Five years ago, I met a homeless mother and her child. She was doing everything she could to create a stable life, but the barriers were endless, housing instability, lack of transportation, and limited access to education for her child. The more I worked with families like hers, the more I saw the deep connection between homelessness and a lack of quality education. Children growing up in poverty face enormous disadvantages, and for many, school is just another system that fails to meet their needs. Traditional public and private schools are not designed to support the unique challenges of these children.
That is why I founded Friendship Academy, a private school specifically designed for children who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. In Tennessee, the Education Freedom Act provides scholarships for private education, which gave me the opportunity to create a high-quality, classical school that would actually work for these children. However, I knew that a standard private school model wouldn’t be enough. Traditional private schools often have high tuition costs, strict admissions requirements, and expectations that simply don’t align with the realities of homeless families. These schools are designed for stability, something these children don’t have. I wanted to create a long on-ramp for them, a place where they could learn in a safe and nurturing environment, so that by middle school, they would be ready to transition into a well-rounded private education.
One of the most sobering facts I learned along the way is that the state of Tennessee determines how many prison beds they will need in the future based on the number of fourth graders who can’t read. This statistic is heartbreaking because it means that a child’s entire trajectory is being predicted based on their literacy at age nine or ten. But what if that child has spent those years bouncing between shelters, sleeping in cars, or worrying about where their next mean will come from?