Gov. Hochul makes a school visit (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)
According to Advocates for Children of New York, over 104,000 children were homeless during the 2021-2022 school year. For the seventh year in a row, 10% of kids are experiencing homelessness in New York City. There are many causes of homelessness, but one of the most common is domestic violence. Parents who are in abusive relationships often have limited access to money, nowhere to go, and no family or friends to turn to, and when they become homeless, so do their kids.
There are lifelong implications for children who witness or experience domestic violence. These children are 50% more likely to become victims or perpetrators of violence themselves. They are also more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors and struggle with depression and anxiety.
Connecting children experiencing homelessness with trained social workers is one of the most effective methods of helping them heal from trauma and preventing future violence. But very few have access to the resources they need. New York should invest in programs that provide youth living in shelters with access to trauma-centered supportive services.
Social workers can offer one-on-one counseling to students, helping children acknowledge their trauma, grow healthy relationships, and have successful academic careers. Because their personal lives are often unstable, homeless children struggle in school, graduate at lower rates, and drop out at higher rates.
Statistically, most homeless families are headed by single women of color who are left with few options and limited resources to help their children. They may be juggling full-time work or searching for employment with securing housing and transporting their children to and from school; these challenges are compounded by the psychological damage of domestic violence. This group of women is more likely to experience mental health disorders, post-traumatic stress, and drug addiction as a result of these factors. Children in these families don’t have access to the support systems needed to succeed in school or break the cycles of violence and poverty.
The AAP has called for expanded access to school- and community-based supports to provide at-risk youth with the tools they need to develop healthy coping skills and relationships. Reaching homeless children, who are in danger of slipping through the system’s cracks, and providing them with services must be a priority for the state.
Urban Resource Institute (URI) is trying to reach those children.
URI administers the school-based Relationship Abuse Prevention Program (RAPP) and Early RAPP to help approximately 40,000 middle and high school students each year to develop healthy relationships within their families, schools, and communities. The culturally sensitive, age-appropriate and trauma-informed programs include conflict resolution and problem solving, with a focus on overcoming trauma, anxiety, and depression. The program is run by trained social workers who provide individualized support and is supplemented by peer counselors within each participating school.
URI’s RAPP program has changed the trajectory of many young people's lives — and their families and communities — by providing them with the tools they need to define and develop healthy relationships with the support of peers and educators who share their concerns and understand their needs. Future domestic abuse is avoided, and cycles of violence are broken.
URI is the nation’s largest provider of domestic violence shelter services and a leading provider of services for homeless families, accommodating as many as 2,200 people every night in its domestic violence and homeless shelters. Sadly, children and youth make up an average of 70% of the total URI shelter population. Though many young people in shelters have been impacted by domestic violence, the majority do not have access to RAPP programming as it is only available in a limited number of schools.
Expanding these programs to reach students living in domestic violence shelters is key for helping homeless families and their children. That’s why URI has requested $3.5 million in funding from the state to be included in the 2023 fiscal year budget, due by April 1, so that relationship abusive prevention programming can be offered to children in shelters.
We need New York State’s support to effectively scale programming and make a huge difference for the city’s growing population of homeless children. With their investment, we can transform the lives of domestic violence survivors, helping their children succeed in school and escape poverty.
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Nathaniel M. Fields is the CEO of Urban Resource Institute (URI), the nation’s largest provider of residential domestic violence services as well as a leading provider of shelter and services for families experiencing homelessness. On Twitter @natmfields & @URI_NYC.
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Emergency response (photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)
The Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD), New York City’s attempt to reform the way 911 responds to mental health emergencies, has been operating in select neighborhoods for more than a year. And trends are heading in the wrong direction.
B-HEARD launched in June 2021 as an alternative to NYPD-led response to mental health-related 911 calls, which can often turn deadly. Instead, B-HEARD teams consist of paramedics and social workers to handle these crises. In the 12-month period that ended on June 30, there were about 11,000 mental health calls to 911 in the areas served by the program, which initially covered five police precincts in Harlem and now includes 11 precincts in Manhattan and the Bronx.
But as the program expands, we need to address its declining efficacy. Correct Crisis Intervention Today in New York City (CCIT-NYC)’s recent analysis of data that the city quietly released last month shows increased response times and hospitalizations, and fewer responses to mental health-related calls. To make matters worse, police officers are responding to B-HEARD calls, which defeats its intended purpose of serving as an alternative to police-led response.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
New York could learn from Portland, Oregon. Its Portland Street Response (PSR), which I had the good fortune of visiting earlier this year, is nearly identical to B-HEARD and was launched just a few short months earlier. While these programs are designed to operate in similar ways, PSR’s recent 12-month data shows it has had greater success in terms of total hospitalizations, number of responses to mental health-related calls, and average response times.
Last March, the Portland program expanded to become citywide. Since its expansion, the program is taking a record number of calls — from 44 in the month of October 2021 to 824 in October 2022, a 1773% increase. B-HEARD, meanwhile, is responding to fewer and fewer. Throughout the year in New York, 911 routed just 22% of mental health calls to B-HEARD’s pilot program, and B-HEARD teams responded to 69% of those calls — down from 82% at the pilot’s start.
Both PSR and B-HEARD include paramedics and mental health professionals in their response teams. But there is a pivotal difference between the two programs: PSR also includes two trained peer specialists to be responders.
As someone who experienced a mental health crisis and later was trained to assist others at Howie the Harp Advocacy Center in New York City, I know that peers offer an empathetic response that cannot be replicated by those who have not been through the same experiences. Peers are trained to de-escalate crises and connect individuals with the services they need for future support. They are also part of the follow-up process to ensure individuals continue to receive the help they need so a dangerous situation does not arise again. They are crucial to the success of a program.
In addition to the inclusion of peers, Portland also makes more data available to the public. PSR publishes a dashboard that is routinely updated with call volume and location of calls routed to PSR. Its first-year evaluation was a 144-page document outlining the program’s performance and outcomes, as well as general stakeholder feedback.
New York, by comparison, published just a two-page data brief that included year-long averages rather than quarterly numbers. Nowhere can New Yorkers find data as granular as that in Portland, which highlights prominent hours, days, and locations of the calls routed to PSR. New Yorkers deserve to know what is happening in their communities. And without access to this data, it is impossible to gauge whether a program is successful.
PSR plans to become a 24/7 service within the next year. I want the same for B-HEARD, which currently operates 16 hours a day. But I am wary of potential expansion of a program that needs serious revisions. Members of the New York City Council have indicated that they are ready to hold a joint oversight hearing. We call on Eva Wong, the Director of the city’s Office of Community Mental Health, to testify. There's no time to waste.
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Evelyn Graham Nyaasi is Advocacy Specialist at Community Access, a member of the CCIT-NYC Steering Committee, and identifies as a peer (a person with lived experience with mental health recovery and services). On Twitter @ccitnyc.
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Then-Mayor de Blasio speaks to the UFT (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
A long-time UFT chapter leader I know used to joke, “There are two things wrong with our union—the leadership and the membership.” I’ve been very involved with the teachers union, both in opposition and alongside leadership, and I couldn’t agree more. That two-pronged problem with our union is evident in the saga over major changes to health care for retired and current teachers.
Let’s look first at membership. In 2018, 86% of us voted yes on a contract. I was on the UFT Contract Committee and fully supported it. It wasn't a great contract, but it appeared to be a fair one. Depending on who you asked, it was above or close to cost of living, and there were no horrendous givebacks. At least that’s what we were told.
The contract was very quickly presented to the UFT Executive Board and Delegate Assembly. I voted yes in both bodies. It then went to membership where, as everyone expected, it was voted up by an overwhelming majority. Everything seemed fine.
Now, in 2022, we’re looking at a rollback of benefits for retirees. This, evidently, is because of a side agreement leadership made with the city in our 2018 contract. The UFT promised health care savings in Appendix B of our Collective Bargaining Agreement. However, this agreement was not presented to the Contract Committee, the Executive Board, the Delegate Assembly, or rank and file. We only found out about it after the contract was ratified.
A large problem with membership is we tend to view UFT as an outside entity. Why did the UFT do this or that? Actually, we are the UFT. But in terms of union action, we don’t do much other than wear a particular color every once in a while.
The more pressing problem with membership is that we trust leadership. We now know they withheld the health care deal expressly to mislead us, so we ought not to have done that.
I was pretty surprised when we were told the default for retirees would now be a Medicare Advantage plan. My mind went straight to Joe Namath on TV hawking Advantage as though it’s the new aluminum siding. Get it now, quickly, before time runs out!
But union president Micheal Mulgrew told us this was a new kind of Advantage. It wouldn’t be like the Namath plan. Every doctor who accepted Medicare was going to take it. At first, I was willing to give it a try if I retired anytime soon.
But then members started asking doctors whether they accepted this plan, and doctors answered no, they did not. Health care for city workers is negotiated by the Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella group of city unions (not all of whom support these changes). Evidently, the MLC, before announcing this plan, had not even bothered to enlist doctors to participate.
Any retiree who wanted to stay in standard Medicare would have to pony up $191 per person per month, almost $5,000 a year for a couple. That’s a considerable expense for people trying to get by on a pension. I started hearing complaints from people I’d never known to complain before.
Another thing MLC failed to do was check current regulations. The city was precluded from charging people to enact this program. MLC, UFT included, lobbied to change Administrative Code 12-126 along with Mayor Eric Adams.
Given these blunders, and given the health care agreement was born of blatant deceit, it’s a wonder anyone trusts MLC or UFT leadership on health care, or anything whatsoever.
We recently received an email from Mulgrew suggesting that, if the law were not changed, in-service members might have to pay $1,500 a year to retain health care. This put forth a zero-sum game, pitting in-service members against retired ones. This notion is antithetical to that of union.
Why is Michael Mulgrew working so hard to help various mayors, our actual adversaries in collective bargaining, to save money at the expense of membership? That’s likely because the health care agreements (which union leadership had kept secret until after we’d voted up the contract) continue after our contract expires, which indeed it has. In this outlandish one-sided agreement, our health care continues to be cut, but the city is not obliged to give us a dime in compensation increases.
It’s beyond disheartening to learn what a miserable job our negotiators did for us in 2018. All our hours on the Contract Committee were wasted, since leadership made a counter-productive deal behind our back. They sacrificed our health care to win only modest gains. Our Contract Committee is a sham, UFT has the worst negotiating team in the world, and every member of that team should be impeached or fired.
Now the union is trying to bargain a new contract with Eric Adams, and Adams says health care savings must be taken care of beforehand. Michael Mulgrew tells us to wear blue one day. Call me cynical, but I don’t see how that frightens Adams.
UFT rank and file absolutely did not approve of these health savings. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to come directly out of the pockets of those who made the agreements.
They fooled me once, but it won’t happen again. Hopefully my union brothers and sisters aren’t fooled anymore either.
Correction: There was a health agreement made by MLC six months before the 2018 Contract, and UFT members were informed if it. Rank and file had not voted on it, and we were not aware of the particulars or implications. It was incorporated into Appendix B of the contract, which was not shared with us before the contract was ratified.
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Arthur Goldstein is an ESL teacher at Francis Lewis High School, and a former UFT executive committee member. On Twitter @TeacherArthurG.
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