The number of homeless children attending New York City public schools increased again in 2024-2025—rising for the fifth consecutive school year, and surpassing 150,000 for the first time. Some school districts had a deeper crisis than others

Students head into school in New York City in February 2021. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

The number of homeless children attending New York City public schools increased again in 2024-2025—rising for the fifth consecutive school year, and surpassing 150,000 for the first time.

This latest count, obtained from the state’s education department and released by the nonprofit Advocates for Children (AFC), tallied more than 154,000 students experiencing some form of homelessness in city schools, a new record.

“There are now more students who are homeless in [New York City] than the entire Dallas public school system,” Jennifer Pringle, director of AFC’s Learners in Temporary Housing Project, said in a statement accompanying the new data.

The total number of students experiencing homelessness nearly doubled from 11 years ago. It dipped slightly during the COVID-19 pandemic, when eviction protections and other relief programs were in effect.

In all, one in seven public school students were homeless during the 2024-2025 school year, a higher proportion than any previous year on record. The most common form of homelessness students experienced was “doubling up,” where families have an unplanned stay in a home with another family or friends. A record high 65,000 stayed in city shelters. 

Some school districts had a deeper crisis than others. In school districts in Northeast Brooklyn, the Northwest Bronx, and Upper Manhattan, over one in five students experienced homelessness last year. 

Being unhoused poses significant hurdles to education, AFC says, pointing to its analysis of data from the 2023-2024 school year which found students experiencing homelessness were more likely to drop out than their permanently-housed peers. They also had lower state test scores, and two out of three students in shelter were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least one out of every 10 school days.

“This year alone, we’ve worked with families whose children already missed an entire month of school because of the lack of coordination between the shelter and school systems,” Pringle said in a statement.

AFC and other family homelessness advocates are calling for the city’s next mayor—who will take office in January following next month’s election—to make a number of policy changes to tackle the crisis.

That includes increasing access to early childhood education programs, ensuring families are placed in shelters near their children’s schools, and addressing delays and inefficiencies with the city’s school bus network.

Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker who now runs Win (Women in Need), a family shelter provider, called the uptick in student homelessness “a moral failure and a stark indictment on our city.”

Win has released its own set of recommendations for the next mayor, which calls for expanding and streamlining CityFHEPS—the city’s main rental assistance program—and building more apartments set aside for the lowest income households. The group wants the city to hire more shelter-based community coordinators, who help families navigate the school system, and to increase the number of school social workers that counsel kids in shelter.

“We know that homeless students face an uphill climb, from battling chronic absenteeism to struggling to meet the benchmarks their housed peers routinely meet,” Quinn said in a statement Monday. “As our city prepares to welcome a new mayor, we have a ripe opportunity to bring new attention to this crisis and to finally end the family homelessness epidemic.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Mariana@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

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The post NYC’s Record-High Student Homelessness Numbers, by Neighborhood and Shelter Type appeared first on City Limits.

In an effort to fast-track a proposed five-mile bike trail along Summit Avenue, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s office allegedly altered the scoring criteria considered by St. Paul Public Works, which helped get the avenue’s $100 million rebuild added to the department’s five-year plan and the city’s short-list of construction priorities for 2028.

That’s the primary accusation fueling the latest legal filing from SOS, or Save Our Street, a coalition of homeowners and other interested parties worried that a sidewalk-level bike trail would hurt aesthetics, trees and parking.

The 21-page civil complaint filed Monday in Ramsey County District Court includes a preliminary injunctive demand for data.

The city has yet to file an official legal response, but a spokesperson for the mayor said Monday she would look into the matter, which has at times overshadowed other issues in this year’s five-way mayoral race.

Calling themselves “Historic Summit Avenue,” the SOS plaintiffs allege that the mayor’s office has repeatedly violated the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act by failing to provide certain documents requested between September 2024 and June.

Those requests seek among other things, “all data, including analysis, communications (including text messages) regarding any evaluation or assessment of determining which portions (of the Summit Avenue regional trail) will be prioritized for construction.”

Later requests specified “all data, including studies, analysis, computations, scoring, and communications relating to, recommending, or discussing” the city’s proposal to put $3.57 million toward Summit Avenue trail planning in the 2026 budget. The money is part of the city’s five-year budget to plan for major capital projects and road construction.

That request specified communications from the city’s Capital Improvement Budget committee and its staff, including a senior budget analyst for the city and a working group composed of representatives of different city departments and the CIB committee.

Public Works officials have maintained that Summit Avenue needs to be rebuilt regardless of whether a bike trail is part of the package, given the condition of the road surface and the water mains beneath it.

Carter often says that Summit Avenue is overdue because it last was fully reconstructed when William Howard Taft was president (1909-1913).

However, a Public Works map of Summit Avenue road work obtained by SOS indicates much of the avenue’s western edge near the University of St. Thomas was reconstructed in 1979 and 1989.

Project moves up

The lawsuit alleges Carter had long maintained that the city would institute a new 1% sales tax to pay for road and parks projects based on “objective scoring criteria,” but the administration instead “improperly manipulated the scoring to fast-track projects that it believed were politically beneficial to the mayor and some of his supporters.”

The alleged manipulation began Aug. 14, 2024, according to the legal filing, when St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw “expressed the ‘need to prioritize’ the reconstruction of Summit Avenue to avoid ‘get(ting) real pushback.’”

Thirteen days later, the scoring criteria for the reconstruction of the western portion of Summit Avenue was “enhanced” so that Summit “can move up the list,” according to the legal filing. And on Sept. 16, 2024, staff reported to Kershaw and Chief Resilience Officer Russ Stark that the reconstruction of Summit had been “moved up to 2029.”

The city’s latest five-year construction plan lists Summit Avenue reconstruction starting even earlier, in 2028.

The lawsuit alleges that the mayor’s office indicated last month that it had satisfied all requests for information. But SOS attorney and Summit Avenue resident Robert Cattanach provided evidence from June and July showing the existence of meeting notes and other data the city had not released.

Citing the state’s Government Data Practices Act, the lawsuit requests the city safeguard the requested data from deletion and produce the documents without redaction. A second count asks the court to impose damages of between $1,000 and $15,000 per day until that happens.

Cattanach’s previous efforts to gather copious information about the proposed sidewalk-level bicycle trail earned him a court-ordered financial award from the city a year ago. Ramsey County District Judge Patrick Diamond found the city liable for 14 violations of the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act and ordered the city to pay $30,000 in damages.

A spokesperson for SOS said that money has not been paid and they expect the city to appeal the order.

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By MATTHEW DALY

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal agency tasked with overseeing the U.S. nuclear stockpile has begun furloughing employees as part of the ongoing federal government shutdown, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Monday.

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In a visit to Nevada, Wright said the National Nuclear Security Administration is furloughing 1,400 federal workers as part of the shutdown, which began Oct. 1. Nearly 400 federal workers will remain on the job, along with thousands of NNSA contractors, the Energy Department said. The NNSA, a semi-autonomous branch of the Energy Department, also works to secure nuclear materials around the world.

“Tough day today,″ Wright said in Las Vegas before a scheduled visit to the Nevada National Security Site in Mercury, Nevada. ”We’re working hard to protect everyone’s jobs and keep our national stockpile secure,” Wright said.

The furloughs do not pose an immediate threat to national security, Wright said, adding: “We have emergency employees and the current nuclear stockpile is safe.”

President Donald Trump’s Republican administration fired hundreds of NNSA employees earlier this year, before reversing course amid criticism the action could jeopardize national security. Similar criticism emerged Monday after Wright’s announcement.

Wright said the disruption would affect employees and their families and will delay testing of commercial reactors, including some small modular reactors that the Trump administration has pushed as a cheaper alternative to costly nuclear plants that can take years or even decades to bring online.

“These are jobs of great gravity,” Wright said, urging congressional leaders to reopen the government as soon as possible.

Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said it was “dangerously unacceptable that the Trump administration claims it will have to temporarily suspend certain nuclear security programs because of the ongoing government shutdown.”

“There is no justification for relaxing security and oversight when it comes to our nuclear stockpile,” Markey said.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said lawmakers were informed of the pending furloughs late last week.

“These are not employees that you want to go home,” he said at a news conference Friday. “They’re managing and handling a very important strategic asset for us. They need to be at work and being paid.”

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the furloughs unacceptable.

“We cannot allow delays or interruptions to our nuclear programs during this shutdown. This is not a partisan issue, and for the sake of our national security” Congress should immediately reopen the government, Wicker said in a statement. “In the interim, it is incumbent upon Secretary Wright to work with Congress, OMB and the White House to ensure our nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe, secure and capable of deterring our adversaries.”

At the heart of the government shutdown are looming health insurance spikes for millions of people. Democrats are seeking negotiations on expiring health care subsidies while Republicans say they won’t discuss it, or any other policy, until the government reopens.

The February firings, which initially included NNSA workers, were part of a massive purge of federal workers led by then-Trump adviser Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.

One of the hardest-hit offices at the time was the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. Those employees work on reassembling warheads, among the most sensitive jobs across the nuclear weapons enterprise, with the highest levels of clearance.

Employees received furlough notices dated Sunday for 30 days or less, with an expiration date of Nov. 18. Employees who are not involved in performing critical functions such as those related to the safety of human life and the protection of property or working on the orderly suspension of operations were being placed in a furlough status without pay.

Jennifer McDermott in Providence, R.I., and Ty ONeil in Las Vegas contributed to this story.

By CLAIRE RUSH and GENE JOHNSON

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An appeals court on Monday put on hold a lower court ruling that kept President Donald Trump from taking command of 200 Oregon National Guard troops. However, Trump is still barred from actually deploying those troops, at least for now.

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U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut issued two temporary restraining orders early this month — one that prohibited Trump from calling up the troops so he could send them to Portland, and another that prohibited him from sending any National Guard members to Oregon at all, after the president tried to evade the first order by deploying California troops instead.

The Justice Department appealed the first order, and in a 2-1 ruling Monday, a panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the administration. The majority said the president was likely to succeed on his claim that he had the authority to federalize the troops based on a determination he was unable to enforce the laws without them.

However, Immergut’s second order remains in effect, so no troops may immediately be deployed.

The administration has said that because the legal reasoning underpinning both temporary restraining orders was the same, it will now ask Immergut to dissolve her second order and allow Trump to deploy troops to Portland. The Justice Department argued that it is not the role of the courts to second-guess the president’s determination about when to deploy troops.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, a Democrat, said he would ask for a broader panel of the appeals to reconsider the decision.

“Today’s ruling, if allowed to stand, would give the president unilateral power to put Oregon soldiers on our streets with almost no justification,” Rayfield said. “We are on a dangerous path in America.”

The Justice Department did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Law enforcement officers watch as the gates close at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as people protest outside on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

Trump’s efforts to deploy National Guard troops in Democratic-led cities have been mired in legal challenges. A judge in California ruled that his deployment of thousands of National Guard troops in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a longstanding law that generally prohibits the use of the military for civilian policing, and the administration on Friday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the deployment of National Guard troops in the Chicago area,

Mostly small nightly protests, limited to a single block, have been occurring since June outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland. Larger crowds, including counter-protesters and live-streamers, have shown up at times, and federal agents have used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.

The administration has said the troops are needed to protect federal property from protesters, and that having to send extra Department of Homeland Security agents to help guard the property meant they were not enforcing immigration laws elsewhere.

Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge on the a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, at right, as people in costumes protest on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

Immergut previously rejected the administration’s arguments, saying the president’s claims about Portland being war-torn are “simply untethered to the facts.” But the appeals court majority — Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade, both Trump appointees — said the president’s decision was owed more deference.

Bade wrote that the facts appeared to support Trump’s decision “even if the President may exaggerate the extent of the problem on social media.”

Judge Susan Graber, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton appointee, dissented. She urged her colleagues on the 9th Circuit to “to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur.”

Law enforcement officers walk back to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as people protest on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025, in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane)

“In the two weeks leading up to the President’s September 27 social media post, there had not been a single incident of protesters’ disrupting the execution of the laws,” Graber wrote. “It is hard to understand how a tiny protest causing no disruptions could possibly satisfy the standard that the President is unable to execute the laws.”

Johnson reported from Seattle.