Support Homeless Teens with Reach Out Resources

Why Do We Do This?

You may not realize it but many students at your school may be struggling with housing insecurity, this is why we stepped in to fight that by providing the resources they need.

20,000 housing insecure youth live in San Diego. There are over 200,00 youth who experience housing insecurity annually in California.

Over a quarter of housing insecure people in the county said they first became homeless before the age of 24.

During the 22-23 school year over 1,374,537 students were identified as housing insecure by public schools.

In 2022, 171,521 people living in California were identified as homeless. This was including 9,520 unaccompanied young people under age 25.

Nationally, 87% of homeless youth drop out of high school and do not earn their diploma.

Twenty-one percent of homeless students dropped out of school or did not complete high school within five years.

What does CHS think?

We released a Google Forms questionnaire to our fellow students to gather data about their awareness level of housing insecurity.

Who is affected?

This question aimed to see how many students we polled had ever or were currently facing housing insecurity. We got a large collection of No's, but still,l 9.6% of people said they had in the past faced housing insecurity. This is just a small part of our school's population, but according to this percent, 82 students on our campus have in the past faced housing insecurity.

We then asked the affected students whether they has received help for their housing insecurity a whopping 90.3% said no. This is unacceptable. 31 people said they had or are currently experienced housing insecurity and 28 people said they had no received help.

Did they get help?

On one of our final questions, we asked students whether a website with all of the available resources to support them would be useful to them or not. 72.4% of students said yes, and we knew this had to be answered. This led to the creation of our website, reachoutchs.org. We worked to compile resources for all the housing insecure teens in our school so they would feel safe and supported!

Would a website be useful?

All these factors lead to why we do this and why we R.E.A.C.H O.U.T!

These numbers are way too high and most people overlook it. Education and staying in school is a crucial factor for housing insecure youth to break the cycle of poverty. The School House Connection Organization states that unhoused students often experience "frequent school transfers, lack of transportation, lack of a fixed address for enrollment, and the stigma and fear of homelessness". This highly contributes to the reason for housing insecure teens dropping out of school. We decided to step in and help create academic environments that provide all the resources on campus needed for unhoused students to feel comfortable, while also spreading awareness around this topic to destigmatize it.

We believe that more schools should also take action to provide students in need with the proper resource and security.

Join the reach and help us R.E.A.C.H O.U.T to drop these numbers!