Where the School Year Starts

What a stable address does for a child in school, and why it belongs in the math of 20 by 28

Last month we asked you to make a phone call. Michigan’s members of Congress were home in their districts, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act had just become law, and the programs it authorized were waiting on a funding decision this fall. That work is not finished, and we will come back to it before the appropriations votes arrive.

This month, the buses are running again.

For the next few weeks, classrooms across Jackson County will do the same set of things they do every September. Teachers will learn names. Families will dig out immunization records and fill out enrollment forms. Somewhere on those forms is a line for a home address.

Moving From House to House Is a School Problem

The research on children who change schools is consistent. Changing schools sets academic achievement back, and the setback is worst when it happens during the years a child is building the foundation everything else rests on. Researchers following a Chicago cohort for twenty-five years found that school moves later in a child's grade-school career, particularly between fourth and eighth grade, carried the heaviest long-term costs, in educational attainment and well into adulthood.

Low-income families move at roughly twice the rate of higher-income families. Most of those moves are chosen. A lease ends. The rent goes up more than the paycheck did. A landlord sells the building. A furnace fails in January and the repair is not coming. The family finds something else, and a child who had a desk and a teacher and a lunch table in one building starts over in another.

The sharpest finding in this literature involves eviction. Researchers looking at nine-year-olds found that children who had experienced an eviction in the year before testing performed worse on memory, math, and vocabulary assessments by the equivalent of as much as a full year of schooling. An eviction filing alone, not a completed eviction, just the filing, reduces school attendance, and the decline can persist for up to two years afterward.

The cost is not confined to the child who moves. Research on schools with high student turnover found that teachers could not reliably gauge whether their instruction was working, lessons drifted toward review, and the pace of the curriculum slowed. By fifth grade, the curriculum in those schools ran roughly a year behind schools with stable enrollment. One family’s housing crisis becomes a whole classroom’s pace.

What an Address Does When It Holds

It is worth being precise about the mechanism here.

Some research finds that homeownership by itself is not a significant predictor of a child’s educational outcomes once you control for how often the family moves. That finding deserves to be taken seriously, and it does not weaken the case for what we do. It clarifies it. Homeownership matters for a child’s schooling primarily because of what it does to mobility, and it does a great deal. Habitat for Humanity’s review of the evidence found that families who moved into homeownership showed thirty-seven percent less subsequent residential mobility than comparable families who kept renting.

The deed is not what raises a reading score. The absence of a moving box is.

Housing quality carries its own weight. An estimated thirty-nine percent of asthma diagnoses in children under six could be prevented by addressing environmental hazards found in substandard housing, and asthma is among the leading causes of chronic absence in American schools. Lead exposure from deteriorating housing has a documented effect on math and reading performance. A furnace that runs, windows that seal, and walls without mold are not comfort items. They are necessary for consistent school attendance.

The Jackson Math

The average home value in Jackson County reached $228,996 in July, up 3.2 percent over the previous year. Roughly 28 percent of Michigan households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. About two percent of Michigan public school students have been identified as lacking a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence, and most of those students are doubled up with another family rather than in a shelter, which means their school often does not know.

A cost-burdened household is not only a household short on money. It is a household one repair away from a move. When housing takes more than a third of what comes in, there is no cushion for a transmission or an emergency room visit, and the thing that gives way is the housing.

Twenty Homes, Thirteen School Years Each

A Habitat home is an affordable mortgage that a working household can carry, at a payment that does not move when the market does. For a family with school-age children, that is not primarily a financial product. It is a school district that stays the same. It is the possibility of thirteen consecutive school years at one address, with the same bus stop, the same friends, and the same teachers who remember the older sibling.

Christin Long closed on her home on Trail Street this past July and became one of our newest homeowners. She has five children. “My children now have a safe place to sleep, play, and grow,” she told us. “We no longer have to worry about the health and safety concerns that came with our previous home. Instead, we can focus on building happy memories together and looking forward to the future.”

Five children started this school year from a stable address. That is what the 20 by 28 campaign is buying.

Twenty homes in Jackson County by 2028. A $6.5 million goal, with approximately $1.4 million raised so far. Every gift moves that number, and every home behind it holds a set of school years steady.

How to Build a School Year

Give to the 20 by 28 campaign. A gift funds construction, the financial counseling that gets a family to a closing table, and every step in between.

Shop or donate at the ReStore. Greater Jackson Habitat’s ReStore at 251 W. Prospect Street is open Thursday through Saturday, 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM, and every transaction there funds the campaign directly. It is also, this time of year, a genuinely good place to find a desk, a bookshelf, a lamp, or a gallon of paint for a study corner.

Keep advocating. The programs authorized by the ROAD to Housing Act still need to be funded, and that decision comes this fall. If you called a district office in August, a follow-up now is worth more than the first call was.