Homeless Students Struggle to Stay in Class

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By Elizabeth Molina

As the number of homeless New Yorkers has grown from 35,000 to more than 50,000 after the 2008 recession, a startling number of students are attending college while sleeping on subways.

Some of those students make the decision to leave home because their parents are not supportive or are abusive in some way.  Others simply run out of rent money.

Anthony Ross is a junior at Lehman College. He says he and his father disagreed about everything. Ross made plans to move out at the beginning of this year. But his alternative housing fell through. When the date to move out came, his father told him to leave.

“I mean at first it didn’t really hit me,” he says. “I pretty much was asking him if he was being serious. Finally I packed up my book bag with a few essential things that I needed and left the house. I went to a nearby park by the house and sat on a bench. Then it honestly hit me and I started panicking.”

Ross says he refused to call any of his friends for help, because he didn’t want to be a burden. With only five percent of battery life on his cell phone, Ross made a phone call in search for nearby motels.

He found one and stayed there for over a week. During that time, Ross researched homeless shelters and found a private one with an open space. Ross is Muslim and, even though the shelter is run by Catholic priests, he says he was welcomed by staff.

However, he says, he soon ran into problems with a fellow patron because of his religion. One man at the shelter disliked that he wasn’t apart of the prayer sessions. “I had tension with him the entire time I was there,” says Ross. “About two weeks in, he and one of his friends jumped me. I went to the hospital with two fractured ribs.”

Ross’s story is similar to that of Jonathon Jones, a senior at Lehman College.

Jones says he was living with his grandmother, but the relationship began to go sour. After a brief stay in a friend’s basement, Jones found himself sleeping on the subway.

“I slept on the trains and I came to Lehman and I washed up in the gym,” he says. “I kept on going to class. I let my professors know my status and told them, ‘It’s gonna be late. I don’t have the resources or time available to do everything on time.’”

Jones was surprised to find out that he was not the only homeless college student sleeping on the train.

“After a while, I’m sitting down on the train and there are five other guys reading books who are about my age and I was like ‘Okay, are we all homeless here?’ They’re all from different CUNY’s. They’re like ‘Yup, we’re homeless too.’”

Many didn’t want to go to homeless shelters because they first needed to register at an intake center downtown.  The process was frustrating they said.

Jones decided to risk it and waited on a long line on a cold winter day. “They tell us right away ‘Nobody is going to get a bed tonight,’” he says. Everyone was then placed in a waiting room. Jones says he asked a man, who looked like a veteran, what would happen next. He says the man replied, “They’re gonna put us in waiting rooms to waiting rooms, until about seven. Then they’re going to kick us out.”

It was the first and last time Jones stood on a line. Jones found a bed in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, but calls the experience terrible.

“The lights are off. You can still hear and see people doing drugs or people getting robbed or just doing bad things,” he says. “You have to go to the bathroom, it’s very unsanitary — you can’t even go. That is why a lot of people decide ‘You know what, I’m just going to stay on the streets.'”

Traveling from school to the next potential place of rest takes its toll on homeless students. This is particularly true for students who have children.

John Holloway, the dean of student affairs at Lehman College, says he has known several homeless students and others in danger of becoming homeless.

“We had one student here with eight children who was in jeopardy of being placed in the streets,” he says. “The girl with the children, she lost her children unfortunately, but she’s not in the streets.”

Anna Rondon, who graduated from Lehman College in 2012, struggled to find a place during her junior and senior years. Rondon says she initially lived with her parents, but left because of clashes.

“We got into a fight,” she says. “I remember it was in either March or April, but I definitely do know it was the spring break of 2010 and I had left. 2011 was probably the most hardest year for me.”

The college does have resources for homeless students. “We provide a lot of support in terms of emotional support,” says Dr. Norma Cofresi, director of the Lehman Counseling Center. “If the student does not have food, we refer them to student affairs, the office of Vice President Jose Magdaleno.”

In emergency situations, the school can provide cards from Pathmark to purchase food or MTA cards for transportation. The school also refers students to the New York City clearing house for shelters.

After her struggles, Rondon has some advice to any students faced with turmoil at home.

“Continue rising above it,” she says. “You don’t have your family there. Okay, that’s fine. It hurts, of course it hurts, but don’t hold a grudge against your family.”