Higher number than anticipated expected at Lynn Youth Count

LYNN – The Lynn Youth Count has been pushed back to the end of the month and is turning into a powerful community effort.”It’s the first time it’s being done statewide ? it’s been five years in the making, and it’s very important that we do it right,” said Marjorie St. Paul, executive director of the Lynn Shelter Association.St. Paul said each of 24 agencies that make up the Consortium of Care as well as organizations like Raw Art Works, Girls Inc., The Haven Project and Straight Ahead Ministries have jumped in to help.”It’s been a huge community effort, it’s been great,” she said. “The Police Department has put up posters and put it on their website. The entire city has gotten involved.”The Department of Housing and Community Development initiated and is footing the bill for the count, which is an effort to determine just how many homeless young adults are living in the city. By state standard, “young adult” is ages 17-24 but St. Paul said there are homeless teens as young as 13 or 14.She also said she suspects the number is going to be much higher than anticipated. She estimates there are 300 to 400 “unaccompanied youth” in the school system alone.”I’m very interested to see what the numbers are,” she said.The count will go over three days, Jan. 30, 31 and Feb. 1, and will coincide with the annual Point in Time count of the adult homeless population, also a state initiative. The Haven Project will hold a pizza party Jan. 30 at its 57 Munroe St. location, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Teens can stop in, have a hot meal, pick up some basic essentials and fill out a brief survey in order to be counted. The next two days the count will run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will include a street count as well as tables.Tables will be set up in the places teens are most likely to show up, St. Paul explained, such as North Shore Community College, Lynn Community Health Center, My Brother’s Table, the Lynn Public Library and even the laundromat.”I thought the laundromat was a very cool idea,” St. Paul said.There are also several agencies that have their own programs with homeless youth and will take counts, and St. Paul said they will have information from the school department as well. Identifiers are built into the surveys to make sure kids aren’t counted more than once.”This sort of group started about 10 year ago, it’s a hidden group of kids,” St. Paul said.The population includes kids who have aged out of foster care, been thrown out of their homes, run away or were the product of bad parenting or no parenting.The goal is to identify the problems and try to prevent youth homelessness from turning into adult homelessness.St. Paul said she finds it “staggeringly wonderful” that many of the homeless children continue to go to school.”It just blows my mind,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s because they can get a free meal or because they feel safe there, and I don’t care, they’re going.”The fear being felt across the state, however, is that there are too many homeless youths who have no place to go and no possibility of moving forward, she said.”It’s just very harsh,” she said.