1/11/2023
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The Center Square
(The Center Square) – Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee called on lawmakers to deal with the state’s challenges – first and foremost among them: homelessness – with “ambition and audacity” during his State of the State speech on Tuesday, the second day of the legislative session.
This year’s State of the State was the first in-person address to a joint session of the state Legislature in two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact Inslee joked about in his opening remarks.
“My fellow Washingtonians, after two years of delivering the State of the State virtually, it really is great to be back together again,” the governor said. “And I want to tell you, you all look great. You haven’t aged a day in two years, so there’s good news here.”
Inslee then got more serious, noting what is expected of himself and lawmakers during this year’s 105-day legislative session.
“As leaders, we will be called upon these next few months to act with decisiveness, with ambition, with audacity,” the governor said. “And the good news is, is that here in Washington state ambition and audacity are both embedded in our state’s DNA.”
Inslee reflected on the progress made in recent years in tackling issues like housing, mental health, and climate change before launching into a familiar State of the State refrain.
“It is because of the work we do in these chambers and because of that work and because of the work of millions of Washingtonians,” the governor said. “I can proudly report to you this: the state of our state is strong.”
But that doesn’t mean challenges don’t remain, including homelessness, the first issue mentioned in depth by the governor in outlining his vision for the state.
“When there’s not enough housing for all, rents and prices skyrocket beyond what many can afford,” Inslee said. “An until we fix our housing crisis, thousands of people will remain homeless.”
Washington is short 81,000 housing units, according to the governor, and the state’s population grew by nearly 1 million people in the last decade.
Housing stock only grew by 315,000 units during this time, Inslee said, noting the state needs 1 million housing units in the next 17 years.
The governor cited Washington’s rapid-acquisition housing program, which began two years ago, that helped to speed up the process of developing affordable housing.
“That program is allowing us now to create thousands of new supportive housing units at a pace that has never been possible before,” Inslee said. “And this is a pace that we have to sustain and accelerate at scale.”
Inslee mentioned his December budget proposal that includes raising $4 billion by issuing bonds outside the state’s debt limit that will “significantly speed up construction of thousands of new units that will include shelters, supportive housing, and affordable housing.”
Several other issues were touched upon by the governor during his address.
BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
The governor spoke about the rise in demand for competency evaluation and restoration services, noting a 60% increase in court orders since 2018 and a 145% increase in inpatient referrals since 2013.
“This is not sustainable,” Inslee observed.
He went on to say that although the state has added hundreds of forensic beds, more needs to be done.
“But even with all these investments, this unprecedented growth in court orders and referrals is not manageable or sustainable,” Inslee said. “Nor is our criminal justice system really an effective way to connect people to the treatment they really need to restore their lives. So, we should be prioritizing diversion and community-based treatment options rather than using the criminal justice system as an avenue to mental health care, particularly because competency services only treat people to get well enough to be prosecuted.”
EDUCATION
Inslee mentioned his proposed budget’s greater investment in special education.
“I’m also hopeful this year that we can increase funding for special education,” the governor said. “I’ve proposed more than $120 million to better support school districts as they meet the needs of every student, no matter how complex their needs.”
The governor’s budget proposal includes an increase of $3 billion in K-12 education.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Inslee touted the Climate Commitment Act and the Clean Fuel Standard, both of which went into effect on Jan. 1, as a means of bringing down emissions and creating jobs as part of fighting climate change.
“And we’re doing this in a way that ensures overburdened communities will experience the economic and health benefits of this transition,” the governor said.
PUBLIC SAFETY
Inslee focused on proposed gun legislation when it came to public safety.
He noted he is asking for the Legislature to pass a permit-to-purchase law requiring prospective gun buyers to apply directly to a state or local law enforcement agency to obtain a purchase permit prior to approaching any seller, as well as making firearms training a requirement for getting the permit.
“One of the most meaningful measures and most effective measures that we can take is requiring that people have safety training, basic safety training, before they purchase a gun,” Inslee said.
ABORTION
The governor reaffirmed his commitment to protecting the right to abortion in Washington in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year overturning Roe v. Wade and giving individual states the power to set their own abortion laws.
“We must protect patient data and privacy,” Inslee said. “We must protect access from the threat of health care consolidation and cost barriers. We must protect patients and providers from persecution by vigilantes and activist politicians in anti-choice states.”
That includes, according to Inslee, amending the state constitution.
“And finally and most importantly we must pass a constitutional amendment that expressly establishes a fundamental right to reproductive freedom in the great state of Washington,” he said.
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The Seattle Times
Housing one of biggest predictors of getting kicked out of Washington schools
The San Francisco Chronicle
Not long ago, she was living in her car. Now, Sheng Thao is about to be mayor of Oakland
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The Seattle Times
Housing one of biggest predictors of getting kicked out of Washington schools
Across Washington state, 1 in 10 homeless students was required to leave school for disciplinary reasons during the 2018-19 school year, the last complete school year before the pandemic, compared to 1 out of every 25 housed students.
This story was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, the Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist.
Shambrika Crawford caught her daughter trying to board a Seattle city bus to avoid the school bus outside the homeless shelter they moved into this summer.
Kids pick on her, her daughter said, and call her a “little dirty shelter kid.”
Crawford has advised her three school-age children to keep to themselves and try to fit in, but her daughter’s after-school detentions are starting to pile up. Before the family moved from Georgia to Washington for work, she didn’t get into that kind of trouble, Crawford said. The biggest complaint from her daughter’s teachers was that she sometimes lost focus in class and didn’t do her work.
But with so much upheaval, Crawford is worried what the recent bout of discipline means.
If things become more serious, the results could be life-changing.
Homeless students in Washington face the most severe punishments from school – suspension and expulsion – at almost three times the rate of their housed peers. A child’s housing status is an even greater predictor of discipline than race.
But while a major overhaul in the state education department’s discipline policy, passed in 2016, aimed to fix that racial disparity, there has been almost nothing done specifically for homeless students, even as education officials say they are well aware of the gap.
Experiencing homelessness as a child, even once, puts that child at a greater risk of poor academic performance, dropping out of school and being homeless as an adult, according to researchers.
When exclusionary discipline is added to these stressful circumstances, the chances of succeeding become more slim.
Children forced to leave school for their behavior are less likely to graduate – already a major obstacle for homeless students – and the likelihood of becoming involved in the juvenile legal system goes up.
“We need to reconcile or reckon with the fact that, like, ‘Are we OK with this?’ ” said Daniel Narváez Zavala, executive director of Building Changes, a Seattle organization that works with school districts to better support homeless students.
“If we are not OK with that, we need to do something different.”
The Seattle Times’ Project Homeless is collaborating with the Center for Public Integrity to examine how homeless students are faring in Washington and across the U.S. These stories also include a look at how one school district greatly improved graduation rates for homeless students, as well as how federal funding disparities disadvantage Washington.
Working from a punitive past
Since Washington state began tracking discipline data in 2014, the disproportionate use of exclusionary discipline on homeless students has held steady.
Across Washington state, 1 in 10 homeless students was required to leave school for disciplinary reasons during the 2018-19 school year, the last complete school year before the pandemic, compared to 1 out of every 25 housed students.
The only student group in Washington that receives more exclusionary discipline than homeless students is children in foster care, where nearly 1 in 7 were suspended or expelled in the 2018-2019 school year.
These rates don’t take into account how many times an individual student is excluded from school within a school year.
When Washington overhauled its disciplinary guidelines in 2016, officials replaced 1970s-era language meant to punish students with rules that describe punishment as a last resort, said Maria Flores, executive director of the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Center for the Improvement of Student Learning.
There’s been an increase in cultural competency training for Washington teachers and a host of preventive measures have been adopted to try to stem unruly behavior before things get out of hand, Flores explained. While these changes aren’t specifically geared to homeless students, state officials said they hope it also helps them.
Some districts say they suspend or expel for extreme issues, like violence and guns. But Flores said the agency is still seeing students suspended or expelled for what it considers minor, like failure to cooperate.
Homeless students, students in foster care, students with disabilities and Black, Native American and Alaskan Native students all face disproportionate levels of discipline.
A five-year study by Seattle’s Building Changes showed that racial disparities in discipline rates are also reflected within the homeless population, with Black students punished with the highest percentage of exclusionary discipline. In Washington, more than 60% of the state’s homeless population, totaling over 40,000 people, are students of color.
“What those disparities say to me is that our system isn’t working,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan. “The fact that we see these gaps means that we don’t have a system that is equitable.”
Investments pay off
As one of the state’s agricultural hubs, Wenatchee schools serve a large population of children of migrant workers.
Most schools have a family advocate who focuses exclusively on serving homeless and migrant students, often groups that overlap, said Jeremy Wheatley, who oversees Wenatchee’s McKinney-Vento program. The federal program is aimed at guaranteeing equal access to education for homeless students, and every school district in the U.S. is required to have a staff member whose partial or sole job is to ensure compliance.
The district reported 4.7% of homeless students in the 2018- 19 school year received exclusionary discipline – one-and-ahalf times greater than the 3.1% of housed students, a substantially smaller difference compared to the state.
Wenatchee School District also employs two full-time staff members focused on the school district’s more than 500 homeless students.
Tukwila School District in South King County involves these liaisons when students have behavioral issues, and reports only 3% of homeless students are disciplined on average, while the state’s average is nearly 10%.
Liaisons often get a closer look at how homelessness impacts students.
As of 2016, Washington schools must provide education during a student’s exclusion and students can no longer be expelled for an indefinite amount of time. But that can be difficult if the student is staying in a busy, crowded shelter or doubled up with relatives or friends. Even more so if they are living in a tent or car.
If a homeless student is placed in out-of-school suspension, Tukwila district spokesperson Carrie Marting said, the McKinney-Vento liaison will work to make sure that student has a safe place to be in the daytime with food and technology.
Some school districts have also invested in staff whose mission is meeting the big and small needs of homeless students to raise graduation rates.
“If it weren’t for the people in the system, and the intentional use of dollars to put people in the right spot to support our students, we wouldn’t be anywhere,” said Wenatchee’s Wheatley.
Homelessness as a marker
Crawford said she’s visited her daughter’s middle school in South King County to speak with faculty there, but she’s worried they don’t fully understand what her family, especially her children, have had to face in recent months.
Crawford’s currently in a custody battle. She recently faced a serious health scare. And she’s working to start a new life in Washington, but until she can earn enough to find housing, the family’s only option is the family shelter.
Crawford said she thinks her daughter has tried standing up to bullying at school and that’s the root of some of the behavior issues.
“It’s one thing to come from like a homeless shelter and go to school,” Crawford said, “but to be treated by where you stay and some of the things that you wear – it’s not right.”
The experience of homelessness is a marker that a student might have many behavioral trigger points, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization for homeless students.
It’s this marker of extreme vulnerability, where you have multiple system failures, multiple traumas, traumas coming together, that then become exacerbated, you know, once the student is actually homeless,” Duffield said.
That trauma doesn’t have to lead to disproportionate school discipline, Duffield said.
SchoolHouse Connection, and other policy organizations, such as Building Changes, have recommended measures for closing the discipline gap both nationally and locally. These include incorporating school staff who support homeless students early in the disciplinary process, more trauma and homelessness training, and consideration of a child’s housing status before removal from school, among other measures.
The Seattle Times contacted several school districts with high discipline rates for homeless students, including the state’s largest, Seattle Public Schools, and they declined to participate in this story.
But some said they’ve created more support for homeless students since the most recent discipline data came out.
Kent School District said this year it started providing case management for homeless students with behavioral or academic needs. Vancouver School District said it’s developed an equity plan to address the disproportionality in discipline.
Narváez Zavala of Building Changes said that as educators understand more about how students learn differently and as they create a variety of methods for teaching, they need to address discipline the same way.
“It’s not just the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach,” Narváez Zavala said.
He said that when discipline is applied in the same way, across a broad range of students, homeless students experience it more harshly – unlike their housed peers, they are being removed from possibly one of the only places that provides a sense of stability and safety.
So some solutions might not focus on the disruptive behaviors at all. Tacoma School District officials said they recently hired a housing navigator to help students and families.
But since the state is two years behind in releasing discipline data, it will take years to understand if these measures are making a difference.
Erb-Downward, who has studied the connection between homelessness and discipline, said there are plenty of things that the federal government, states and local districts can do around discipline to make improvements, beginning with understanding the scope of the problem.
But these behavioral issues showing up in the classroom, Erb-Downward said, go beyond just educators and school administrators.
“If housing instability, poverty and trauma are some of the drivers behind behaviors that are coming into the classroom,” Erb-Downward said, “wouldn’t it make more sense to try to make policies that ensure that children have access to a safe, stable place to live and grow up? That they have access to food?”
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The SEATTLE TIMES
Oakland Mayor-elect Sheng Thao will have a perspective very few politicians share when she begins tackling the city’s spiraling homelessness crisis: The 37-year-old has been homeless herself.
Thao teared up when I pointed out that 10 years before her historic election she was on public assistance. On Jan. 9, she will be sworn in as mayor in the same city where she once lived out of her car.
“Now that you’ve stated it like that, it’s very emotional for me. I mean, it’s like night and day. I’m sorry, give me a moment,” Thao said in our Friday conversation as she composed herself. “It’s now just kind of sinking in.”
The stages of her journey — the seventh of 10 children, a single mother, a domestic violence survivor, and now the first Hmong American to lead a major American city — are testament to her drive and resilience.
Her challenge now will be translating her inspirational lived experience into being a mayor who gets things done in one of the toughest political jobs in the country. The number of homeless people living in The Town has increased 24% over the past three years to about 5,000 people.
“I have gone through a lot to get to where I’m at, but the lens was never about me,” Thao said. “It’s just always fighting for those who have the least. I know what I went through, and I don’t want families to go through what I had to go through.”
Thao’s path to the mayor’s office starts with her parents, who met in a Thailand refugee camp as they fled the CIA-sponsored secret war in Laos during the Vietnam War. Thao inherited some of her grit from her mother, who had made her way to the camp as a young widow after being shot in the arm as she fled.
Her parents immigrated to Stockton, where they started a family. For a time, they lived in public housing. Thao said she grew up in a patriarchal household of six boys and four girls, who were “trained to be a good wife that just cooks and cleans.”
“I’ll give you an insight into my personality growing up,” Thao told me during the campaign. “I told my mom, ‘I’m never going to wake up (at 6 a.m.) to cook unless my brothers do.’”
She laughed and said, “I was rebellious.”
Thao left home after graduating high school and headed for Oakland. She got a low-paying job at a Walgreens and soon became involved in a relationship that turned violent. Her partner forced her to cut off relationships with her family and most friends. At 20, she became pregnant.
She vividly remembers the night she left. Her partner dragged her by the hair, she said, and began kicking her in the stomach. She was six months pregnant.
“I couldn’t leave for myself, but I’m damn sure not gonna stay here and allow for my son to be born into this,” Thao said.
Like many survivors, she felt alone. She hadn’t talked to her family in two years. “I just assumed that my parents and my family wouldn’t accept me back because I chose him,” she said. “And I was just embarrassed, to be honest.”
She couch-surfed or slept in her car. When she delivered her son at the Contra Costa County hospital in Martinez, she recalled, “I didn’t have any visitors. I was totally alone.”
As she prepared to leave, though, nurses gave her a secondhand car seat and some donated clothes for her baby.
For the next two weeks, “I don’t even know how they did it, but they found wherever I was at — whether it was in my car, couch surfing or wherever,” and taught her how to feed, bathe and care for her young son. “That’s why nurses hold such a special place in my heart. They knew that I was alone.”
She was not only alone but isolated. “When you’re in a domestic violence relationship for four years (with someone) just tearing you down,” she said, “I felt like my growth was truly stunted.” She pledged to go back to school so she could pursue a career and provide for her son.
Thao enrolled in a paralegal program at Merritt College, choosing the Oakland hills campus in part because of its panoramic view of the Bay Area. At one of the lowest points of her life, she said, “I would go out and look at the view every day, as a reminder of what could be.
“Seeing the whole city, the beauty of it and the expansiveness of it,” she said, “gave me some semblance of hope that, you know what, this doesn’t need to be my story. That my story can change, however I see it to be.”
Community college as a single mom wasn’t easy. If her son was sick, she often took him with her to class. When this happened once on the day of a crucial biology final, she packed up her son’s Thomas the Tank Engine toys and sat him on the floor next to her.
Soon, a complication arose. “In the middle of the final, he says, ‘Mom, I have to poop,’” Thao recalled.
The instructors weren’t doling out extra time to finish the test, so Thao took her son to the bathroom. Not only did she pass the exam, she was named class valedictorian.
She then enrolled at UC Berkeley, relying on scholarships and living in family housing with her son. While she had a stable place to live, she struggled to afford food. She learned that some of her new friends and fellow students did, too, “but were too embarrassed to say anything.”
Thao and others asked local restaurants, including the Cheese Board Collective Pizzeria in Berkeley, whether they could donate unsold bread and pizzas. Then collected unsold fruit and vegetables from Smart & Final grocery stores.
Thao remembers her student friends sending out a note on their listserv saying, “Hey, everyone, there’s free bread from Cheese Board and pizza. Come and bring your own bag and come get as much as you need.” This effort evolved into a food pantry funded by the university.
As graduation approached, Thao was set to begin law school. But with her son outgrowing clothes, she accepted an internship from an organization aimed at recruiting more Asian Pacific Islander students into local government. She interned with Oakland City Council Member Rebecca Kaplan and never left City Hall. She became a full-time staffer, then was elected to the council four years ago.
When she started in politics, she had little knowledge about what local government did. Or how it worked. She soon realized that few people working in government shared her background.
“They were doing their best through anecdotal stories,” Thao said, “but they didn’t have the lived life experience of living in public housing. They didn’t have the lived life experience of growing up and being on social services.”
Now, Thao — who rents a home in the city — must show how she will use her lived experience to take on Oakland’s innumerable challenges. In an Oakland Chamber of Commerce survey conducted in October, 97% of respondents said homelessness was either an extremely or very serious problem. Nearly 4 in 5 opposed allowing people to camp in parks and public places.
Thao understands this concern. After taking office, she said, she will focus on looking for more appropriate land owned by the city or Oakland’s school district to house homeless people, including those living in RVs and other vehicles.
She also wants to forge a better working relationship with other East Bay cities and county officials so that Oakland isn’t shouldering more than its share of Alameda County’s homeless population.
The homelessness crisis in Oakland won’t disappear anytime soon. But those looking for solutions will be watching how a mayor who has lived on society’s margins will take on a challenge that has vexed many who haven’t.
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli