Is child homelessness declining, or is it skyrocketing? If you are looking at federal government figures for the answer, you could be forgiven for being confused.
According to new data the Department of Housing and Urban Development released Thursday, family homelessness has declined 12 percent since 2008. And on a single night in January, there were 127,000 homeless children nationwide, according to the data, which comes from HUD’s annual point-in-time count.
But data from another branch of the federal government paints a very different and far less rosy picture: There are 1.36 million homeless students in the nation’s K-12 public schools, 70 percent more than in 2008 and double the number in 2006, according to the Education Department.
A story from the Washington Post.