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June 2008: In addition to families living in shelter, thousands more Massachusetts families with children sleep on floors and couches of friends and relatives, or live in other makeshift arrangements. The extent of this phenomenon is reflected in data collected and analyzed by the Mass. Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in cooperation with the U.S. Centers on Disease Control for the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. This data shows that more than 50,000 school-aged children and youth are homeless at any point in time (a conservative estimate, due to a variety of factors). This new data confirms a similar finding made by DESE in its 2007 Publication, A Snapshot of Homelessness in Massachusetts Public High Schools.
Given that there are equal numbers of school-aged and younger-than-school-aged homeless children in Massachusetts* more than 50,000 homeless children are younger than school age, for a total of more than 100,000 homeless children and youth in the Bay State on any given day. Since the number of homeless children on a given day represents only a portion of the children who are homeless over the course of a year, this means that well over 100,000 children and youth in Massachusetts experience homelessness each year.
*Situation Critical: Meeting the Housing Needs of Lower-Income Massachusetts Residents, p. 9, UMASS Boston, McCormack Institute, Center for Social Policy (2000).
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