revealed many overwhelmingly lacked the resources to do their jobs effectively. Information often wasn’t available for families, and liaisons couldn’t effectively refer students to outside services.
At Monarch, the mental health needs of the children are a priority. Through optional weekly meetings with licensed clinicians, students become more aware of their emotions and develop healthy coping skills for challenging moments. Teachers are taught to prioritize emotional needs, healing and repairing harm in their lessons in the classroom. The school also offers eye movement desensitization and reprocessing psychotherapy, which is known to help with processing upsetting memories and the larger issue of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Victoria Hallard, the community and development coordinator for Stand Up for Kids San Diego, a nonprofit group supporting homeless youths, remembers being unhoused during her college years and in a constant state of anxiety. She said having a “fight or flight” mentality made it hard for her to continue her education.
“These are kids who are starting to build their sense of self, and if they are also unhoused, it can highly impact their future in a negative way, which is completely unnecessary and can be avoided given the right support systems,” Hallard said.
The Monarch School also provides access to sports, clubs and an arts center. Rodriguez said the extracurriculars have been one of the most surprising joys of Monarch: She has watched her son break cross-country records and her other kids enjoy skateboarding club.
“They’ve given us way more than we expected,” she said. “My kids love to go to school, and when I pick them up, they want to stay there. My son even wants to come back and coach after he graduates.”
Life skills like cooking and gardening are also course options. During kitchen class, students learn about the importance of nutrition and different cultural foods — which many of them haven’t had an opportunity to explore.
“A lot of our kids are often getting food from shelters, and they’re always eating the same food,” said Emma Fish, Monarch’s health and wellness manager. “So it’s important they get to take ownership and know what it means to cook and about the love that is shared through food.”
Meeting the needs of students’ families
Support for parents and caregivers is also a priority of the school. There are laundry facilities, showers and quiet rooms for nursing parents. Social care interventions, like family therapy and marriage counseling, are also offered.
Rodriguez loves that Monarch’s free therapy sessions are geared toward unhoused people and are conveniently located on campus. She has learned how to be an active listener, identify healthy patterns in relationships, meditate to calm herself down and set healthy boundaries with others — all coping mechanisms that have made her a better parent.
“If the student is progressing socially, it’s really important that the parent or caregiver are also making some strides and feeling comfortable and confident supporting their students’ growth,” DeVries said. “These are dignified human beings that want the best for their kids, but circumstances brought them here.”
Beyond therapy and schooling for her kids, Rodriguez said, the biggest gift Monarch gave her was a home. Through a partnership with the San Diego Housing Commission, she received a rental housing voucher and moved into a three-bedroom home where she can now make home-cooked meals and feel safe.
“Me and my kids now have a place to lay our heads,” she said. “This has been the biggest form of stability in their lives.”
Transitioning into traditional public schools
Once Monarch students feel better situated to cope with their trauma and handle schoolwork — usually after 11 months to two years — they often transfer to public schools.
“We want our students to stabilize to the point where they no longer need to be in an environment that is exclusively nurturing their needs and to the degree that we can get them into an environment where they can have agency,” DeVries said.
While the ACLU California report recommended that school districts should do more to cultivate partnerships with outside service providers to support houseless students, DeVries said she believes it is something that should be done nationally.
“We don’t need to build a bunch of Monarch schools,” DeVries said. “What we do need to do is change the way we operate as traditional schools, so that every kid, no matter what they’re dealing with, is nurtured differently than they often are, so that they can develop and be OK with managing their trauma while they’re developing.”
Rodriguez said she believes she would still be homeless and struggling without the help of Monarch. She is excited to see her oldest son graduate next year and her two younger children transition to traditional schooling.
“They’re helping us redirect and learn to be self-sufficient,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like the umbrella that covers you from the storm.”
