ABSTRACT
The speaker is John Ash, the house manager at a local emergency shelter, whom I interviewed in the course of my pilot study. John was talking about differences he saw between the single homeless men who came to the shelter and the women who came. I have often recalled this comment as I sought to understand how the life and schooling experiences of the eleven homeless children in this study have affected their performance in school. John’s characterization of the homeless mothers he has known as “too freaked out” to work might well be applied to many of the children, I think. Sadly, for many of them, being “too-freaked-out-to-work” has been a life status rather than an aspect of a one-time emergency experience of homelessness.
