Hannah Mercurius testifies on family shelter placements and school stability

Thank you.

My name is Hannah Mercurius, and I'm a senior attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services in the civil justice practice.

BDS is a public defense office.

We represent about 40,000 people each year in Brooklyn and Queens.

Thank you to Councilmember Hudson and the committee.

Our civil justice practice works with people who are entering the shelter system as well as shelter residents attempting to secure stable housing.

And as many people have said at this hearing today, shelter residents are subjected to heightened surveillance and are at an increased risk of contact with the criminal and family legal systems.

Shelters have rigid rules about enter and exit, what residents can eat and wear, who can provide child care for children.

And how shelter units must be maintained.

The people we represent share that these stringent requirements often create frequent conflict in shelters and that shelter staff lack training in de-escalation, and they often resort

to calling law enforcement and ACS, the Administration for Children's Services, which perpetrates trauma and disruption that shelter residents are already experiencing.

And then families are really unlikely to seek support from shelter staff who are the same people who surveil and criticize them.

Many of the families who live in shelters have been placed very far away from their existing networks of support.

We support Intro 99 in part because we know that families have no control over where they're placed when they enter shelter.

And one of the things that this hearing made me wonder is if families are asked where they want to be placed when they're experiencing intake.

It disrupts the network of supportive people and providers that they've created in their home neighborhoods.

Risking school absences, as we've heard, missed doctor's appointments, and exposing families to ACS investigations during these really precarious transition periods.

Even though under the McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act,

students in shelter are entitled to transportation to their home, to their schools of origin, we find that there are extensive delays in that busing being put in place.

And it's unrealistic for parents to travel more than an hour with multiple children to get them to school.

And as a result, families are often forced to risk that those repeated school absences will incur more surveillance by ACS.

Or initiate a case against them if schools call in a report, or make a really impossible decision to change their child's school.

So we support this legislation, and it's more about increasing busing services for families.

It's about ensuring that families experiencing homelessness can access critical systems of support.

Religious communities, neighbors, schools, stores that they're familiar with, which are essential for families during the incredibly destabilizing experience of entering shelter.

And we'll submit written testimony as well.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.