Thursday, December 17, 2015

URSP Student Robert Miller Evaluates the Cultural Context of Education on Homeless Youth in the D.C./Metropolitan area


My name is Robert Miller and I am working on a project titled “Evaluating the Cultural Context of Education on Homeless Youth in the D.C. / Metropolitan area, a Group Project with Jesse Roof”.  This project is looking for links between educational policy and the downfalls when it comes to homeless youth.

I got interested in this topic when I entered a case study through George Mason about a little girl named Relisha. She was a nine year old who was housing impaired and she disappeared. The case study was asking how you could best help the rampant case of homelessness in D.C. My group came up with a charter school to cater directly to homeless/ homing impaired students. Getting information about homeless/ housing impaired youths educational levels and problems they faced helped me to realize the great injustice.

The more I thought about the charter school idea, the more I thought about what public schools in the area could do differently to better cater to the homeless youth population. This is where my project came to mind. I wanted to do this study to get a better understanding of what can be done to help this group of people. I want housing impaired students to get the same opportunity to experience education as non- housing impaired students.

I am a math major here at Mason with a minor in education studies. This project relates directly to my minor. Not only is it about the educational system, it is about how a group of people experience education and how the educational policy affects them. When I get older I would like to become an educational policy analyst. This way I could look at different cities educational policies and see how to better the educational system of that city.

For my project every week I have been calling homeless shelters and hospitals around the area to promote the project. To get the information from this group we must advertise in many locations. I have spent countless hours on the phone trying to get shelters to allow us to interview their constituents along with changing our procedure and resubmitting to IRB. Getting interviews from a group that is very transient is quite difficult and therefore takes time.

This week I have learned of two needed resources that are interested in helping Jesse and I with our project. These centers will allow us to conduct interviews there with their constituents. With our constant outreach to these shelters we have gotten many leads on where to find research participants. We look forwarding to gathering more data to find trends in this transient population.