Abstract
Students who experience homelessness are people first. Like their peers, they have unique hopes, dreams, cultural heritages, abilities, disabilities, and unique personality traits. As urban schools become more sophisticated in developing their support systems for students, it is important that systems stress personalization rather than generalization. Rather than conceptualizing students as homeless as if they belong to a homogeneous group, it is important for school personnel to see students who are homeless as individual human beings who need personalized support that will meet their academic and social needs. This stance is not intended to trivialize the stress that homelessness can cause but to remind us all that categorization because of a life circumstance may prevent systems of care to design systems that work.