BOSTON — Dr. Megan Sandel was treating a 2-year-old. The main symptom? The toddler was still the size of a baby.
“He had not outgrown his 12-month-old clothing, he wasn’t sleeping well, and nothing was working,” she said.
But the problem behind the symptom, Sandel pointed out, can’t be seen on a medical chart: unstable housing.
The lack of safe and affordable housing has ripple effects on the growth and development of children, and their education and future prospects, said Sandel, a professor of pediatrics at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine at Boston University.
It wasn’t until his family got off an affordable housing waitlist and into a home that the child’s circumstances improved, she said.
Housing instability
Housing instability, she said, has many definitions: Homelessness, the risk of eviction or falling behind on rent, moving three or more times in one year, and overcrowding, are all examples.
Research shows that schoolchildren threatened with eviction are more likely to end up in another district or transfer to another school, often one with less funding, more poverty and lower test scores.
They’re more likely to miss school, and those who end up transferring are suspended more often. That’s according to a groundbreaking analysis from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, published in Sociology of Education, a peer-reviewed journal, and shared exclusively with The Associated Press’ Education Reporting Network.
Pairing court filings and student records from the Houston Independent School District, researchers identified more than 18,000 times between 2002 and 2016 when students lived in homes threatened with eviction filings. The data from the Eviction Lab, which does not include Massachusetts’ eviction filings, analyzes formal evictions in 10 states.
They found students facing eviction were absent more often. Even when they didn’t have to change schools, students who were threatened with eviction missed four more days in the following school year than their peers.
In all, researchers counted 13,197 children between 2002 and 2016 whose parents faced an eviction filing. A quarter of those children faced repeated evictions.
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