San Diego Unified may be on the receiving end of $215,000 in federal funds it would then spend on converting a retired school bus into a mobile laundromat for San Diego’s growing homeless population. It’s also considering opening its own safe-sleeping site, an official told NBC 7.
The idea is the brainchild of SDUSD area superintendent Stephen Dorsey, who’s been a San Diego guy for five years and who, as the father of eight, knows a little about laundry himself.
“Yes, it’s a lot of laundry,” Dorsey said. “That’s why we had an RV with a washer/dryer in it.”
Those experiences were the genesis for his idea.
“We had our floods in Southeast San Diego, and it was kind of within that whole timeframe of having conversations of, ‘Man, I wish there was something we could do to help folks who needed food, clothing, laundry,’ ” Dorsey said.
Dorsey realized the district had recently retired some school buses as part of the fleet’s transition to electric vehicles, and thought some of those could be pressed back into service.
“And then I was like, ‘Wait, we have buses that are sitting at our yard,’ and then I just kind of put the idea of, ‘OK: RV, we have a full kitchen, washer dryer, shower, bath, beds, entertainment,’ ” Dorsey told NBC 7 recently. “Why can’t we just fill one with washers, dryers to help people get clean clothes, particularly our homeless population?”
Eventually, the idea made its way to the office of local congressional Rep. Sara Jacobs, who included a request for the funding — which, according to Dorsey, would only provide the necessary money to convert a single bus — as one of 15 San Diego projects totaling $27.5 million in federal funds her office submitted as part of a Fiscal Year 2025 Community Project Funding request.
“Having clean clothes is a simple but incredibly important part of the unhoused community’s ability to live with dignity, maintain good hygiene, pursue job opportunities and more,” Jacobs said in an email recently sent to NBC 7. “That’s why I’m so proud to push for $215,000 in federal funds for the San Diego Unified School District to create mobile washer and dryer units out of old school buses and bring this necessity directly to the unhoused community.”
Not everyone, however, is firmly behind the idea. One critic is Todd Maddison, who is both the director of research at Transparent California, a data-driven web site that discloses the pay packages of state and local governmental workers, as well as the leader of the Parent Association, an educational advocacy organization. While he was not familiar with the bus-conversion plan, he had thoughts on the topic regardless.
“I don’t know if I really know a lot about that — it’s not an area of expertise that we have at Transparent California or in my K-12 activism either,” Maddison told NBC 7 this week. “A quick comment would just be: Why is the school district spending money doing something that seems like the responsibility of the city or the state, or the county or some other entity? I prefer that the school districts stick to their knitting and improve where they need to improve.”
If the prototype bus gets converted and up and running, the district will fund its continued operation, paying for supplies and staffers to drive the bus and operate the laundry. It’s expected that all the federal funding will be used in transitioning the bus to its proposed role.
“Well, we have our maintenance budget for our buses now and our yard, so it would be” paid for out of the school-bus maintenance budget, Dorsey said.
Dorsey said the bus is expected to drive out to safe-sleeping and safe-parking sites and shelters, where it would clean the clothes of any interested residents, not just kids.
So why is the district mulling providing a service that’s non-educational and not limited to students? Basically, Dorsey agreed, the guiding principle is to help families with children who are in those spaces and wherever homeless children are. He told NBC 7 that the district has 6,500 “identified” homeless children (that figure can swell to 8,500 during the school year) and said that San Diego Unified is considering providing a safe-parking space of its own.
“I don’t know if you realize this or not, but we do have many families who are in homeless situations that are right by our school sites,” Dorsey said, adding later that the bus or buses would be sent “wherever there’s homeless, wherever there’s families, children that we know are in need, that’s the whole point of the bus: to make it mobile.”
Critics might wonder: Would it be cheaper to give people stipends to do laundry?
“It might be; I don’t know — once we get the bus, then the operational cost probably is not going to be too much,” Dorsey said, adding that there may be other sources of funding: “And if we partner, I’m reaching out to Tide, to Whirlpool, to Downey … to really see if we can leverage some relationships. Again, that’ll keep costs down.”
Dorsey did concede that nobody at the district has crunched the numbers to see how much the program would cost the city-schools system. He’s envisioning a half-dozen sets of washers and dryers on each retrofitted bus.
“I’m thinking a ladder on one end, out the exit doors on another,” Dorsey said. “Come in, wash, dry, fold.”
Jacobs’s office said they “hope that Congress passes government funding, and hopefully include this project, by the end of September. But given it’s an election year, we’ll likely pass a continuing resolution until after the election and then pass a budget, hopefully including funding for this project, by the end of the calendar year.”
“So if we were to get the money for 2025,” Dorsey said. “I would anticipate maybe six to eight months once we get the funding to try and get the bus converted,—- up and ready to run.”