With the new school year right around the corner, nine public schools on the UWS have received an unexpected but much-needed gift to help homeless and other needy students look their best and reduce absenteeism: washers and dryers.
A large number of students, including many migrants, are living in shelters or other temporary housing, where washing clothes is difficult or impossible. This has had a significant impact on attendance, according to City Council Member Gale Brewer, who orchestrated the donation to schools in her district that needed them most. It’s an issue she’s been spearheading for several years and a need she and others say exists throughout the city.
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The used appliances were the gift of an anonymous school in New Jersey that had reached out to Brewer with the offer after reading about her efforts to get laundry equipment in city schools. They were generously delivered for free on Monday by West Side Movers. Now students’ laundry can be washed while they’re in class and they will be given a fresh stack of clean clothes at the end of the day. Eleven washers and dryers were brought to nine UWS schools but there is still a great need for more, according to Brewer. In February, she sent a letter to NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks asking for help bringing laundry facilities to more than 30 schools in her district that homeless children were attending.
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“I’ve been talking about this for like two years,” Brewer told Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization focused on education. “Kids will not come to school if they’re smelly. They just won’t come.”
Her appeals to education officials to put laundry facilities in public schools is supported by education department data showing that more than 2,500 students attending District 3 schools, which includes the UWS, are living in temporary housing. An estimated 581 of those children are migrants, among the thousands who’ve sought asylum in the city recently.
Coming to school wearing dirty clothes affects students’ morale and self-esteem and, Brewer said, puts them at risk of being bullied. She told the NY Daily News that some teachers–aware of the negative impacts on young learners–have been taking children’s clothes home and washing them themselves.
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“Adolescents are hyperaware of how they look and what other people look like, so they are often concerned about the perception that they may or may not look a particular way,” Danielle Salzberg, principal of Frank McCourt High School on the Upper West Side, told the NY Daily News. Sixteen students at Salzberg’s school were homeless last year.
City schools have been slowly bringing in washers and dryers for needy students over the past decade or so after educators realized the lack of clean clothes deterred some students from going to school. Data from 2022 shows that there were at that time about 119 schools in the city with washers and dryers.
Recognizing the need for laundry facilities in public schools, legislators in Albany earlier this year proposed a bill to offer grants to schools throughout the state to install washers and dryers. But the bill languished during budget negotiations and ultimately never passed.
