When my youngest was just one year old, I faced a difficult decision to move my daughters, relocating from our current home back to my hometown. The move happened quickly, and while I believed I had secured a new rental for us, I was informed shortly before the move that the rental needed repairs and wouldn't be ready for a month. As a result, we had to temporarily move in with family. When the school year began, I had to enroll my oldest daughter in elementary school. Due to our living situation, which was classified as "doubled up," I completed the necessary homeless paperwork for the district, as we did not have stable housing or utilities in our name at the time. This was my first experience with the homeless paperwork, and as an educator, it was also when I began to question the process. Nowhere in the paperwork did it inquire about my child's or student's specific needs, whether academic or social-emotional. The forms only focused on whether I needed assistance with physical items, completely overlooking the broader challenges that my child might be facing. This lack of consideration for the more holistic needs of students in similar situations raised concerns for me about how the system addresses their well-being beyond just basic necessities.

         The move also meant that I was working in a new school district. During my first two years in the district, I encountered many families living in doubled-up arrangements. After two years, my school was closed, and I was transferred to another school within the district. My new placement was located near a women's and family homeless shelter, which sparked my interest in my research topic. In this new role, I found myself teaching students who were staying at the nearby shelter, which led me to explore the unique challenges these students faced and the support they needed. During this first year teaching students staying at the shelter, I came to many realizations about how some of my previous strategies and daily routines might be unintentionally causing more harm than good. This has sparked a great deal of self-reflection and prompted changes to my classroom routines.

Over the next few years, I became more mindful of my own practices in the classroom, as well as the systems in place within the school and district, realizing that some of these might be inadvertently causing more harm than intended for homeless students. I started to observe and reflect on the unique needs of these students, noticing patterns in their behavior, particularly in terms of social-emotional challenges, such as difficulty connecting with their peers. I also observed academic delays, which seemed to be linked to their unstable living situations. These insights prompted me to reconsider how the existing systems and my teaching strategies could be better aligned to support these students' well-being and success.