DC receives funds to help homeless students. Why are so many schools missing out?
Photo by Tyrone Turner // WAMU/DCist
Towanda Chew has gone to extraordinary lengths to prioritize her children’s education. Like many parents navigating homelessness, keeping this promise remains a harrowing challenge. It requires that she first keep them safe and sheltered.
“I wish I could have walked on the stage,” said Chew, who didn’t graduate from high school, but got her GED. “And that’s why I’m so hard on them about finishing school, going through that … I stay on them about that,” said Chew. She is a single mom to five daughters and two sons, two of whom still live with her.
After experiencing homelessness on and off for three years, Chew and her children finally moved into a subsidized apartment along Martin Luther King Jr Ave. in Southeast D.C. in 2020.