Bethany House CEO, Peg Dierkers, Weighs in on Impact of CPS Safe Sleep Lot
Cincinnati Public Schools has delayed the opening of its safe sleep lot for homeless students for the second time.
Originally slated to open in March at William Howard Taft Elementary School, the lot will now open on April 30, the district told The Enquirer. The new opening date comes after the district lastestimated in February that the lot would be ready for families by mid-April.
It will operate through the summer, slated to close Nov. 30, the district said, when temperatures drop. At that time, those residing in the lot will be offered sleeping space at a church that the district said has asked to go unnamed.
A first-of-its-kind effort in the state known to the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, the district’s project offers 12 parking spaces to families living out of their vehicles. The initiative is meant to support the CPS’s homeless student population that has nearly doubled since 2015.
In recent months, the district saw a swell in businesses reaching out, wanting to contribute to the lot after the initiative garnered lots of media coverage in October 2025. And the delayed opening, CPS said, allows for them to build out resources offered by local vendors, including a kitchenette stocked with meals courtesy of Freestore Foodbank.
“We’re preparing to open with a safe place to sleep, showers, laundry and warm meals,” the district previously told The Enquirer.
In terms of safety, CPS previously said it will employ a full-time security guard to monitor the lot during all hours of operation, from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. seven days a week. Those same hours of operation will be maintained through the summer months.
Families in safe sleep lot will get priority spots at shelter, district says
By no means a permanent solution, the lot is meant to expedite families’ placement in a living shelter like Bethany House or YWCA of Greater Cincinnati, Beach said.
Within 24 hours of being at the lot, Beach said, families’ homelessness status will be verified by Greater Cincinnati Behavioral Health Services and they’ll be placed on a priority wait list for a spot at a family shelter.
The new method should iron out difficulties faced in the city’s current method of identifying families living on the street and prioritizing them for shelter spots, Peg Dierkers, chief executive officer of Bethany House, told The Enquirer. The largest of the three local family shelters, Bethany House can shelter 43 families at a time at capacity.
“One of the issues has been … the street outreach team comes out to verify that they’re living on the street, but they weren’t there,” Dierkers said. “This will increase the speed with which these families will be put at the top of the list.”
“She’s making the system work for the people she’s advocating for,” Dierkers said about Beach’s work organizing the safe sleep lot. “We appreciate the superintendent and (that) the district was willing to take this on to keep families as safe as they can before we can get them into shelter.”
The jump in homeless students represents a rise in local families who have no roof over their heads or who often have to choose between paying their rent or buying food, Dierkers said. And shelters are struggling to keep up.
Bethany House has been consistently at maximum capacity since 2018, Dierkers said, with three to five families moving out to permanent housing situations per week on average. Typically, families stay at Bethany House for 70 days, she added.
How did we get here?
Data from Cincinnati Public Schools shows that the district had 4,326 homeless students in the 2024-25 school year, a 77% jump from a decade prior.
“We work really hard so that they’re homeless once in their life and it’s the shortest (duration) possible,” Dierkers said.
The trend is ultimately driven by a lack of affordable housing, she said.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit devoted to ending the country’s affordable housing crisis, Cincinnati is short nearly 54,000 units of housing that is affordable and available.
