Community Assessment 2020-2025

Sacramento Employment and Training Agency 2020-2025
The experience of being homeless clearly compounds the effects of health and mental health
conditions. Older adults are more likely to report an on-going medical condition (54%) and a
mental or physical disability (66%), compared to younger adults. Though these conditions
contribute to challenges that older adults face, they were not more or less likely to say that these
conditions were severe enough to prevent them from obtaining employment or securing housing,
as compared to unsheltered homeless (41% vs 40%).
The following chart shows the racial/ethnic breakup of the homeless population in Sacramento
County comparing the sheltered population with the unsheltered population:
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
83% 81%
0.40% 0.10% 19%
64% 53%
50%
47%
45%
34%
40%
17%
31%
0.50% 0.50%
1% 1%
3%
10% 1% 10% 6%
3%
Unsheltered
Sheltered
Public Schools and Homelessness
During the 2015-16 school year, more than 1.3 million children in the U.S. public school
system were homeless, a historic high for the nation (National Center For Homeless Education,
2017). In California, 275,448 public school students (4.4%) were recorded as being homeless at
some point during the 2015-2016 school year. This accounts for approximately one-fifth of all homeless
public school students in the U.S. that year and has ranked 48 th of all 50 states in performance issues of
child homelessness. (National Center for Homeless Education, 2017). This number is up from 2010-2011
when 220,708 public school students (3.6%) were reported to be homeless. More than half of all homeless
public school students in California (52.3%) were enrolled in Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 5 in 2015-
2016, while 20.1% were in Grades 6-8 and 27.6% in Grades 9-12. Sharing housing with friends or
relatives ('doubling up') was the most common type of nighttime residence among homeless students
statewide (85.2%) (Kidsdata).
COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT 2020-2025 22