MANSFIELD — Before Eric Anderman entered the world of higher education, he spent a few years working as a middle and high school teacher.
Anderman, now interim dean at Ohio State Mansfield, still remembers a conversation he had years ago with a high school senior.
The student frequently came in early to talk to him before classes started. One day, the boy casually mentioned that he’d slept in a park the night before. He didn’t know where he’d stay that night.
His mom had kicked him out to appease her boyfriend and told him he was old enough to take care of himself.
“Those kinds of experiences are all too common and I was naive to it,” Anderman said.
Anderman, who has a background in adolescent psychology, said there’s not a lot of research on youth homelessness.
But the data is clear on one thing — personal traumas like housing insecurity have a negative impact on education.
“If you have to worry about where you’re going to sleep and food, you’re not going to be thinking about your calculus homework,” he said.
Ohio State Mansfield hosted more than 40 representatives from agencies across the county last week for a discussion on housing insecurity among college students.
The groups spent time discussing the material and psychology barriers housing insecure students face and possible solutions.
Cindy Wood, director of community relations and development at OSU Mansfield, said it’s common for college students to face financial challenges and housing insecurity.
“What we are finding is that no one is dealing with this as a community college discussion,” Wood said.
“We’ve been putting band-aids on challenges with emergency situations with students for quite some time. But this is really the first time we’ve really started dealing with room and board scholarships and housing security.”
OSU Mansfield pilots room and board scholarship
OSU Mansfield is already taking steps to address this issue with its new Compassionate Bucks Room and Board scholarship.
School officials came up with the concept after learning three incoming students were experiencing homelessness.
“This year, three Richland County students were referred to the campus Student Success team from their graduating high school or local agency early in May,” said Donna Hight, an assistant dean.
One student, a high school senior, was living with a food pantry volunteer she met as a client. Another student was living with a friend’s parents. A third was living with friends.
The two-year pilot provides those three students experiencing housing insecurity with full room and board, as well as wraparound services to support their educational and co-curricular success.
The S.N. and Ada Ford Fund is providing financial support for the program.
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“Our goal is to create some stability for students who are housing insecure,” Anderman said.
“If you have someone who’s housing insecure and you get them to college, you can’t just then say, ‘OK, good luck.’ You have to provide them with support.”
Room and board is estimated to cost between $12,000 and $14,000 per year at OSU Mansfield. OSU administrators say the ultimate goal is to partner with community agencies to lower that cost and provide 20 students with a $5,000 room-and-board scholarship each year.
Federally-funded Pell Grants are available to undergraduate students who display “exceptional financial need,” but amounts are capped. For the 2023-2024 student, one can receive a maximum of amount of $7,395.
According to associate dean Donna Hight, between 45 to 50 percent of OSU Mansfield students are Pell eligible in any given year.
“I think that there’s a lot of students who are not Pell eligible, but one wrong thing happens in their family, and suddenly they’re in the same situation as well,” she said.
Hight estimated between 25 and 35 percent of the student body lives on campus, either in Molyet Village Apartments or Buckeye Village.
What’s next?
OSU administrators said the next step for the University is to compile the information from the symposium discussions and come up with an action plan they can share with stakeholders.
“If we can be in communication and get to the point where we’re not duplicating efforts, but we’re working collaboratively, then maybe we can move the needle in the right direction,” said Kendra Boggs, coordinator of student financial aid.
Participants at the event said it was helpful to get together and hear about other local agencies and their work.
“My take is, we are rich in resources but poor in coordination,” said community organizer and Mansfield Fifth Ward Councilman Aurelio Diaz. “It’s good to understand what everyone’s doing so that we don’t replicate it.”
Jessica Gribben of the Richland Area Chamber said the symposium was a reminder that everyone has a role to play in addressing community challenges.
“Sitting on the housing development steering committee, I think it just re-emphasizes a need that we already know (about),” she said. “We need affordable housing in the community and it is our duty to advocate for that in positive ways.”
Participants also considered the barriers housing insecure students experience.
“I think we all agree that there’s power in collaboration,” said Deanna West-Torrence, executive director of the North End Community Improvement Collaborative.
“There was a theme of ‘We need to kind of unify our systems a bit more to make a more seamless system for students.'”
Michelle Miller, the new director of Richland County’s Youth and Family Council, experienced housing insecurity as a child. Miller bounced in and out of foster care until she was permanently placed in the care of the state as a fifth grader.
During a brief address to the group, she said the key to mitigating housing insecurity is to start early — ideally long before a person reaches college or even high school.
“We do have to move upstream when we’re thinking about families experiencing homelessness,” she said. “A lot of times we look back into history, we saw it. We just didn’t do anything about it.”
If you’d like to support the Compassionate Bucks Room and Board Scholarship, visit go.osu.edu/CompassionateBUCKS.