"Record number of homeless children enrolled in public schools, new data show."

U.S. public schools are now enrolling a record number of homeless children and youth — over 1.1 million — with the largest populations in California, New York, Texas and Florida, new data from by the U.S. Department of Education show.

The news comes on the heels of a new study showing that a majority of students in public schools throughout the American South and West are poor for the first time in at least four decades.

The new homeless statistics, for the 2011-12 school year, are 10 percent higher than the year before and 72 percent higher than before the recession. Still, the reported figure — 1,168,354 homeless students — is known to actually underestimate the number of homeless children across the United States.

Ten states showed increases over the previous year of 20 percent or more; the states that showed the largest jumps in the numbers of homeless students were:

North Dakota, 212 percent
Maine, 58 percent
North Carolina, 53 percent
Michigan, 42 percent
Wyoming, 40 percent
South Dakota, 35 percent
Vermont, 31 percent