Oakland’s Creative Approach to Educating Unhoused Children

Oakland Ready Set Go Mobile Education Center for Homeless Children
Oakland’s Ready, Set, Go! program brings essential early childhood education directly to unhoused children, ensuring they have access to learning and support services despite housing instability.

Ready, Set, Go! Is a Great Example of People Getting Creative to Help Homeless Families in Oakland

The classic yellow school bus is an easily recognizable vehicle across America and beyond. For decades, it has made education more accessible to the public by transporting children from their homes to their schools.

This is a blessing for busy working parents and rural communities especially, but for unhoused families, the traditional school bus model may still not be accessible enough. Without a stable address, you can’t get on the bus route, and there often aren’t existing stops convenient to local shelters.

Instead of a bus that brings children to school, what’s needed is a bus that brings school to the children. That’s where Oakland’s innovative mobile classroom comes in.

Ready, Set, Go!

Last year, the city of Oakland launched the Ready, Set, Go! after officials noticed that a significant number of families were dropping out of the traditional Head Start program after losing their housing.

Instead of shaming these families and blaming the drop in attendance on a lack of parental care or interest in their children’s education, they got to work figuring out an adaptive solution. With a little creativity, the idea for the lime green RV stocked with all the must-haves of any preschool classroom was born.

The decked-out RV has everything kids need, from a child-sized toilet and sink to cabinets chock full of building blocks, books, art supplies, musical instruments, bubble wands, puppets and dolls, puzzles, sensory play tables, and even one of those parachutes we all loved to play under in gym class.

There’s even a TV mounted on the outside where kids can watch Sesame Street or other educational programming. And of course, you can’t forget the snacks, because who can learn on an empty stomach?

School Anywhere

The Ready, Set, Go! bus makes stops at various locations handpicked to be accessible for low-income and unhoused families enrolled in the local Head Start and Early Head Start programs. On different days of the week, it stops in front of homeless shelters, city parks, and recreation centers across the city.

The mobile classroom offers a place to meet for parents who signed up for home services but may not currently have a home to meet in. Here, parents can meet with trauma-informed educators to discuss their child’s educational progress and any wraparound services that may benefit the family, including:

  • free diapers
  • computer access for parents
  • basic health checks
  • nutritional screenings
  • developmental screenings

That’s right, it’s more than just story time and singalongs!

What Is Head Start?

Head Start is a federal program designed to give children from families with a low income a, well, head start. It also serves children in foster care, homeless children, and children from families receiving TANF or SSI regardless of income. (However, we’ve talked before about how SSI often locks people into remaining low-income anyway.)

The Head Start program focuses on children from birth to age 5, while the Early Head Start program, which many locations also provide, focuses on low-income toddlers under 3, infants, and pregnant people.

Together, these programs promote children’s cognitive, physical, and social development, encourage healthy bonds between parents and children, and support caregivers. Through their focus on children, the Head Start and Early Head Start programs seek to improve the health and well-being of every family member and set the stage for a successful future for each child.

Responding to a Community Need

In Alameda County, where the city of Oakland is located, one-quarter of all individuals experiencing homelessness are children under the age of 18. In Oakland alone, 104 out of 479 total families enrolled in the Head Start program experienced homelessness during the 2022-23 school year.

Oakland Head Start Program Director Diveena Cooppan remarked, “The Ready, Set, Go! Mobile Classroom is the result of listening to our community and responding to what we hear. Families were dropping out of Head Start because it was too difficult to get to an early childhood education center while dealing with homelessness. The City had to find new ways to provide services, and Region 9 Head Start supported our innovation.”

We Love to See the Creativity

This mobile classroom is one of only a handful of such innovations in the country, though we may start to see more of them as word of this one’s success spreads. Overall, this story is a perfect example of getting creative, doing something different, and being the change we want to see.

While officials working within Oakland’s regional Head Start program may not have had the authority to start using their funds to build affordable housing and bring homelessness to an end, they still did what they could to make things easier for the homeless families within their reach. The critical piece to their success was listening to the families they wanted to help, hearing their needs, respecting their feedback, and acting on that information.

It would have been very easy to look at the raw data on unhoused families dropping out of Head Start programs and extrapolate wildly, blaming them for being lazy or uncommitted and trying to implement solutions to the wrong problem. We’ve seen that kind of response repeatedly, and it never works.

Talking with unhoused people and understanding the unique needs of the people in your community is a critical step that many programs seem to skip. However, if you want to actually help the people you say you want to help, this step is not optional. Without it, you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. You’ll just end up with a big mess.

Hopefully, this story will inspire us all to do what we can where we can. Whether it be as part of your job or just in your everyday life, do you have any opportunities to make life easier for the homeless people you know?


Kayla Robbins

Kayla Robbins

  

Kayla Robbins is a freelance writer who works with big-hearted brands and businesses. When she's not working, she enjoys knitting socks, rolling d20s, and binging episodes of The Great British Bake Off.

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