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Mortgage Crisis Is Leaving Children Homeless

NEW YORK -- Children's advocates say the impacts of the housing and foreclosure crisis are being felt in K-12 classrooms and communities across the country.

The United States' current record-breaking rates of mortgage foreclosure will directly affect 2 million children this year and next, according to a recent report from First Focus, a bipartisan child advocacy organization.

"Our homeless education liaisons are noticing increases in the number of students who are homeless, not just in high-poverty families but also those who have typically been middle class and facing this for the first time," says Patricia Popp, state coordinator for homeless education in Virginia.

Under federal law, school districts are required to have homeless education liaisons to identify and assist homeless students.

Kathy Kropf has served as the homeless liaison in Macomb Intermediate School District in suburban Michigan for 14 years. "Our numbers are the highest they've ever been this year," she says. This school year, the county served 514 homeless students, a 33-percent increase over last year. At least 50 of those students were made homeless by recent foreclosures, according to Kropf.

The national data on homelessness during the 2007-08 school year will not be available until the Fall, but preliminary evidence suggests a rise.

In April, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, a grassroots membership and advocacy organization, surveyed over 1,000 school districts about the impact of the foreclosure crisis. Those districts reported serving a total of about 250,000 homeless students as of April 2008. With two months left in the school year, that number was already almost equal to the number of homeless children served the previous year.

The districts reporting the highest increases in homeless students appear to match those currently leading in foreclosures -- namely, areas in California, Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio, says Barbara Duffield, the organization's policy director.

"At least 300 districts that responded to the survey said that the foreclosure crisis was having 'some or significant impact' on homelessness. Others weren't sure why the numbers were going up, whether it was due to foreclosures or the economy, or both," says Duffield, who cautions that the numbers are not nationally representative, but do make the case for further study.

Stability Helps Kids

Frequent moves have been shown to take a toll on children's learning, behavior, and health. Elementary school students who change schools twice or more in a year show poorer reading than their peers who do not change schools, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the Nation's Report Card. The Government Accountability Office finds similar negative impacts on math performance.

An increase in housing instability may have consequences for a nation struggling to improve its 70-percent average high school graduation rate, which dips to 50 percent in many of the largest U.S. cities. School and residential changes can cut a student's chances of graduating by more than half, according to data cited in the First Focus report.

Other studies have found ties between attending several different elementary schools and higher rates of behavior problems and violence.

Stable housing, on the other hand, has been linked to better health outcomes, according to the Center for Housing Policy.

"Absenteeism, a drop in performance, and students who were normally active participants suddenly being withdrawn -- these are all warning signs," First Focus' Phillip Lovell told One World.

Adds Duffield: "Once you lose your housing, you often find...that shelters are full or don't take older boys, or you end up in motels or hotels, which eat into any savings you have, or the families get split up among several relatives and friends."

Schools as First Responders

Veronica Peterson, a divorced mother of four in Columbia, Maryland, knows the warning signs first-hand.

For the past 10 years, Peterson has run a child-care business out of her home. In November 2006, as her business grew, she bought a $545,000 four-bedroom house. She says her credit score of 659 landed her an adjustable-rate mortgage from Washington Mutual even though she had no money for a down payment.

As the area's economy slowed, Peterson's business slowed with it. She fell behind on her mortgage payments, and Washington Mutual eventually foreclosed on the house.

Peterson's housing worries are compounding the strain of the family's recent divorce. "I manage to shield my kids from much of the housing issue, and my 10- and 11-year old don't really know -- but my 16-year-old daughter has to be responsible and kick in more, and I rely on her more. She ended up messing up in school. She was kicked out for fighting," Peterson says. Her daughter is receiving counseling.

Peterson is working with ACORN, a housing advocacy organization, in an attempt to negotiate a mortgage modification. In case that doesn't work, she has applied for public housing. She says the worst part about leaving is that her children would no longer be in this school district, which was the main reason she moved to the community 10 years ago.

Under federal law, her children would not have to change schools. The McKinney-Vento Act is designed to ensure that children can remain connected to their schools when a loss of housing forces changes in their residence status. But it's not always practical to send children longer distances to attend school, especially for those struggling to make ends meet.

The U.S. Senate is currently debating an amendment to the McKinney-Vento legislation that would add $30 million in funds to school districts for services for homeless students, including education supports and transportation.

"Shamed into Silence"

Peterson believes her loan was predatory and says that she was misled, but admits she "didn't read the papers closely enough" when she signed them. "I think a lot of people are embarrassed and ashamed because they signed those papers, so they aren't going to come forward when there's a problem or a predatory situation, they're just going to pack up and move."

Indeed, many of the respondents to the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth survey said it was difficult to gauge the impact of foreclosures because some parents -- especially those experiencing homelessness for the first time -- are reluctant to share their stories or access services, hoping it is a temporary situation.

New data is expected to clarify the exact impact of the housing crisis on children as First Focus releases a follow-up to its May 2008 report in the coming weeks.

This article is part of "Housing Crisis Investigation Week," a project of The Media Consortium, which will culminate with Live From Main Street Miami -- a televised town hall exploring how the city of Miami is facing the economic crisis and working toward a sustainable future. For more information about Live From Main Street and Housing Crisis Investigation week, go to www.livefrommainstreet.org.

How One Region Has Gone from Breadbasket to Food Crisis

Ludhiana: Last month, the wheat fields in Punjab stretched in amber-tinged waves as far as the eye could see, promising bountiful harvests. Nothing hinted at the grave crisis that has gripped the state, driving farmers to suicide and unemployed youth to the comforts of heroin.

Dubbed "the breadbasket of India," Punjab is in the throes of a serious crisis, one that bodes ill for the future of agriculture at a time when the world faces an acute food crisis.

Punjab's grand narrative, a success story of bumper harvests, conceals dangerous sub-plots of pesticide poisoning, water shortages, soil salinity, fertilizer runoff, skyrocketing cancer rates, farmer indebtedness and drug addiction.

Read more of this story here.

The Short End of the Stick

Immigration and human rights groups are hoping that a legal brief they have submitted to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft will persuade him to permit women who have suffered severe domestic abuse in their homeland to receive political asylum in the United States.

Briefs are due today in the asylum case of Rodi Alvarado, an immigrant to the U.S. from Guatemala, who suffered repeated and nearly fatal beatings by her husband, a soldier in the Guatemalan army, for more than ten years before fleeing in 1995 to San Francisco, where she now lives. She contends that if she were returned to Guatemala, her husband would almost certainly track her down and that Guatemalan authorities were unwilling to provide her with protection.

Rights groups are concerned that Ashcroft intends to limit asylum for women fleeing gender-based persecution, a concern that was furthered when the attorney general initially declined to accept briefs to help him decide the matter a year ago. He reversed that decision last fall after 62 members of Congress intervened. Ashcroft has not said when he intends to issue his opinion.

The Alvarado case, which has been pending since the late 1990s, is considered the key test of whether the George W. Bush administration will offer asylum to women based on gender-related abuse, an increasingly important issue in international refugee law.

Among the almost 100 groups that have signed the brief are the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (recently renamed Human Rights First), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Rescue Committee, as well as a number of faith-based groups representing the Catholic Bishops, Jewish congregations, the Presbyterian Church, and the National Association of Evangelicals. In addition, almost 100 law professors have signed the brief, drafted by the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinic.

The case is the latest in an almost 20-year evolution that began with a 1985 opinion by the UN High Commission for Refugees that women who face abuse arising from certain customs in their society -- such as female genital mutilation, honour killings or beatings by their mates -- should constitute a special group for asylum purposes. The opinion, however, was largely ignored until the UN's 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, which focused attention on violence committed against women, including mass rape in Bosnia.

Despite these innovations on the international level, U.S. immigration judges continued to view claims of gender-based persecution -- particularly those of battered wives -- skeptically, seeing their plight largely as resulting from personal or family problems, rather than as stemming from social and legal systems that protect their abusers.

In 1995 the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) issued new guidelines calling on immigration officers to give more attention to the social context in which an alleged persecution took place. But judges continued to make inconsistent and contradictory rulings, as demonstrated by the history of the Alvarado case.

The initial immigration judge in that case granted her asylum on the grounds that she belonged to a persecuted social group defined as "Guatemalan women who have been involved intimately with Guatemalan male companions, who believe that women are to live under male domination."

But that finding was reversed by a majority in a sharply divided, 15-member Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which decided in 1999 that Alvarado could not win asylum because she had presented no evidence that her husband threatened any other members of that social group besides herself. As such a group did not exist, the majority found, she could not claim membership in it.

Under U.S. law, a person can be granted asylum only if he or she establishes a well-founded fear of persecution if returned home on account of five protected areas: race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Thus, the essential difference between the immigration judge and the appeals court majority was over the question of whether battered women could qualify as members of the last category.

As the Clinton administration prepared to leave office, Attorney General Janet Reno overruled the BIA's decision and drafted new rules for immigration judges. In particular, the rules stated that "certain forms of domestic violence may constitute persecution, despite the fact that they occur within familial or intimate relationship." Moreover, such patterns of violence are not private matters, but rather should be addressed when they are supported by a legal system or social norms that condone or perpetuate domestic violence.

Under this test, the key issue was to be whether the victims of domestic violence could obtain protection from their own government. If not, the case for asylum as a member of a persecuted social group must be taken more seriously.

Reno's draft regulations, however, never became final, and last March the BIA informed Alvarado's attorneys at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California's Hastings School of Law in San Francisco, that Ashcroft had decided to formally review the case.

In addition to the rights and immigration groups, the Department of Homeland Security is expected to file a brief. The National Organization for Women (NOW) has also submitted a brief, while the conservative Concerned Women for America (CWA) has sent a letter in support of the grant of asylum on the grounds that turning Alvarado away "would be an act of pointless cruelty."

Human Rights First says that a denial of asylum could have a major impact not only on women immigrants fleeing domestic abuse, but also on other gender-related asylum policy covering sexual trafficking and honour killing. It said proposals for new regulations that have been circulating within the Justice Department suggest a more restrictive approach.

Jim Lobe is a journalist with OneWorld U.S., where this article originally appeared.

Activists Protest Expanding Aid to Colombia

More than 30 human rights, policy, and church groups have urged the administration of United States President George W. Bush not to expand US aid to the Colombian army in the wake of the collapse of a three-year-old peace process late last week.

In a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, the groups specifically asked that none of the helicopters provided by Washington over the past two years to the army be used to retake the guerrilla-controlled demilitarized zone (DMZ) into which the army began moving over the weekend.

But early reaction by the administration to the end of the peace process -- which included an announcement by the State Department Friday that it is rushing spare parts to the country's army and working on ways to provide military intelligence to the army on guerrilla movements throughout Colombia -- suggested that Washington fully intends to expand its assistance to Colombia's military in the coming weeks and months.

A Department spokesman Monday accused Colombia's most prominent rebel group, the FARC, of committing "over a hundred terrorist acts" in recent weeks and strongly condemned its kidnapping of presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt over the weekend after she tried to enter the DMZ with a group of reporters.

President Andres Pastrana, who launched the peace process amid high hopes three and a half years ago, ordered the army into the DMZ after the FARC hijacked a civilian airliner and abducted one of its passengers, the chairman of the Colombian Senate's Peace Commission, Senator Jorge Gechen Turbay.

The civil war in Colombia, which dates back to the 1960s, has pitted the FARC and a second, smaller rebel group, against the Colombian armed forces, as well as right-wing paramilitary armies which are backed by powerful business interests and some military officers, according to international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Due to the army's history of rights abuses, as well as its links to the paramilitaries who have been responsible for most of the mass killings which have increased in recent years, the US Congress has restricted military aid to the army's counter-drug operations in Colombia and has forbidden its use for counter-insurgency purposes.

In practice, however, the line between counter-drug and counterinsurgency aid has been blurred since Congress approved US $1.3 billion in aid for "Plan Colombia" two years ago. Much of the money was to be used to help the army gain control over coca-growing regions in southern Colombia, most of which was held by the FARC.

In addition, even before the collapse of the peace process last week, the administration had asked Congress to approve some US $250 million more in military aid, including US $98 million to train and supply new army brigades to protect an oil pipeline owned by the US corporation Occidental.

Washington currently has about 250 military and intelligence personnel deployed in Colombia to assist the anti-drug effort. A broader campaign, which would include intelligence sharing on guerrilla movements in Colombia as well as training and other support for the protection of the pipeline, could require a larger US presence, according to analysts in Washington.

In their letter to Powell, the 31 groups -- including the Washington Office in Latin America, Global Exchange, the Center for International Policy, and the National Council of Churches -- called on the administration to "use all possible means to ensure" that the civilian population in the DMZ was protected against possible reprisals by the army and paramilitary forces.

The groups, which also include about a dozen church relief organizations, asked Powell to ensure "that no US military equipment or U.S.-funded battalions are used in the operation to retake the DMZ."

"We call on the United States government to clearly express its support for a negotiated settlement," the letter said. "Both sides are convinced of their own ability to win a war, however the most likely outcome is an intensified stalemate with devastating consequences for the civilian population."

Reports in the last several days suggest that the FARC has abandoned the major towns in the DMZ without a fight and retreated to strongholds in the mountains to prepare for its next move in the insurgency. It has also reportedly offered to exchange Betancourt for captured rebel soldiers.

Check out in-depth news coverage of Plan Colombia at OneWorld.net. The Center for International Policy also offers an detailed analysis of current U.S. aid to Colombia, including the latest budget request submitted by the Bush Administration last month.

For the Colombian government's human rights record, read the certification report released by Human Rights Watch early this month.

You can write a letter to Colin Powell urging him to investigate whether US aid is being used against the rebel forces.

BRAND NEW STORIES

Mortgage Crisis Is Leaving Children Homeless

How One Region Has Gone from Breadbasket to Food Crisis

The Short End of the Stick

Activists Protest Expanding Aid to Colombia

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