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.
