Dionna Johnson was at her workplace when her phone rang. The principal at her daughter’s school asked her to get her child and never bring her back. If she did, the school would call Child Protective Services (CPS) and the cops on her.
The reason: her daughter had missed a few days of school.
Johnson wanted to tell the principal she had lupus, no friends or family to rely on, and no permanent place to live, but she could barely get a word in. It has also been hard to keep a job, as she has to be admitted to a hospital sometimes and cannot afford to get health insurance. Currently, they call an Airbnb their home.
“I think sometimes when we think about students who are unhoused, we think about actual students on the street. That’s not the majority of the students that we see in HISD.”
najah callander
She had enrolled her daughter in Kashmere Elementary in October last year, and that same month, she was asked to take her back.
She started a GoFundMe page soon after. “My daughter was expelled from school because HISD discriminated against her based on her gender, demographic background, and financial status,” the page reads.
The big picture
During the 2022-2023, Houston ISD illegally suspended roughly one in 10 homeless students, causing them to miss around 3,000 days of classes. These students comprised 725 out of 7,250 homeless students in the school district who received out-of-school suspension last year for a “discretionary offense,” reported the Houston Landing.
According to the Texas Education Agency’s 2023–2024 Student Attendance Accounting Handbook, a district “must not withdraw a student who is temporarily absent (for example, as a result of illness, hospitalization, treatment for a mental health or substance abuse condition, or suspension)…”
Immediately after the phone call, she rang the Parent Center at the Houston ISD. No answer. However, Johnson kept ringing “a thousand times.” Her frustration grew, and when she finally got through, she told them, “I’ll level this whole city block and watch it all come down.”
She left work and went to the school to pick her daughter up. That’s when she was arrested on grounds of “terroristic threat.”
“It is not literal. It’s a euphemism like, ‘I’ll wreck this whole place if you guys expel my innocent 9-year-old baby outta school.’ She did nothing,” Johnson told the Defender.
The police debated whether to lock her up for 15-20 minutes, she recalled, while she tried to contact her sister in South Carolina and her mother to take care of her daughter.
Soon, they took her away while her daughter watched with tears in her eyes. “It broke my spirit. She was crying, and I had to be strong for her and tell her, ‘Your aunt is going to come.’”
She was released five days later. By then, Johnson’s daughter had left for South Carolina with her aunt, who collected her from a CPS location. In March, she returned to her mother.
She tried to enroll her daughter in a different school, but it was futile. “I got so much pushback. I got so much frustration. I got so many people from HISD being rude. I’ve got dozens and dozens of emails of no one returning my calls or emails, so they wouldn’t let her go to another school,” Johnson recalled.
They returned to Kashmere Gardens Elementary eventually. However, the experience is not always pleasant. “There’s no reason to be combative every time I walk in on the premises. I just wanna drop my daughter off. I want her to get the education she needs, and I want her off the campus as soon as possible,” she said.
While federal law dictates public schools to provide transportation for its homeless students, Johnson’s daughter never received transportation and walks to school every day. She was also not provided with uniforms.
How wraparound specialists helped
As a homeless parent, Johnson relied on wraparound specialists to avail bus passes and food earlier, who never singled her daughter out. Moreover, by the time she gets off work, it is no longer possible to receive services from Sunrise Centers, which aims to serve HISD’s homeless students.
She says these wraparound specialists are no longer around to help Johnson. Moreover, due to budgetary constraints, the school district has planned to eliminate several of these positions in the upcoming academic year. HISD is currently facing a $450 million budget shortfall as federal COVID-19 relief funds or “ESSER dollars” are about to expire in September.
The Houston ISD defines “homeless children” according to the McKinney-Vento Act, ie. “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.”
The definition includes children who are:
- sharing housing due to financial hardship or loss of housing,
- living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or campgrounds,
- living in emergency or transitional shelters,
- sleeping in places unfit for human habitation (e.g. park benches), and
- living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, etc.
Since Johnson and her daughter do not have a permanent residence, they are considered “homeless” by this definition.
“I think sometimes when we think about students who are unhoused, we think about actual students on the street. That’s not the majority of the students that we see in HISD,” Najah Callander, senior executive director of external engagement at HISD, told the Defender.
Each Sunrise Center focuses on different kinds of unhoused families, including those in transitional living shelters and HISD’s “doubled up” population, referring to students who share their housing, Callander explained.
“It allows us to pray to be able to provide some specific support to them around transporting them to their school, making sure they get enrolled, making sure that they have all of the supplies and all of their needs met so that they can come to school ready to learn,” she said.
