Alison is only 14 but she knows what she wants to be when she grows up: A surgeon. It’s not easy to study, however, when you’re so exhausted and hungry you can barely get through 9th-grade biology.
An immigrant from Colombia, Alison is one of more than 200,000 K-12 students in California considered homeless because they lack stable housing. And like most of those students, she lives with her family in a home shared with other families — in her case, two other families.
“I go to school every day because I like school, but sometimes I can’t concentrate,” said the Santa Maria teenager whose district reports nearly a third of its students are homeless. “When you’re that tired it affects your personality. You feel like … not much.”
[For more of this story, written by Carolyn Jones and Daniel J. Willis, go to https://edsource.org/2017/homeless-students/588020]
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