This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin and Vermont Public reporter Lola Duffort, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
The motels that serve as emergency shelters in Vermont have been home to hundreds of children. They include 8-year-old Summer, who loves Disney’s Inside Out and potato chips, and a 6-year-old named Sariyah, who always chooses to go down the biggest slide at the playground near her elementary school.
But as restrictions on the motel program come to bear this fall — resulting in a mass wave of evictions — the landscape of available shelter for families with children is particularly tight.
There were more than 300 families with children living in motels before the limits took effect in mid-September, but only 203 shelter units statewide that accept families with children. And those slots, by and large, are already full.
Some will win the shelter lottery when their voucher expires. That’s the case for Summer and her family, who are moving into a temporary unit managed by Capstone Community Action. Sariyah and her grandmother accepted an offer from a stranger for a place to stay. When those accommodations fell through, they took a charitable donation to help pay for a hotel room.
Other families — including James and Teala Ouimette and their two young daughters, profiled by VTDigger and Vermont Public last month — will have no other choice but to pitch a tent. When the Ouimettes tried to access a family shelter in Burlington before leaving their hotel room, they were told it had a lengthy waitlist.
The number of families experiencing homelessness in Vermont has grown precipitously in recent years. Particularly as motel shelter capacity retracts, providers now have to balance the long-term goals of boosting shelter and housing options for families, while triaging those families’ acute needs.
“We just got a request for a cooler to keep milk cold for toddlers at a campground,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. “This is unprecedented.”
‘We’ve kind of lost control’
Not too long ago, Vermont believed that ending family homelessness outright was within reach. In 2015, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin announced a plan to eliminate child and family homelessness by 2020, which involved giving families with children priority for rental vouchers and rehabbing run-down housing. And as recently as January 2023, service providers made yet another push to solve child homelessness, arguing that doing so would “help break the generational cycle of poverty.”
But as the scale of the problem has grown amid a deepening housing crisis, some feel that goal has slipped out of reach. Not only have the numbers grown, but so have the needs of unhoused families.
“Now I feel like we’ve kind of lost control,” Dragon said.
An annual federally-mandated census in January counted 737 unhoused people under 18, but this census is widely considered to be an undercount, and does not include those who are couch surfing. According to preliminary data collected by the state Agency of Education, which does count couch surfing and other types of doubling up, there were 1,927 unhoused students enrolled in Vermont public schools last school year — nearly double the figure from five years prior.
Vermont has capacity to shelter 61 households with children at dedicated family shelters that receive state funding. Those family shelters are located in Bennington, Brattleboro, Burlington, Hartford, and in scattered temporary apartments in Washington County, according to information provided by Lily Sojourner, director of the Department for Children and Families’ Office of Economic Opportunity.
Another 82 shelter spaces are available for households experiencing domestic violence (with another nine currently in development), which can include children. Another 60 units can serve families but are also open to a broader population.
In three Vermont counties — Orange, Essex, and Grand Isle — there does not exist a single formal shelter option for families.
Decades of research has cataloged the catastrophic impacts of homelessness on children. Young people who experience homelessness are more likely to have developmental delays, to do poorly in school, and experience higher rates of victimization, bullying, suicidality, substance abuse, and hospitalization. And children who experience homelessness are less likely to have stable housing in adulthood.
Precisely because children are so vulnerable, family shelters are more resource-intensive, space-intensive, and staff-intensive than those serving individuals. And so there are fewer of them.
COTS has long run two family shelters in Burlington. Both are staffed around the clock so families don’t have to leave during the day, said Rebekah Mott, director of development and communications for the organization. The family shelters also have a dedicated family housing navigator, as well as an education liaison and a new mental health specialist fully-funded through private donations.
Providers for the most part agree that congregate shelters — typically, cots or bunk beds lined up in a large space — aren’t best for families. Family shelters in Vermont are generally “semi-congregate,” meaning families might have their own room, but share a kitchen and common spaces, or fully “non-congregate.”
“I think the prospect of getting one up and running from scratch is probably… seems very difficult and overwhelming,” Mott said.
‘It’s shameful, to be really honest’
With shelters full, the city of Burlington has set aside temporary campground space for unhoused families with children, and, alongside the school district, put out a public callout for camping equipment in the wake of the new motel limits taking effect.
Victor Prussack, the school district’s engagement director, expressed bewilderment that some students were living outdoors. Citing student privacy rules, he declined to give the precise number.
“It’s shameful, to be really honest,” he said. “I don’t understand how we allow that to happen in this day and age and in the state of Vermont.”
There’s also a concern amongst local officials that the effort, although perhaps necessary, also endorses the status quo.
“We don’t feel great about reaching out to our community and saying, ‘Hey, could you give sleeping bags? Could you give tents? Could you give cooking fuel?’,” he said. “Because to me, that is supporting what the state is not doing.”
Despite their limitations, schools throughout the state are trying to plug in the gaps. They often host food pantries, collect clothes, provide counseling, and, as is federally required, will arrange transportation for their unhoused students, even if seeking shelter forces families to move out of the district.
At the Hilltop Inn in Berlin, a white sedan arrives every school day to bring Summer 45 minutes south to Bradford Elementary. The 8-year-old, who has autism and is now learning to speak in full sentences, is well supported at school, her mother, Kimberlin Gowell said. And the elementary, which she has attended for the last three years, has also become a refuge from life in the motel, which sometimes overwhelms Summer.
“She loves school,” Gowell said.
But even as schools attempt to provide some measure of material support and constancy for children experiencing homelessness, local school officials say there’s only so much within their power.
“We have families reaching out to the school, seeing if there’s anything we can do to help support them. And the reality is that what we can do in schools is limited,” said Bianca McKeen, the assistant superintendent for the Rutland City school district, where there were 104 unhoused children enrolled last year — 5% of all students.
‘Anywhere I can keep her safe’
Asked how much additional family shelter she thinks the state needs, Sojourner, of the Department for Children and Families, emphasized the need for Vermont to create more housing.
“We can’t lose sight of that North Star,” she said. “I think if someone said, you know, ‘Would you rather build housing or more shelter capacity?’ I would want more housing.”
Dragon agrees that Vermont needs to bolster its housing stock to address homelessness. CVOEO administers a rapid-rehousing program for unhoused families, offering vouchers for rental assistance. But 60 families have vouchers in hand — including some who are being exited from the motel program — and can’t find anywhere to use them, Dragon said.
“I think in lieu of adequate housing for families, we have to provide more shelters, especially if we’re not going to continue with the hotel program,” Dragon said. “Nobody likes to see more shelters, but that’s the place that we’re in.”
As motel vouchers expire for hundreds of Vermonters over the next few weeks, pressure is building on Gov. Phil Scott to intervene, including from the very lawmakers who wrote the new limits into law. But for now, families will have to figure out how to survive until the program’s rules loosen up again in December.
Sariyah and her grandmother, Terri Ann Garrett, briefly stayed with a stranger who reached out to them after reading about their situation a few weeks ago. They’ve since returned to the Barre motel where they’d previously had a state voucher; a charitable donation has covered a room for them and Garrett’s husband. But Garrett doesn’t know how long that help will last. She is trying to get them into an apartment of their own.
Sometimes, she and Sariyah talk about imagining their dream home.
“Hers is somewhere with a pool that is all hers, with a Lamborghini,” Garrett said, laughing, as she watched Sariyah run around the playground on a recent afternoon. Then she grew serious.
“My idea of a perfect home is anywhere I can keep her safe,” she said.
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