More than 138,000 New York City public school students experienced homelessness last school year — one in eight students in the system — according to a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit Advocates for Children, reported by Chalkbeat. The children lived in temporary housing: city shelters, or “doubled up” with relatives and friends because of economic hardship.

There was rare good news inside the number. The total dropped 10% from the previous school year, driven largely by fewer families living in shelters. But the figure remains staggering — roughly the population of Albany — and marks the 11th straight year the count has topped 100,000, the report found.

The breakdown shows how tenuous housing has become for a vast slice of the city’s school-age population. Of students identified as homeless, 37% lived in shelters, while 58% shared housing with other families. The Bronx again led the city with nearly one in six students homeless; Manhattan followed at one in seven but posted the biggest year-over-year drop, at 18%. Staten Island had the lowest rate, about one in 20. At the school district level, more than one in five students was homeless in the South Bronx’s District 9, Brownsville’s District 23, and Bushwick’s District 32 — while fewer than 5% of students in northeast Queens’ District 26 were.

The report’s sharpest findings concern what homelessness does to a school career. About 27% of students in shelters in grades 3-8 were proficient in reading on 2025 state tests — less than half the rate of their permanently housed peers. Roughly 59% graduated on time, against a citywide rate of 81%, and 14% dropped out, about triple the rate of their classmates. Chronic absenteeism sits underneath those numbers: nearly half of students in temporary housing missed at least 10% of the school year, and 63% of those in shelters did.

Advocates say one fixable driver is where the city places families. About 37% of families in shelters are placed in a different borough from the one where their youngest child attends school, and there is no mechanism to revisit a placement once made, said Jennifer Pringle, director of Advocates for Children’s Learners in Temporary Housing project. School bus assignments can take more than a month, and buses sometimes fail to show. Families stay in shelters an average of 14 months — hours each day spent on transit that parents cannot spend working or hunting for permanent housing.

“Unfortunately, for too many families, being in shelter derails their education,” Pringle said, warning that people without a diploma are 4.5 times more likely to face homelessness as young adults. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said the Education Department has eliminated a requirement that children attend all housing meetings and expanded community schools offering wraparound services, while Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Erin Dalton pointed to declining chronic absenteeism among shelter students and expanded outreach.

For a mayor who ran on affordability, the report is a reminder that the city’s housing emergency is measured in report cards, too.