Schools across New York City are getting ready to welcome students back in a couple of weeks, stocking supply closets and decorating classrooms. On the Upper West Side, nine schools are taking back-to-school preparations a step further, installing laundry machines for homeless students — whose lack of clean clothes often hurts their attendance.
On Monday, volunteer movers dropped off 11 washers and dryers for children and their families, including migrants, living in shelters without laundry facilities. With the donated machines, students will have one less reason to be absent from school, their teachers and administrators say.
“We’ll see this student isn’t here,” said Kevin Bourne, business manager of the Urban Assembly School for Green Careers on the Upper West Side. “By the time we call home or do a home visit, as simple a thing as ‘I didn’t have clean clothes,’ that’s the reason they’re not able to come to school.”
In 2022-23, the latest term with available data, close to 12% of Green Careers students were living in temporary housing. Last year, the school enrolled additional migrant students displaced from Ukraine or elsewhere, Bourne said, as the number of kids without a stable place to call home surged.
That school year, half of homeless students across the five boroughs missed enough classroom time to be considered “chronically absent,” according to data from the local Education Department.
Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), a former borough president, said a lack of clean clothes — and its impact on attendance — is a long-standing issue only exacerbated as more families seek asylum in New York. An estimated 581 migrant students enrolled in district public schools between the first six months of last school year and the end of the previous term.
For months, she’s been leading a charge to survey the public schools in her district and press the Education Department to provide laundry services.
At schools without the necessary facilities, “teachers were taking the child’s clothing home, and washing it and bring it back,” the councilwoman said “That’s really an imposition on teachers.” Students who come to school with dirty clothes are at risk of being bulled, Brewer said.
Brewer’s office secured the used machines from an out-of-state donor and partnered with a local movers to deliver them to the Upper West Side schools. Matt Fiore, president of West Side Movers, said the company contributed two trucks and two drivers.
Even with the donations, just a fraction of the city’s public schools can offer laundry services. At last count, 119 schools had washer-dryers as of late 2022, according to the Education Department. Clean clothes, meanwhile, can make a big difference in students’ ability to learn.
“Adolescents are hyper-aware of how they look and what other people look like, so they are often concerned about the perception that they may or may not look a particular way,” said Danielle Salzberg, principal of Frank McCourt High School on the Upper West Side, where 16 students were homeless last year.
“So having a space and the materials they need to look their best, the way they want to look, is going be helpful to their ability to engage with each other and attend school more regularly,” she said.
At Green Careers, the washer-dryers will go in a space under renovation, where families can also access a food pantry and other necessities, such as blankets and clothes. The room already has a couple of microwaves and a fridge. The machines, too, should help students thrive in their classrooms.
“That is going to help take away some of the other stress they have,” said Bourne, the business manager, “so they can come in and focus on their education.”
