Federal funding to support homeless students often comes up short.

Before the pandemic, it amounted to about $60 annually per identified homeless student nationwide, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation in partnership with The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist. That often represents a sliver of what schools spend to support them.

In December, Congress increased funding for homeless students by 13%, a move that came after a years-long push by advocates and our investigation the previous month. But that’s hundreds of millions of dollars below the level many members of Congress thought was necessary.

And the money doesn’t flow directly to schools that serve the children. Reporting by Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist found that Washington, D.C., schools with the highest percentage of homeless students were not awarded the funding. The Seattle Times showed how federal formulas leave states like Washington, which does a better job identifying the children qualifying for help, with less money per homeless student than other places.

Now, some school districts are allocating more money for helping these students as they try to close the gap left by insufficient federal funding. Children with unstable housing are less likely to graduate and more likely to face discipline than their peers, making school support critical.

New York City, the nation’s largest school system, is the latest to propose funneling more money to schools that enroll a significant number of homeless students, joining the state of California and districts such as Boston and Houston.

“If we don’t write that into the funding formula, it’s tough to have that batch of students represented in the push and pull around spending decisions,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab, a Georgetown University research center focused on school finance.

A 2020 Edunomics Lab report found that large school districts often use funding formulas to support particular types of students, such as those living in poverty or suffering from poor academic performance. Few target funds specifically for homeless students.

Last school year, more than 100,000 students in New York City were homeless. Across the nation, K-12 schools have identified more than 1 million homeless students, which represents a significant undercount, Public Integrity’s investigation revealed.

In nearly every state, homeless students graduate at much lower rates — and dropping out of high school increases their risk of housing instability later in life. Students experiencing housing instability often face discipline in schools at rates higher than their housed peers, as The Seattle Times showed in December.

School districts are hoping that rethinking funding for homeless students could better cover the cost of keeping them on the path to success.

In New York City, the proposed additional $45 million would prioritize the “needs and voices of students who have long been forgotten,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.

A city education department panel will review the proposal. If the plan is approved, schools could use the money to hire more staff and run outreach programs to connect with homeless children, including migrant students and those living in temporary housing.

“There’s a way to make sure that the money is flowing to the schools where these kids are and make sure it’s flexible enough to address their needs,” Roza said. “And it signals to schools that you really do need to do a good job by these kids and recognize that they’re different than their low-income peers who are housed.”

Figuring out how to fund support for homeless students

The latest funding boost from Congress comes after the American Rescue Plan earmarked $800 million for identifying and supporting homeless students in 2021, making federal funds available to districts that had not previously received the money.

Until the rush of one-time emergency aid in response to the pandemic, only one in four districts nationwide received dedicated funding for homeless students.

But the money was temporary. Advocates for maintaining that level of funding highlighted how districts used the windfall to expand spaces for students to study or do laundry, to improve access to counseling and legal services, or even to connect students with housing vouchers.

Last spring, about one-fifth of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a letter to their colleagues, urging renewal of the additional funding. The latest budget supplied a fraction of that: $129 million, the 13% increase over the previous year’s regular allotment for homeless students.

Before the budget vote, Democratic and Republican members of Congress told Public Integrity the federal government must do more to ensure consistent homeless-student support. 

In Washington state, officials at the North Thurston Public Schools have devoted more resources to homeless students, boosting their high school graduation rates by double digits, The Seattle Times found. But officials there are worried what will happen when federal and state funding dries up. 

Under the current system, the U.S. Department of Education awards funds to states through a formula that factors in poverty rates. States use their share to funnel competitive grants to districts.

“Part of [the solution] has to be making sure that the school districts that have good intentions … can get the resources they need to serve all students,” said Katie Meyer Scott, senior youth attorney with the National Homelessness Law Center. “That’s the harder issue.”

Shifts to the way districts are funded would allow schools to better assist students whose needs can change by the day, said Roza of the Edunomics Lab. A student experiencing homelessness may require a transportation voucher to get to school one day, a social worker to help with housing support and a tutor to help them catch up in class the next day.

“Whenever money comes from federal sources, it comes with federal rules. You have people saying, ‘You’re allowed to do this, and you’re not allowed to do that,’” Roza said. “That may not be the right approach for students with very dynamic needs that are changing regularly. They need people to be more nimble and responsive with a flexible pool of money.”

The post Funding decisions often shortchange homeless students appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Shambrika Crawford caught her daughter trying to board a Seattle city bus to avoid the school bus outside the homeless shelter they moved into over the summer. 

Kids pick on her, her daughter said, and call her a “little dirty shelter kid.”

Crawford has advised her three school-age children to keep to themselves and try to fit in, but her daughter’s after-school detentions are starting to pile up. Before the family moved from Georgia to Washington for work, she didn’t get into that kind of trouble, Crawford said. The biggest complaint from her daughter’s teachers was that she sometimes lost focus in class and didn’t do her work.

But with so much upheaval, Crawford is worried what the recent bout of discipline means. 

If things become more serious, the results could be life-changing.

Homeless students in Washington face the most severe punishments from school — suspension and expulsion — at almost three times the rate of their housed peers. A child’s housing status is an even greater predictor of discipline than race.

But while a major overhaul in the state education department’s discipline policy, passed in 2016, aimed to fix that racial disparity, there has been almost nothing done specifically for homeless students, even as education officials say they are well aware of the gap.

Experiencing homelessness as a child, even once, puts that child at a greater risk of poor academic performance, dropping out of school and being homeless as an adult, according to researchers.

Unhoused and Undercounted

Federal law requires that public schools assist homeless students to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.

Read more

When exclusionary discipline is added to these stressful circumstances, the chances of succeeding become more slim. 

Children forced to leave school for their behavior are less likely to graduate — already a major obstacle for homeless students — and the likelihood of becoming involved in the juvenile legal system goes up. 

“We need to reconcile or reckon with the fact that, like, ‘Are we OK with this?’” said Daniel Narváez Zavala, executive director of Building Changes, a Seattle organization that works with school districts to better support homeless students. “If we are not OK with that, we need to do something different.”

The Seattle Times’ Project Homeless is collaborating with the Center for Public Integrity to examine how homeless students are faring in Washington and across the U.S. These stories also include a look at how one school district greatly improved graduation rates for homeless students, as well as how federal funding disparities disadvantage Washington.

Working from a punitive past

Since Washington state began tracking discipline data in 2014, the disproportionate use of exclusionary discipline on homeless students has held steady.

Across Washington state, 1 in 10 homeless students was required to leave school for disciplinary reasons during the 2018-19 school year, the last complete school year before the pandemic, compared to 1 out of every 25 housed students. 

The only student group in Washington that receives more exclusionary discipline than homeless students is children in foster care, where nearly 1 in 7 were suspended or expelled in the 2018-2019 school year. These rates don’t take into account how many times an individual student is excluded from school within a school year. 

When Washington overhauled its disciplinary guidelines in 2016, officials replaced 1970s-era language meant to punish students with rules that describe punishment as a last resort, said Maria Flores, executive director of the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Center for the Improvement of Student Learning.

There’s been an increase in cultural competency training for Washington teachers and a host of preventive measures have been adopted to try to stem unruly behavior before things get out of hand, Flores explained. While these changes aren’t specifically geared to homeless students, state officials said they hope it also helps them.

Some districts say they suspend or expel for extreme issues, like violence and guns. But Flores said the agency is still seeing students suspended or expelled for what it considers minor, like failure to cooperate. 

Homeless students, students in foster care, students with disabilities and Black, Native American and Alaskan Native students all face disproportionate levels of discipline. 

A five-year study by Seattle’s Building Changes showed that racial disparities in discipline rates are also reflected within the homeless population, with Black students punished with the highest percentage of exclusionary discipline. In Washington, more than 60% of the state’s homeless population, totaling over 40,000 people, are students of color. 

“What those disparities say to me is that our system isn’t working,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan. “The fact that we see these gaps means that we don’t have a system that is equitable.”

Investments pay off for students

As one of the state’s agricultural hubs, Wenatchee schools serve a large population of children of migrant workers.

Most schools have a family advocate who focuses exclusively on serving homeless and migrant students, often groups that overlap, said Jeremy Wheatley, who oversees Wenatchee’s McKinney-Vento program. The federal program is aimed at guaranteeing equal access to education for homeless students, and every school district in the U.S. is required to have a staff member whose partial or sole job is to ensure compliance.

The district reported 4.7% of homeless students in the 2018-19 school year received exclusionary discipline — one-and-a-half times greater than the 3.1% of housed students, a substantially smaller difference compared to the state.

Wenatchee School District also employs two full-time staff members focused on the school district’s more than 500 homeless students.

Tukwila School District in South King County involves these liaisons when students have behavioral issues, and reports only 3% of homeless students are disciplined on average, while the state’s average is nearly 10%.

Liaisons often get a closer look at how homelessness impacts students.

As of 2016, Washington schools must provide education during a student’s exclusion and students can no longer be expelled for an indefinite amount of time. But that can be difficult if the student is staying in a busy, crowded shelter or doubled up with relatives or friends. Even more so if they are living in a tent or car.

If a homeless student is placed in out-of-school suspension, Tukwila district spokesperson Carrie Marting said, the McKinney-Vento liaison will work to make sure that student has a safe place to be in the daytime with food and technology.

Some school districts have also invested in staff whose mission is meeting the big and small needs of homeless students to raise graduation rates.

“If it weren’t for the people in the system, and the intentional use of dollars to put people in the right spot to support our students, we wouldn’t be anywhere,” said Wenatchee’s Wheatley. 

Homelessness as a marker

Crawford said she’s visited her daughter’s middle school in South King County to speak with faculty there, but she’s worried they don’t fully understand what her family, especially her children, have had to face in recent months. 

Crawford’s currently in a custody battle. She recently faced a serious health scare. And she’s working to start a new life in Washington, but until she can earn enough to find housing, the family’s only option is the family shelter. 

Crawford said she thinks her daughter has tried standing up to bullying at school and that’s the root of some of the behavior issues.

“It’s one thing to come from like a homeless shelter and go to school,” Crawford said, “but to be treated by where you stay and some of the things that you wear — it’s not right.”  

The experience of homelessness is a marker that a student might have many behavioral trigger points, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization for homeless students.  

“It’s this marker of extreme vulnerability, where you have multiple system failures, multiple traumas, traumas coming together, that then become exacerbated, you know, once the student is actually homeless,” Duffield said. 

That trauma doesn’t have to lead to disproportionate school discipline, Duffield said.

SchoolHouse Connection, and other policy organizations, such as Building Changes, have recommended measures for closing the discipline gap both nationally and locally. These include incorporating school staff who support homeless students early in the disciplinary process, more trauma and homelessness training, and consideration of a child’s housing status before removal from school, among other measures.

The Seattle Times contacted several school districts with high discipline rates for homeless students, including the state’s largest, Seattle Public Schools, and they declined to participate in this story. 

But some said they’ve created more support for homeless students since the most recent discipline data came out.

Kent School District said last year it started providing case management for homeless students with behavioral or academic needs. Vancouver School District said it’s developed an equity plan to address the disproportionality in discipline. 

Narváez Zavala of Building Changes said that as educators understand more about how students learn differently and as they create a variety of methods for teaching, they need to address discipline the same way.

“It’s not just the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach,” Narváez Zavala said. 

He said that when discipline is applied in the same way, across a broad range of students, homeless students experience it more harshly — unlike their housed peers, they are being removed from possibly one of the only places that provides a sense of stability and safety. 

So some solutions might not focus on the disruptive behaviors at all. Tacoma School District officials said they recently hired a housing navigator to help students and families.

But since the state is two years behind in releasing discipline data, it will take years to understand if these measures are making a difference. 

Erb-Downward, who has studied the connection between homelessness and discipline, said there are plenty of things that the federal government, states and local districts can do around discipline to make improvements, beginning with understanding the scope of the problem. 

But these behavioral issues showing up in the classroom, Erb-Downward said, go beyond just educators and school administrators. 

“If housing instability, poverty and trauma are some of the drivers behind behaviors that are coming into the classroom,” Erb-Downward said, “wouldn’t it make more sense to try to make policies that ensure that children have access to a safe, stable place to live and grow up? That they have access to food?” 

The post Homeless, then kicked out of school appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Washington state has one of the largest homeless student populations in the country — 40,000 just prior to the pandemic. Yet, Washington school districts in the 2018-19 school year received an average of $29 per homeless student from one of the main federal funds for homeless students to pay for transportation, books, extracurriculars or any other need they can’t afford.

Vermont, which has about 1,000 homeless students, received $211 each.

In fact, Washington received the lowest amount per homeless student of any state that year. The McKinney-Vento Act, passed in 1987, requires districts across the country to identify students who are homeless, and provides some grants to districts to help support them.

Washington excels at this identification — and pays a price for it.

That’s due to a paradox in how McKinney-Vento funding is allocated. The funding does not increase even if the population it’s trying to help does. State officials say this disparity likely puts Washington’s homeless students at a disadvantage compared with those in other states. Experts agree, calling the formula flawed for inadvertently penalizing states that make the greatest efforts to identify students who might need these resources.

Nationally, states receive $60 per homeless student on average. If Washington were awarded that for its homeless student population, the state would have received double what it did in the 2018-19 school year — an extra $1.2 million.

“There’s something not quite right about it,” said Liza Rankin, vice president of the Seattle School Board.

Looking at her district’s graduation rates for homeless students — 64% compared with 87% for the overall student body — Rankin says that “clearly is showing they’re not being provided with what they need.” 

A Seattle Times partnership with the Center for Public Integrity has shown that those extra funds could potentially change the lives of Washington’s homeless students, who graduate in smaller numbers, score lower on tests and are disciplined more than their housed peers. 

One school district in Lacey was able to raise homeless student graduation rates by more than 15% with just a few extra support staff paid for by money it raised through competitive grants and from the community and pandemic relief funding, giving their students a better chance at avoiding homelessness later in life.

Some advocates and experts are calling for change in the way McKinney-Vento funding is distributed, to be based at least partially on the count of each state’s homeless students.

But those same experts say that improvement would be marginal. With the total pie of homeless student funding so small — at most, less than 1% of the federal education budget — they say states with a homeless population as great as Washington’s could divert resources from other states that also need support. 

Unhoused and Undercounted

Federal law requires that public schools assist homeless students to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.

Read more

How Washington loses out

Washington state has made a strong push to identify more of its homeless students in the past decade. And it has worked.

Washington has become a leader nationwide in identifying student homelessness, according to Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy nonprofit for homeless students. She said that’s been the result of consistent training for school staff on how to spot signs of homelessness, such as chronic tardiness or wearing the same clothes every day.

Washington also passed a law in 2016 that requires each school building to designate a staff member as a “point of contact” who is responsible for identifying homeless students. The state goes further in being one of a few that provide state-level homelessness funding in addition to the federal dollars to school districts. 

Those resources provide more staff in Washington who can identify unhoused students, Duffield said.

Between 2008 and the start of the pandemic, the number of identified homeless students in Washington doubled from 20,000 to 40,000. Washington state accounts for about 3% of all identified homeless students nationwide. An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity shows there are likely 300,000 unidentified homeless students across the country, with less than 1% of those in Washington.

Yet that made no difference to the amount of federal homeless student funding Washington received.

“A state like Washington that does a good job of identification does not receive an increase in [McKinney-Vento] funding even if an obvious need has been demonstrated,” said Katy Payne, a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

That’s because the funding is based largely on a state’s number of school-age children living in poverty — measured by the U.S. census — not the number of homeless students. 

That means each student identified gets a smaller slice of the pie.

Oregon, Utah, California and Nevada also excel at identifying homeless students, and also receive a low amount of McKinney-Vento funding per student, according to the Center for Public Integrity analysis. 

Homeless-student funding formula ‘feels unfair’

“It feels unfair,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, who researches student homelessness.

The McKinney-Vento funding formula disincentivizes school districts from improving identification of homeless students, Erb-Downward said, because the districts would have to then pay for more of the supportive services those students are entitled to by law, and it would likely come out of the districts’ pockets, which are often already stretched thin.

One of the main provisions of the McKinney-Vento Act requires school districts to provide free transportation to homeless students, who are also allowed to stay enrolled at the same school they were attending when they first became homeless, even if they’ve moved neighborhoods or cities. Those rights can get expensive for school districts to provide.

In the 2018-19 school year, Washington school districts reported they spent more than $32 million to transport homeless students to and from school. 

In many states, school districts are often left to find those funds wherever they can.

Washington state reimburses school districts for travel. But in 2019, the state auditor’s office found that this reimbursement for homeless student travel costs did not fully cover expenses for half of districts, with some getting reimbursed only 60% of their costs.

For example, in the 2019-20 school year, Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver said the state’s reimbursement for its homeless student transportation was more than $300,000 short. The district filled this gap using a local tax levy.

The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction said it could not determine if Evergreen’s claim was accurate but said it has proposed to the Washington Legislature that the state move to a new funding model that would cover more of those transportation costs.

Districts get by piecemeal

As it stands, less than 15% of Washington school districts receive any federal McKinney-Vento funding for homeless students. At the same time, districts said they spent more than $28 million for that population in the 2018-19 school year, according to a survey by the auditor’s office. That’s likely a huge underestimate, given that less than half of districts in the state responded. 

Washington school districts say they provide the most basic needs for their homeless students by relying on other funds that are also limited and aren’t specifically geared toward homeless students.

Many school districts use federal Title I, Part A funds for the bulk of their homelessness needs. It’s a program designed to help students from low-income families, and school districts have to decide how much of this funding to spend on homeless students versus low-income students more broadly — a bigger pool. 

For example, Bellingham Public Schools allocates $15,000 from its Title I, Part A, funding for homeless students. Evergreen Public Schools has about twice the number of homeless students and sets aside 15 times as much — $225,000. 

Evergreen’s graduation rate for homeless students is 79% compared with Bellingham’s 58%.

Bellingham school officials said overloaded staff, a fundamental housing shortage and a lack of mental health resources are the biggest factors in their district’s low homeless student graduation rate.

Duffield, with SchoolHouse Connection, said there should be more oversight and transparency over how school districts decide how much of their Title I, Part A funds to set aside for homeless students. Congress has recently instructed the U.S. Department of Education to take a closer look at this issue.

Bellingham and Evergreen, among other districts, also rely on the state funding for homeless students, but it tops out at $1.7 million distributed to less than 10% of districts per year. 

What should happen?

Experts say the McKinney-Vento grant funding formula should change.

A report published in September 2022 by the national nonprofit the Learning Policy Institute suggests that Congress target McKinney-Vento dollars based on student homelessness numbers to promote better identification, rather than disincentivizing it.

While that would benefit Washington, that would punish states that do a relatively worse job of identifying homeless students, and could deprive them of resources to improve, some experts say. 

The real problem with funding for homeless students, says Erb-Downward, the University of Michigan researcher, is that “there’s not enough to go around. It needs to be expanded.” 

The pandemic provided a historic boost to districts’ homeless student programs in the form of $800 million in American Rescue Plan funds — seven times the usual allotment — that is set to expire in 2024.

Advocates for homeless students had called for the federal government to convert the one-time American Rescue Plan funding into a sustained investment. In the most recent budget passed by Congress, the federal government will instead increase its funding for homeless students by 13% — an additional $15 million nationwide.

The post How a funding paradox hurts the schools doing right by homeless students appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

A leading advocate for homeless rights in Congress says the federal government must do a better job helping schools identify and assist students who are experiencing housing instability, a serious barrier to graduation for many youth.

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s comments come in the wake of a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal education data that suggests roughly 300,000 children and youth entitled to rights reserved for homeless students are going unidentified by the school districts mandated to help them.

“It is tragic if we are not providing desperately needed help for kids who are just probably struggling every single day to make it,” said Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri.

Public Integrity’s analysis revealed that many districts are likely undercounting. And about 2,400 districts did not report having any homeless students, despite levels of financial need that make such figures improbable.

Cleaver chairs the House Committee on Financial Services’ subcommittee that oversees efforts on homelessness. In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reviewed how the nation counts its homeless population after he raised concerns about under-identification concealing the true extent of need.

The government watchdog agency concluded that better oversight of data collection by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could improve the nation’s homeless population estimates.

Those tallies are separate from the counts required of schools. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, the federal law that provides money for homeless programs, mandates that schools identify students living in situations such as shelters, motels, cars and tents as well as those “doubled up” with extended family or friends after economic need forced them from home.

Districts must waive enrollment requirements, such as immunization forms, that could keep children out of class. They must refer families to health care and housing services. And they must provide transportation to and from school, including to students whose housing instability pushed them outside district boundary lines.

If students are not identified as homeless, they are not eligible for support and services.

Staff for U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who wants more consistent federal resources for homeless-student support, contacted several superintendents in his district after Public Integrity’s analysis showed likely undercounts there. Some of the school leaders expressed confusion over McKinney-Vento eligibility, especially when students are doubled up — a common reason children fall through the cracks of a system intended to help.

Another reason, Public Integrity found: The typical amount of federal funding for homeless students is so low that it doesn’t cover the extra support required. Some schools aren’t keen to look too hard.

Enforcing a federal law at the state and local level is challenging, Bacon said.

The U.S. Department of Education delegates enforcement to states. States where school districts do not follow the law are subject to increased monitoring, but the federal agency has declined to say how often that occurs.

“It’s very hard to force schools to do it the way we want. I don’t know that we have the big stick in this case, but we can help provide resources. We can encourage schools to do it,” Bacon said. “We’re never going to have perfection here, but I want to make sure we have resources.”

The 2021 American Rescue Plan made $800 million available to states and districts to identify and support homeless students, a one-time infusion far above the norm that school officials said was sorely needed. Bacon was a lead author of a “Dear Colleague” letter in April urging a similar funding boost for the McKinney-Vento law this year.

Cleaver, who signed the letter, said he plans to discuss undercounting with officials at the Education and Health and Human Services departments. The two federal agencies implement the McKinney-Vento law, the former for provisions involving schools, the latter for most other circumstances.

“There is so much that can be done that [this] is, frankly, a sore eye on all of us. Kids are out there needing help and not receiving it,” Cleaver said. “We are ready to be of help and support to any school district where there’s a problem.”

Reporting by KCUR, an NPR affiliate and one of the newsrooms that partnered with Public Integrity on the “Unhoused and Undercounted” investigation, focused on a Kansas City, Missouri-area school system in Cleaver’s district with a homeless-student count well below what financial need there would suggest is likely.

“I don’t know whether that was any intentional failure to provide the data that’s needed,” Cleaver said. “There are so many ways in which this act can help young people that I hope every school district in the country familiarizes [itself] with it and follows through.”

Unhoused and Undercounted

Federal law requires that public schools assist homeless students to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.

Read more

Across the nation, homeless students graduate at much lower rates than average. Without high school diplomas, they often face greater risk of housing insecurity as adults.

Black and Latino children were particularly over-represented among students identified as homeless nationwide. Students with disabilities and American Indian or Alaska Native students also experience homelessness at disproportionate rates.

Difficulty securing a ride to school is one reason unhoused students tend to lag their peers academically. Federal law, on paper, guarantees homeless children transportation to school, even without a permanent address. That promise is not always readily delivered.

Public Integrity’s investigation detailed the experience of Beth Petersen, a mother in Southern California who said her son’s school district didn’t respond to emails asking staff to send a bus to their new, temporary address after the two became homeless and were forced outside district boundaries. Unable to continue paying acquaintances to drive the teenager to school, Petersen estimated her son missed a month of classes before the California Department of Education intervened at her request. At last, he can ride the bus to school.

Then there are the students whose districts do not even recognize they are homeless.

Public Integrity’s analysis compared the number of homeless students identified by school districts to a commonly used benchmark that estimates that one-in-20 students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches experience homelessness. Advocates and researchers say this metric is likely still a conservative estimate — but 8,000 districts failed to meet it in both of two recent school years analyzed. 

It’s the same benchmark Arkansas officials cited in a November presentation before the State Board of Education. Arkansas school districts identified about 1,300 fewer students experiencing homelessness in 2018-19 than expected when state officials applied the one-in-20 benchmark at the state level. The gap since then keeps growing — and Public Integrity’s analysis, which applies the benchmark at the district level, suggests that schools were missing even more students as of 2019-20.

Kimberly Mundell, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Education, wrote in a statement to Public Integrity that the department conducts monthly meetings with districts’ liaisons to homeless students and works with community organizations to provide rapid response services. 

Public Integrity’s analysis also flagged dozens of school districts in Mississippi where the number of students identified as homeless fell below benchmark estimates. Shanderia K. Minor, a spokesperson for the state Department of Education, said in a statement that under-identification of homeless children and youth “is likely,” citing “turnover rates and lack of understanding of the McKinney-Vento Act, especially for new staff.” 

Minor highlighted the department’s efforts to train school districts on the law and review homeless data for “potential discrepancies.” 

In Congress, officials charged with oversight of the school-related provisions of the law sit on the House Education and Labor Committee. Leaders there were not eager to discuss under-identification when asked for interviews or statements.

A spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia and the current chairman of the committee, first said different committees provided oversight. When informed otherwise, she suggested seeking comment from the U.S. Department of Education. Scott’s office agreed to answer questions in writing after Public Integrity reporters kept pressing, then did not respond.

U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, the highest-ranking Republican member on the committee, also did not respond to requests for comment. 

Nor did the U.S. Department of Education.

Before the pandemic, McKinney-Vento funding was so low that it equated to about $60 per identified homeless student nationwide. Several state departments of education contacted by Public Integrity said the one-time funding infusion from the American Rescue Plan allowed them to launch programs to help educators better understand the law’s requirements.

Among those was the Georgia Department of Education, which also gave money to districts “to address low reporting numbers and increase awareness.”

Students would benefit, spokesperson Meghan Frick wrote in a statement, if the typical level of federal funding increased to allow these efforts to continue.

Increased federal funding could help more school districts follow the example of North Thurston Public Schools in Washington state, a district profiled by The Seattle Times as part of the Unhoused and Undercounted investigation.

North Thurston hires additional “student navigators” exclusively to support homeless students — an investment well beyond the McKinney-Vento law’s requirements, which mandate districts designate only one liaison to homeless students, a position often held on a part-time basis. 

The extra investment in North Thurston has paid off. The graduation rate among homeless students there rose from 65% in 2017 to 81% in 2021, just seven percentage points shy of the overall district rate.

Barbara Duffield, the executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy nonprofit for homeless students, told The Seattle Times the navigator program was “what the McKinney-Vento Act at its heart was designed to do but with the resources to actually do it.”

But as the district runs out of money from the American Rescue Plan, it may have to cut two student navigator positions, The Seattle Times reported.

The “Dear Colleague” letter that Reps. Bacon and Cleaver signed months ago was a plea to sustain the federal funding, which benefited North Thurston and other districts. Congress has still not set its budget.

The post Officials: Federal government must do better for homeless students appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

The Center for Public Integrity is the only national investigative newsroom solely focusing on the causes and effects of inequality. Telling these stories well takes time, resources and expertise.

Investigating inequality often requires employing the tools of social scientists to do original analyses. These techniques have been used by newsrooms to show disparities in home mortgage lending, jury selection, student achievement and more. 

For Public Integrity’s recent investigation Unhoused and Undercounted, Amy DiPierro and Corey Mitchell used those techniques to show that hundreds of thousands of homeless students likely have not been counted by their school districts — despite a 1987 federal law requiring them to do so. When students aren’t counted, they can’t get access to transportation if they move out of the district, leading to more missed class time, dropouts and reduced learning. It also means they don’t get other services, such as referrals for health care and housing.

This investigation breaks new ground because while there has been reporting about undercounts of homeless students over the years, no media outlet has tried to quantify the gap within school districts nationwide.

Unhoused and Undercounted

Federal law requires that public schools assist homeless students to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.

Read more

To get there, reporters talked with experts to develop a statistical model that would estimate just how many students had fallen through the cracks.

To gauge whether school districts are identifying homeless students, researchers and some education officials estimate that at least 1 in 20 students qualifying for free- or reduced- price lunch experience homelessness. Reporters applied that figure to existing data, allowing them to estimate the gap between the expected number of homeless students and the actual reported numbers. The difference nationwide: about 300,000 children and youth.

Previous research also had shown a relationship between measures related to poverty, such as the poverty rate and the ratio of household income to the poverty line, and housing instability. That relationship didn’t surprise us. What did was that in many states, reporters found no relationship between three separate poverty measures and the rate of homeless students. That’s a sign of just how bad the undercounting is.

Zeroing in more closely, reporters identified districts that reported much lower numbers than they should have, given the rate of students impacted by poverty. 

One example: DeSoto County, Mississippi, identified fewer than 300 homeless students. Based on its share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches, the district would be expected to have three times the number it reported.

By comparison, reporters found, Mississippi’s Vicksburg Warren School District identified about as many homeless students as DeSoto despite having less than half as many children eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches.

As with any data-driven investigation, there are caveats. There are cases where homelessness and poverty may not actually be closely connected, such as in communities where wildfires destroyed homes. Many other factors in addition to poverty can cause families and youth to experience housing instability.

The analysis also found that homelessness disproportionately affects students of color and disabled students. 

This type of accountability journalism drives change and provides policymakers and the public with evidence needed to support those changes. As one expert told reporters: 

“You’re giving us a clue as to the magnitude of this problem. And that’s really the important part here.”

What’s equally important is that this work did not stop with our newsroom. Public Integrity extends the reach of its investigations to other newsrooms. The reporting and audience teams shared the data, notes and graphics with dozens of local news outlets. The team made complex data understandable and held regular office hours for local newsrooms, many of whom are better positioned to hold local officials accountable. 

If you want to dig into all the details of the analysis, check out their white paper. 

The post Public Integrity student homelessness project breaks ground appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Towanda Chew has gone to extraordinary lengths to prioritize her children’s education. Like many parents navigating homelessness, keeping this promise remains a harrowing challenge. It requires that she first keep them safe and sheltered. 

“I wish I could have walked on the stage,” said Chew, who didn’t graduate from high school, but got her GED. “And that’s why I’m so hard on them about finishing school, going through that … I stay on them about that,” said Chew. She is a single mom to five daughters and two sons, two of whom still live with her. 

After experiencing homelessness on and off for three years, Chew and her children finally moved into a subsidized apartment along Martin Luther King Jr Ave. in Southeast D.C. in 2020. 

But her housing troubles were far from over. Soon after moving in, her toilet began overflowing, creating a stagnant two-inch pool of water that left a feces smell in her apartment. Even after contacting her landlord, she said she could not get the necessary repairs or relocate to a vacant unit within the building. The stench lingered for months. Then in September, someone broke into her apartment and damaged the lock on her front door. Again, she said her landlord failed to adequately respond. But these could be the least of her problems — her rental subsidy is time limited, so she’ll have to search for a new home regardless. 

For a year, Chew tried to move the family into another apartment but her case manager, she said, was no help. Instead, Chew turned to an unlikely source: the staff at her children’s high school. In the end, it was her children’s school — not her government assigned caseworker – who finally helped her family find temporary shelter at a hotel.

Chew is just one of countless parents across the country who turn to their children’s schools for help while navigating housing instability. Under the landmark McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, the U.S. Department of Education provides states, including D.C., with funding to support equal access to public education for homeless children and their families. Last academic year, D.C. public schools counted over 6,600 homeless students. However, a joint DCist/WAMU and Street Sense Media investigation using data from the Center for Public Integrity found some local schools serving a significant number of homeless students have not been getting those federal dollars. 

In fact, for both school years analyzed (2018-19 and 2019-20), school systems with the highest percentage of homeless students were not awarded McKinney-Vento dollars. While some opted out of applying for the funding, the third-party reviewers for D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) rejected applications from others. 

Among the schools that have missed out on this federal support is Maya Angelou Public Charter School, the place where Chew and her family received help navigating their housing issues. Despite the staff’s best efforts to support the increasing number of homeless students enrolled there, the school only sometimes receives McKinney-Vento funding. And they are more fortunate than most. 

What is the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grant?

Federal law requires state education agencies, D.C. included, to ensure each homeless child has “equal access” to “appropriate public education.” The law is a section under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which also authorizes the U.S. Department of Education to provide money to states to help achieve that mandate: the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grant. 

But it’s not nearly enough. U.S. Department of Education data shows that D.C. received $274,000 in 2018 and $289,760 in 2019. With somewhere between 7,700 and 7,100 homeless students in D.C. schools those years, which some advocates believe to be an undercount, that would be roughly $35 to $40 per student. Instead, the federal government requires the subgrants distributed by states to be competitive, and some D.C. schools with the highest rates of homelessness don’t receive help.

Between 2018 and 2020, there were eight local education agencies — all charter schools — where over a fifth of the student population was considered homeless for both school years, according to the federal data analyzed by DCist/WAMU, Street Sense Media and Public Integrity. Only one of them received McKinney-Vento dollars those years: Maya Angelou Public Charter School, which has multiple campuses. It also educates incarcerated young men at the city’s New Beginnings center. The school received the subgrant in the academic year 2018-19 when 26% of the student population was counted as homeless, but not the following year when that number jumped to 31%.

Meanwhile, D.C. Public Schools received the subgrant both years, with 6-7% of its student population counted as homeless. That still accounts for several thousand homeless students because DCPS is the largest local education agency — with 115 schools — and has nearly 50,000 students. Students in D.C. are split almost evenly between DCPS and the various public charter schools.

Fred Lewis, an OSSE spokesperson, said the local agency uses external reviewers to determine which school systems receive funding. “Grants are awarded based on ranking, which considers the strength of the LEA’s application, the number of students served and the amount of funds available,” Lewis said in an emailed statement.  

Charter officials said applying for the opportunity can be challenging for smaller public school districts – and if they are lucky enough to get the money, how schools may spend those dollars is restricted. For instance, it generally can’t be used for food or housing.

Schools that don’t get the subgrant do what they can to support unhoused families. But some parents have described instances where their school community fell short of ensuring their kids have educational opportunities comparable to classmates with stable housing. 

Historically, the McKinney-Vento grant was the only government funding routinely available to specifically support homeless students, which the law defines broadly as children who “lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” The only other recurring government support for local schools serving poor communities is the D.C. government’s funding for “at-risk” students, an even broader category that describes nearly half the students in D.C. 

As a temporary response to the COVID-19 pandemic, The American Rescue Plan released unprecedented dollars to states for homeless students, which OSSE said enabled D.C. to provide federal funding to all 69 local education agencies (DC Public Schools and 68 charter school systems).

The kinds of support homeless students need to learn

Maya Angelou Public Charter School is partially paying for Chew’s hotel through American Rescue Plan dollars, according to L'Tanya Holley, the school’s director of operations who’s coordinated services for unhoused families for over a decade. 

But those dollars are temporary – Maya Angelou is spending down its second and final round of funding. And the school does not regularly get the McKinney-Vento subgrant. 

“We went through hell and back, but they was here helping me,” said Chew of school staff.  “I call Ms. Holley my angel. Because she’s been there.”

The pair met in 2017, around the time when Chew was looking for a school to enroll her son in before he turned 18. After getting “the run around” at other schools, the family landed at Maya Angelou. The school opted to arrange temporary shelter for Chew and her family after Holley visited the subsidized apartment. Chew was also able to lean on the school’s monthly grocery distribution for toilet paper and food, a program made possible by private donations.

“Kids cannot learn on an empty stomach and they can't learn worrying about where they're going to sleep or worrying about their mother or their parents,” said Holley.

D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education distributes the McKinney-Vento funding as subgrants to schools with significant student populations navigating housing instability. They range between $600 and $86,000 and may go toward specialized personnel, supplemental instruction, referral services and school supplies. Yet several school districts that fall under this category and others OSSE prioritizes were not awarded dollars in the two school years analyzed: 2018-19 and 2019-20. 

The school districts with the highest percentage of homeless students for 2018-19 – Monument Academy Public Charter School and Cedar Tree Academy Public Charter School – applied for McKinney-Vento dollars and requested $20,000 and $16,000 respectively, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. However, the OSSE rejected their requests. (Both schools have applied for and received funding in subsequent years.)

Various charter officials have attributed their relatively high percentage of homeless students to their mission of serving vulnerable populations and their process of identifying homeless families who may need extra support during enrollment. Monument CEO Dr. Jeffrey Grant says the boarding school was founded to serve young people in the foster care system but has since expanded its pursuit to include other at-risk youth.

Meanwhile, some of the largest local education agencies received funding despite significantly lower rates of student homelessness, including $85,600 for DCPS and $38,000 for KIPP DC Public Charter School. But several smaller charters were also awarded McKinney-Vento funds during that time, suggesting headcount is not the determining factor. 

Within the large DCPS system, some individual schools have higher percentages of homeless students. Anacostia High School considers 13% of its student population to be homeless. And the school’s homeless liaison, Jocelyn Coleman, believes that to be an undercount. She attributes undercounting to the stigma associated with homelessness.  

“Nobody, especially a teenager, wants to be known as somebody who doesn't have a family or the family has kicked them out. Or they're living from house to house,” Coleman said. “To them, it's an embarrassment. And so a lot of the teenagers don't say anything to anybody.”

Coleman also says the school doesn’t have enough money to support unhoused students, requiring staff to solicit donations, particularly anything extra like non-uniform clothing for the weekend. “We look at their needs, but they also have wants, too,” Coleman said.

A separate analysis from the Center for Public Integrity estimates that thousands of public school districts are undercounting homeless students, missing an estimated 300,000 students nationwide.

While OSSE data shows that the total number of students experiencing homelessness in D.C. has largely trended down since 2016, that’s not every school district's experience. For example, the charter Rocketship Public Schools counted twice as many homeless students between 2016 and 2020, according to OSSE data. 

The charter school had among the highest percentage of homeless students among local education agencies in academic years 2018-19 and 2019-20 but did not get McKinney-Vento dollars. Public records show Rocketship Public Schools has never applied for the funding since 2016. The charter did not respond to requests for comment. 

In the years that Maya Angelou PCS didn’t get McKinney-Vento dollars, Holley said her school has had to dip into the school’s budget for other expenses and fundraise more. She’s even asked her friends to chip in. 

“It is very stressful because you got to steal from Peter to pay Paul,” said Holley. “I hate to have to tell a parent or a child ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’ In my 15 years, I’ve gotten very creative.” 

Why smaller schools have a harder time securing funding

The application process is thorough, asking school districts to provide a detailed budget and plan for tracking spending and evaluating its impact, according to Anna Scudiero, the development director at Monument Academy Public Charter School. “I, full-time, work on writing grants and things like that for the school. A lot of schools don't have a dedicated person to sit around and complete applications,” she said.  

Having recently taken on that role, Scudiero didn’t write the applications for the academic years Monument Academy’s requests for McKinney-Vento funding were rejected. But when she reviewed them afterward she said she thought they were “bare.” 

“It just didn't include the level of information that they were looking for. Even though it answered the questions,” she said. “I kind of think if you're serving the student population that you should automatically get additional funding to support them instead of making it a competitive process.”

The principal of Roots Public Charter School, where over a quarter of students are homeless, said her staff has given up on applying for McKinney-Vento dollars. “I have been told by my Homeless Liaison that the reason we’re not interested is that it takes too much time and effort to apply when it’s already known that only the big schools ever get it,” said Bernida Thompson. “It’s a waste of time for small schools to put the energy and time into trying to compete.” The school has roughly 120 students. 

The OSSE spokesperson contested that claim, saying, “Although larger [local education agencies] may be perceived as having a slight advantage due to typically having larger numbers of students experiencing homelessness, LEAs with a smaller number of students served have received funding in the past as well.” For example, Lewis said a school with only eight reported homeless students received McKinney-Vento funds in 2015. 

In the 2018-19 academic year, 17 local education agencies applied for new funding, and five were awarded, according to public records. For the 2019-20 school year, four local education agencies applied and one received it. OSSE told the D.C. Council only one school district was awarded new funding that year “due to limited available funds.” (Three other schools that received money the previous year also received some continued funding for 2019-20.)

Schools with high rates of homeless students are not receiving subgrants at the state level because there’s simply not enough federal money to go around, according to Maria Foscarinis, the founder of the National Homelessness Law Center. She was also involved in the creation of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act – which she believes to be the last time Congress passed a sweeping bill on homelessness.

“The funding for this program has always been very limited,” Foscarinis said. "If this were actually an entitlement with these funds, then they would be awarded based on how many homeless kids there were. But it's not, it's a fixed amount of money and it has to be divided some way."

And for over a decade starting in 1995, the District chose to not accept McKinney-Vento funds and thus was able to skirt federal law. The Department of Education’s only means of enforcing equal access to public education for homeless students is to withhold funding from a state.

“It was the only jurisdiction that did not accept the money and did not participate in the program,” Foscarinis said. By not accepting funds, the District remained in legal standing with a lawsuit filed by unhoused families and the National Homelessness Law Center, against the city for treating their students unfairly. 

The District did not accept McKinney-Vento funds until 2006, when the D.C. Board of Education requested the superintendent reapply for funds, according to Foscarinis. 

Schools try and fill in the gaps without federal homeless dollars

Tameka Harris and her two children experienced homelessness in late 2012 and early 2013. At the beginning of the 2013-14 school year, Harris enrolled her two sons at Kingsman Academy, a public charter school near Kingman Park that teaches sixth to 12th graders. 

Kingsman has not received McKinney-Vento funds since at least 2016. But Harris said the school provided an abundance of resources for her family, including transportation, therapy, laundry services, a food pantry, and laptops for her children to get their work done. 

“It's life-saving, actually,” Harris said. “It got us through. I was able to save money.”

When Harris was working as a bus driver and tour guide she would have to be at work by 6 a.m. and was unable to bring her children to school. But Kingsman provided Uber rides to school for her kids and eventually modified the bus route so her kids could be picked up right in front of her apartment. 

Back at Maya Angelou, L'Tanya Holley strategizes how she can help her school’s families without McKinney-Vento dollars. She’ll advise parents without internet access to go to the local Starbucks for free WiFi or guide students to shelters that have available beds. Acting as a case manager, Holley will even try and get parents a job so they can be self-sufficient. 

Chew just landed herself a job with help from Holley. She is now working at a church in Northwest. Holley identified the opportunity and helped her prepare for the interview. Before that, Chew had been cutting people’s lawns for cash.  

“I’ve got to do what I got to do because I got my daughter, and my other daughter, and I got a 13 and 17-year-old,” said Chew. “They can't do it all,” she said of Maya Angelou staff, “because it's for other people out there too, not just me.” 

The post Schools can get funds to help homeless students. Why do so many miss out? appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

LACEY, Wash. — In April of his senior year at Timberline High School, after years of conflict at home, Mikel Jake “MJ” Dizon became homeless.

He was a few months from graduation, but considered dropping out of school to focus on his job as a Starbucks barista to make money for rent. This decision could redirect the course of Dizon’s life.

Only 59% of homeless students in Washington state graduate in four years compared to 83% of all students. A similar disparity exists nationally as well. 

This has a snowball effect. Not having a high school degree is the greatest single risk factor for experiencing homelessness after school, according to the Chapin Hall research institute at the University of Chicago.

The longer a person remains homeless, the more difficult obtaining stable housing becomes. If a homeless student becomes a chronically homeless adult, they more often require not only housing but also services for mental health, physical health, and substance abuse treatment.

But at North Thurston Public Schools, the 661 students like Dizon, who are sleeping on friends’ couches, in vehicles, in shelters or in tents — with or without their families — are graduating at nearly the same rates as their peers. The district has shown that this feat just requires dedicated and consistent support.

The Seattle Times’ Project Homeless is collaborating with the Center for Public Integrity to examine how homeless students are faring in Washington and across the U.S. This series will also include a look at school discipline rates for Washington’s 40,000 homeless students, as well as federal funding disparities among states.

Unhoused and Undercounted

Federal law requires that public schools assist homeless students to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.

Read more

Beginning six years ago, North Thurston hired staff, called “student navigators,” whose sole function is to attend to each homeless student’s needs, whether that’s housing or food, feeling like they belong at school, or planning for the future beyond graduation.

It has worked. 

North Thurston’s graduation rates for homeless students rose from 65% in 2017 to 84% in 2020 and 81% in 2021 — within 7 percentage points of the district’s overall graduation rate.

State education officials say that North Thurston has provided a blueprint to limiting the impact that homelessness has on the rest of a student’s life. Now, they just need the money to scale it up.

Mantra is ‘remove all barriers’

Since Dizon’s family immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in 2015, he said he’s been forced to leave his home three times due to conflicts with his parents, at times because he didn’t feel safe there.

“I came out of the closet to my parents, and my father wasn’t so accepting,” Dizon said. “They didn’t want to be my parents anymore. And I wasn’t their son.”

Forty percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, 68% of whom cite family rejection as a major reason they become homeless, according to the Raikes Foundation.

Dizon wasn’t able to sleep at night his senior year when he realized he would become homeless. He had trouble waking up in time to attend drama, his favorite class. Soon, he was failing a class and drowning in all the tasks he needed to complete.

His boyfriend’s mom, a teacher at the district, told him a student navigator could help him.

Dizon connected with Gina Goddard, the student navigator at Timberline High School, who invited him into her office and spent hours on the phone with him to sign up for food stamps, and helped connect him with a foundation that provided him money for rent. 

“If you are worried about whether or not you’re going to be able to eat or where you’re going to sleep, it is very, very hard to concentrate on your Spanish test,” said Leslie Van Leishout, who helped create North Thurston’s student navigator program in an effort to “remove all barriers” for homeless students.

That support pulled Dizon above water.

How North Thurston’s student navigator program began

The amount of time student navigators have to spend with their homeless students is what sets North Thurston apart from many other districts.

Before North Thurston had a student navigator in each high school, the district had a single homeless student liaison who was in charge of supporting about 900 homeless students and a similar number of foster care children.

Every school district in the nation is mandated to have a liaison under the McKinney-Vento Act, a federal law passed in 1987 to ensure that students experiencing homelessness “have access to the same free, appropriate public education” as other children.

But the law and the accompanying federal funding don’t provide the level of support homeless students need, education officials and advocates say. 

Much of the North Thurston liaison’s time, Van Leishout said, was spent on paperwork and meetings rather than one-on-one support for homeless students.

Many have duties beyond even that. Sometimes, the McKinney-Vento liaison is also a principal or the district’s superintendent. Nearly 60% of McKinney-Vento liaisons statewide said they have less than four hours a week to serve homeless students, according to a 2022 report by the state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Washington state passed several laws in the last decade to strengthen the McKinney-Vento Act, one requiring every individual school in the state to designate a staff member as a point of contact for homeless students. But that had the same problem of adding duties onto already burdened staff, usually counselors.

Van Leishout wanted to try something new in North Thurston. Formerly a teacher in the district for almost 20 years, and director of student support for seven years, she had the superintendent’s trust to try new ideas, and she could write the grant applications to support them.  

She repurposed federal McKinney-Vento Act funding the district was using primarily for tutoring homeless students to pay for one student navigator. 

It worked instantly. In the first full year of the program, the district’s graduation rates for homeless students rose 7 percentage points.

The next year, Van Leishout applied for a Washington-state specific grant to help homeless students, which paid for another student navigator. Then, with the pandemic, came funding from the federal government that enabled Van Leishout to add two more student navigators. 

For three straight years since the program began, the graduation rate rose.

Could any district do it?

North Thurston’s student navigator program is “what the McKinney-Vento Act at its heart was designed to do but with the resources to actually do it,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of Schoolhouse Connection, a national advocacy nonprofit for homeless students.

But the funding is precarious and limited.

Two student navigator positions may expire soon as money from the American Rescue Plan runs out.

“That's a little bit challenging to know what's going to happen next,” Van Leishout said.

And not every district in the state could marshal as much ongoing funding as North Thurston.

Both federal and state funding for homeless student programs are competitive — not every district applies and not every district that applies wins. 

Less than 15% of school districts in the state receive federal McKinney-Vento grant funding and less than 6% of districts receive the state Homeless Student Stability education Program grant.

“That by no means is going to come even close to meeting the need that we have given the number of students that are experiencing homelessness,” said Vivian Rogers-Decker, the state’s Homeless Student Stability education Program supervisor.

Washington does better than most states at identifying and tracking its homeless students, but an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity shows that the lack of funding is likely causing many to fall through the cracks with more than 300,000 homeless students nationally, and at least 2,000 statewide, who are likely unidentified and not receiving support promised to them by law.

Rogers-Decker says North Thurston’s model of providing one-on-one support to homeless students is a best practice that should be emulated in districts around the state, but more funding is needed.

Seattle Public Schools, the largest district in the state, with more than twice the number of homeless students as North Thurston, gets the same amount of McKinney-Vento grant funding and none from the state’s Homeless Student Stability education Program. 

Whereas each student navigator in North Thurston provides individualized support for about 65 high school students, in Seattle, each full-time staff member dedicated to supporting homeless students serves more than 200 across the district.

“Do I think there's enough resources? Absolutely not,” said Jeanea Proctor-Mills, Seattle Public Schools’ McKinney-Vento liaison. 

Like most districts in the state and nation, Seattle’s 64% graduation rate for its homeless students lags behind its overall graduation rate of 87%.

Personalized attention leads to graduation

Lorin Griffitts, one of North Thurston’s student navigators and a former homelessness services provider, said she does what she hopes “a really good mom would do.” 

She scrutinizes her students’ attendance and grades and notices when they start falling off. She meets with students regularly, some every day, in her office in the high school. She provides them whatever they need. Sometimes that’s a sleeping bag, other times it’s just a listening ear. 

Student navigators say they need to support students’ participation in sports and extracurriculars if they expect them to maintain an interest in school amid what is often turmoil outside of it.

For Dizon, that was theater. He looks the part with long black hair, wearing plaid pants, a pearl necklace and wire-rim glasses. He produced, wrote and directed his first play his senior year and knew he wanted to keep at it.

“I’m really passionate about writing,” Dizon said. 

So when Dizon couldn’t afford a school trip to a Shakespeare festival after he became homeless, his navigator, Goddard found funds to pay for it. 

Students also need to see a path for themselves after school, one worth graduating for, navigators say.

Dizon had little time to think about that last spring. His priority at the time was finding a place to live, so when Dizon received his acceptance letter to college, he was overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork he needed to complete.

Goddard spent hours with him filling out forms for financial aid and submitting enrollment papers, in addition to making sure he had a roof over his head until school started. 

Oftentimes, Goddard is her students’ only support.

“A lot of the things that the kids deal with are super overwhelming. And so I think that knowing somebody cares about them is huge," Goddard said. "And I do really care about my students."

Dizon is now a freshman at Western Washington University, hoping to graduate with a degree in theater.

“I call her Miss G. Like, you know, my aunt,” Dizon said. “I wouldn't have been so comfortable sitting here in my dorm room if it wasn't for her help.” 

School district or homelessness system?

In many ways, North Thurston has created a homelessness response system within its school district where student navigators act like case managers. 

The district even repurposed an unused building into a space where homeless and low-income students and families can do their laundry and pick up food, household items, clothes and school supplies. Community organizations meet families there to offer housing, health services and help obtaining public benefits.

That’s possible largely due to the community’s generosity. All the food, clothes, and supplies are donated by individuals or local businesses. The district also received more than $150,000 last year in cash donations for homeless students. 

That generosity has also been cultivated by student navigators who have built relationships with the community. For example, the North Thurston Education Foundation, which provided Dizon rent money when he became homeless, has increased its giving to the district more than threefold since the student navigator program began. 

Last year, the district built on its success by adding a bilingual student navigator, Jessica Llamas, who is able to reach Spanish-speaking families by allowing them to “kind of put their guard down.” 

North Thurston is hoping to add a student navigator in its middle schools, and eventually its elementary schools.

That is, if it can find the money.

The post This school district helped homeless students graduate. Here’s what it took. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

What happens to students experiencing homelessness?

Federal law requires that public schools assist to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.

The Center for Public Integrity joined forces with newsrooms around the country to shine a light on this often-forgotten group of children and the misunderstood rights they have in school.

Our partners reported on the issue from California to Washington, D.C., and many places in between.

STORIES FROM OUR PARTNERS

The post Making visible the hidden toll of student homelessness around the country appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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For months, Beth Petersen paid acquaintances to take her son to school — money she sorely needed.

They’d lost their apartment, her son bouncing between relatives and friends while she hotel-hopped. As hard as she tried to keep the 13-year-old at his school, they finally had to switch districts.

Under federal law, Petersen’s son had a right to free transportation — and to remain in the school he attended at the time he lost permanent housing.

But no one told Petersen that.

“They should have been sending a bus for him. … He’s missed so much school I can’t believe it,” Petersen said. “And school is stability.”

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of district-level federal education data suggests roughly 300,000 students entitled to essential rights reserved for homeless students have slipped through the cracks, unidentified by the school districts mandated to help them. 

Some 2,400 districts — from regions synonymous with economic hardship to big cities and prosperous suburbs — did not report having even one homeless student despite levels of financial need that make those figures improbable.

And many more districts are likely undercounting the number of homeless students they do identify. In nearly half of states, tallies of student homelessness bear no relationship with poverty, a sign of just how inconsistent the identification of kids with unstable housing can be.

The reasons include a federal law so little-known that people charged with implementing it often fail to follow the rules; nearly non-existent enforcement of the law by federal and state governments; and funding so meager that districts have little incentive to survey whether students have stable housing.

“It’s a largely invisible population,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on homeless education. “The national conversation on homelessness is focused on single adults who are very visible in large urban areas. It is not focused on children, youth and families. It is not focused on education.”

Losing a home can be a critical turning point in a child’s life. That’s why schools are required to provide extra support. 

Nationwide, homeless students graduate at lower rates than average, blunting their opportunities for stable jobs and increasing the risk of continued housing insecurity in adulthood.

The gap is often stark: In 18 states, graduation rates for students who experienced homelessness lagged more than 20 percentage points behind the overall rate in both 2017 and 2018.

➤ Take a closer look: The graduation rate of homeless students vs. all students

The academic cost is not equally shared. Black and Latino children experience homelessness at disproportionate rates, Public Integrity’s analysis showed. Nationally, American Indian or Alaska Native students were also over-represented, as were students with disabilities.

Until recently, it was not clear from federal records which students were hit hardest by housing instability. Data disclosed in U.S. Department of Education reports revealed nothing about the race or ethnicity of students recognized by their school districts as homeless.

That changed in the 2019-20 school year when the federal government for the first time made public the race and ethnicity breakdowns for individual school districts. The pattern that emerged is a story of the country’s sharp inequities, which put some families at far higher risk of homelessness than others.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, first enacted in 1987 and expanded in 2001, requires that districts take specific actions to help unstably housed students complete school. Districts must waive enrollment requirements, such as immunization forms, that could keep kids out of the classroom. They must refer families to health care and housing services. And they must provide transportation so children can remain in the school they attended before they became homeless, even if they’re now outside the attendance boundaries. 

Earl Edwards, an assistant professor at Boston College’s School of Education and Human Development, argues that McKinney-Vento was premised on an idea still pervasive in the policy debate on homelessness: Like a tornado that levels towns at random, housing misfortune has an equal chance of afflicting anyone, regardless of who they are.

In the 1980s, that rhetoric was a potent argument in favor of expanded federal support for homeless services. It was also wrong.

An inadequate policy

The McKinney Act — later renamed — took shape at a time when the Reagan administration, if it acknowledged homeless people at all, regarded them as having chosen a life on urban skid rows, said Maria Foscarinis, who helped write the law. 

Foscarinis, the founder of the National Homelessness Law Center, reframed homelessness as a broader structural problem impacting families, people of all races, even suburbanites. The outcome was a race-neutral solution, despite data at the time that went counter to that theory.

Foscarinis said the law’s architects knew it was inadequate and planned to follow it with homeless prevention programs and housing. But they faced stiff resistance. It would have been better to include race-conscious language tracking the demographics of homeless children, she added, but doing so could have jeopardized the entire effort. 

“Had we done that, it would have torpedoed the whole thing, which would have hurt Black communities even more,” she said. “Then, we would have nothing at all.”

Unhoused and Undercounted

Federal law requires that public schools assist homeless students to help break what could become an inescapable cycle of hardship. But many of the students who need that aid fall through the cracks.

Read more

Figures now available down to the school district show the consequences of homelessness policy that doesn't address race directly.

Nationally, Black students were 15% of public school enrollment but 27% of homeless students in 2019-20. In 36 states and Washington, D.C., the rate of homelessness among Black students was at least twice the rate of all other students that year. 

Boston College’s Edwards said the disconnect lies between the reality of housing inequality and the policies intended to address it.

“If you don’t recognize that Black people, during the time when you were establishing the actual policy, were disproportionately experiencing homelessness” — and that housing discrimination, urban renewal, blockbusting and other systemic factors pushing Black people out of housing were key drivers — “then you make a policy, and the policy doesn’t have anything in place to prevent those things from persisting,” Edwards said.

And under-identification of homelessness could impact Black students more than peers of other races.  

In interviews with Black students who experienced homelessness while enrolled in Los Angeles County public school districts, Edwards found that many distrusted school personnel, who underestimated their academic ability, sent them to the principal’s office for the smallest perceived slights and threatened to call child protective services.

As a result, Edwards found, many students went unidentified under McKinney-Vento because they feared that sharing their situation would only make things worse. They paid for transit passes out of pocket. They were forced out of their home districts. They navigated college admissions alone. If they were lucky, they found mentors outside of the school system.

Those experiences aren’t an accident, Edwards argues, but the product of historical patterns. For example: “Calling child protective services would not be a severe threat to Black students if racial disparities within the institution itself were less pronounced.”

Beneath the race-neutral veneer of McKinney-Vento, American Indian or Alaska Native students and Latino students also experience housing instability at higher rates than their peers in the majority of states. 

In Capistrano Unified, a 44,000-student school district in southern California, the rate of homelessness among Latino students was roughly 24% in recent school years compared to about 2% among the rest of the student body.

“It's not anything that we've really done research on, so I wouldn't even be able to speculate” as to why, said Stacy Yogi, executive director of state and federal programs for the district.

Across California, Latino students are 56% of public school enrollment but 74% of homeless students.

A 2020 report from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Black and Latino students who experience homelessness in the state are more than one and a half times as likely to be suspended from school as their non-homeless peers. They also miss more school days and are less prepared for college.

Public Integrity’s analysis also found that students with disabilities have higher rates of homelessness than the rest of their peers in every state except Mississippi, suggesting that a significant share of students who already require additional support attend school uncertain of where they will sleep that night.

“They’re experiencing trauma, and trauma has a pretty significant impact,” said Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth, a policy and advocacy group focused on youth homelessness. “You have to navigate an overly complicated system, and it’s this competition for limited resources where young people and children and families are just inherently disadvantaged.”

EJ Valez, who has limited vision and requires large-print materials for reading and braille instruction, was among them.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

For most of his youth, EJ Valez experienced housing instability, bouncing between homes and schools. Listen to him explain below.

(Photo credit: Courtesy EJ Valez)

Valez experienced housing instability for most of his youth, bouncing between homes and schools in the Bronx and Reading, Pennsylvania.

“I’m surprised I made it out of school,” he said.

As a teenager, he said, he couch-surfed with friends and acquaintances after he became estranged from his family.

“Somehow I could retain information, but at no point in my childhood before full-on adulthood was there ever actual stability,” said Valez, now a student at Albright College in Pennsylvania and a member of the National Network for Youth’s National Youth Advisory Council. “No one cares about classes if we don’t know where we’re going to put our heads at night.”

That, he said, is why extra help from schools is so critical.

Hidden homelessness

It might seem like common sense to assume that where more children experience poverty, more will experience homelessness, too.

But that’s not what the data from school districts show. One of the most surprising patterns we found is that reported homelessness among students didn’t mirror poverty in 24 states. 

The finding runs counter to a growing body of empirical evidence supporting the connection between poverty and housing instability. Children born below 50% of the poverty line had a higher probability of eviction than higher-income peers, lower-income households are more likely to experience forced mobility and renters who are forced to move end up in higher-poverty neighborhoods than renters who move voluntarily.

“There should be a stronger relationship between homelessness and poverty,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, “and the fact that there’s not supports that there’s under-identification taking place.”

Districts can tell teachers and staff to look for common signs of housing instability among students — fatigue, unmet health needs, marked changes in behavior. But those aren’t always apparent.

If they’re following the law, districts will survey families so they can self-identify as homeless. But some parents fear that acknowledging their housing struggles could prompt the government to take their kids away.

And then there’s the gulf between what people commonly think of as homeless and the more expansive definition Congress uses for students. Living in a shelter, on the streets, in a vehicle or in a motel paid for by the government or a charitable organization are included, but that’s not all.

IN HER OWN WORDS

Beth Petersen lives with her son in a two-bedroom apartment that they share with another family. Listen below to how she said her son stays focused on schoolwork despite their housing instability.

(Photo credit: Zoe Meyers for the Center for Public Integrity)

More than 70% of children eligible for services were forced by economic need to move out of their homes — with or without their family — and in with relatives or friends, a practice that the U.S. Department of Education defines as “doubled up.”

Research on doubled-up students shows there’s good reason to provide them with help: They earned lower grades, for example, and were less likely to graduate on time.

In Riverside County, California, Beth Petersen’s son met the definition of doubled up for months, having lived temporarily with her sister and with friends.

Only Petersen didn’t know it at the time.

Eventually, the two found housing outside the Temecula Valley Unified School District her son had attended for years. He switched districts, keeping up with the schoolwork but struggling to make friends.

Then a friend of Petersen’s who works at a charter school told her that her son had the right to re-enroll in the Temecula Valley schools because the McKinney-Vento law allows students to stay in the same school they attended before becoming homeless.

In early September, Petersen moved with her son into a two-bedroom apartment — still outside the district boundaries — paid for by a homeless prevention organization and shared with another family. Under federal law, her son is considered homeless because they live in transitional housing.

Petersen re-enrolled her son in Temecula Valley Unified but problems persisted. She said she pleaded with the district for weeks, trying to secure bus rides for the teenager. The district never responded to her emails, she said. He ultimately missed a month of classes, Petersen estimated, because she could not afford to continue paying acquaintances to transport her son every day.

The California Department of Education intervened in late September to ensure her son received transportation.

“This has been a teachable moment for the district and there are protocols and … barriers that have been removed to ensure the law is met,” an employee at the state agency wrote Petersen in an email.

A statement provided by Temecula Valley Unified in response to detailed questions regarding the Petersens said the district “does everything in its power to support our McKinney-Vento families experiencing homelessness” and has “highly responsive site and district teams,” but declined to comment further.

Experts think students like Petersen’s son are among those most likely to go unidentified and unassisted because their families don't realize they qualify for help and schools too often fail to fill the information gap.

When that happens, “we’re not even including most of our kids who are experiencing homelessness in the definition of who’s homeless,” said Charlotte Kinzley, supervisor of homeless and highly mobile services for the Minneapolis Public Schools. “So we haven’t even named the problem.”

In Minneapolis, the reported graduation rate for homeless students is at least 26 percentage points below the rate for all students. The district introduced programs in the last few years to help schools find more students experiencing housing instability and connect them with assistance. Lesson plans for teachers help high school students understand if they qualify.

Across Minnesota, districts generally reported homeless rates that loosely mirrored trends in free- or reduced-price lunch eligibility, suggesting some consistency in identification.

“It's not a matter of getting the right count or getting the numbers,” said Melissa Winship, a Minneapolis schools counselor who works with students experiencing homelessness. “It's a matter of those students and families having those supports and resources that they deserve.”

Data on student homelessness is collected by districts and funneled to the federal government by states, which can choose to leave out any districts that did not report having any homeless students. Our data adds those excluded districts back. We assume they identified no homeless students, since they're not in federal data.

Our analysis focused on non-charter districts in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. In addition to comparing poverty and reported homelessness, we applied a common benchmark used by education researchers and some public education officials — that one of every 20 students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches experience homelessness under the federal definition.

In each school year we analyzed, more than 8,000 districts did not meet the one-in-20 guideline. 

DeSoto County, Mississippi, for instance, identified fewer than 300 homeless students, according to state records Public Integrity reviewed. Its share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches suggests the district has three times the number it reported.

That’s not the only reason to suspect an undercount. In 2018, local landlords filed more than 4,000 eviction cases, according to an estimate from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.

By comparison, Mississippi's Vicksburg Warren School District identified about as many homeless students as DeSoto despite having less than half as many children eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches.

The DeSoto County schools did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s possible that some school districts genuinely have fewer homeless students than this benchmark predicts. But multiple researchers told us that they see the one-in-20 threshold as a conservative estimate.

J.J. Cutuli, a senior research scientist at Nemours Children’s Health System, said the analysis bolsters the anecdotal experiences of school district staff, shelter personnel and people who’ve lived through periods of homelessness.

“You're giving us a clue as to the magnitude of this problem. And that's really the important part here,” he said.

The University of Michigan’s Erb-Downward said the reason numbers are critical is because “we, somehow, as a society, have agreed that it is OK for the level of poverty and instability that children experience, from a housing perspective, to exist."

"If we don’t actively track that, and have a conversation about what the level [of homelessness] really is, I don’t think we’re being forced to actually look at that decision that we’ve made societally," she said. "And we’re not really being forced to say, ‘Is this actually what makes sense? Is this actually what we want?’”

‘Uphill battle’

The federal government, state education departments and families have few options to hold districts accountable if they fail to properly identify or provide assistance for students experiencing homelessness.

The U.S. Department of Education delegates enforcement to states. States where school districts fail to follow the law are subject to increased monitoring, but the federal agency would not say how often that happens. A spokesman said only that the agency “engages in monitoring and compliance activities that can include investigating alleged non-compliance.”

Public Integrity reviewed dozens of lawsuits in which families and advocacy groups alleged that school districts denied students rights that are guaranteed under the federal McKinney-Vento law.

Families experiencing homelessness have sometimes prevailed in their standoffs with education agencies, winning reforms like agreements to train school personnel in the law and, in one case, a toll-free number for parents and children to contact with questions about their rights. 

“There’s not really a ton of capacity for actually investigating and dealing with these complaints,” said Katie Meyer Scott, senior youth attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center. “We have a problem where there’s not necessarily an investment in enforcement at either the federal or state level.”

As an extreme last resort, the U.S. Department of Education can cut funding — a step officials are loath to take because that would ultimately harm the very students the agency wanted to help. The agency said it has never penalized a state in this manner.

A 2014 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that eight of the 20 school districts its staff interviewed acknowledged they had problems identifying homeless students. The watchdog agency found that the U.S. Department of Education had "no plan to ensure adequate oversight of all states," with similar gaps in state monitoring of school districts.

State audits in California, Washington and New York have also made the case that many school districts fail to identify a significant number of students who qualify for the rights guaranteed under federal law. Advocacy groups and researchers, too, have surfaced examples.

In Michigan, state Department of Education guidelines call for an investigation if school districts identify fewer than 10% of low-income students as homeless. Erb-Downward found that all but a handful of Detroit schools fell below this threshold in the 2017-18 school year.

Public Integrity’s analysis points to similar problems. Detroit's public school district, the largest district in the state, identified 255 fewer homeless students than the Kalamazoo Public Schools in 2018-19, despite having four times as many students and a much higher poverty rate. 

Detroit school superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in a statement that the district’s efforts to improve in recent years include adding full-time staff to its homeless student office, a residency questionnaire with its student enrollment form, referral systems and public information about available services.

Homeless student numbers have tripled in the past several years, Vitti said. But, he added, “We are aware there is still an undercount.”

A statewide review this year identified 120 Michigan school districts, roughly 20%, in need of additional monitoring, department spokesman Martin Ackley said. The state is asking those districts to provide evidence that they are in compliance with federal law.

The state expects to finish the reviews this winter and will provide technical support to districts struggling to meet federal requirements.

Districts in other parts of the country willing to explain likely undercounts offer a variety of reasons.

In the Chester-Upland School District outside of Philadelphia, interim homeless liaison Dana Bowser said many families consult district staff as a last resort when they can’t find a solution to their housing troubles on their own. Language barriers make some parents reluctant to come forward, she added.

Florida’s Broward County Public Schools described struggles to overcome limited funding, stigma and fear of immigration services as “skyrocketing home prices and lack of regulation around rental fees have created an unfortunate climate in which more individuals and families are facing homelessness, including middle-class income families.”

And in the Yuma Union High School District along Arizona’s borders with both California and Mexico, where our benchmark predicted more than five times the number of homeless students than was reported in the 2019-20 school year, school officials said they do not report a child as homeless if they do not apply for and receive services under McKinney-Vento. The National Center for Homeless Education advises officials to count enrolled homeless children and youth even if they decline services available to them.

In Oklahoma, hundreds of districts report that no students experience homelessness. Tammy Smith, who oversees the state’s homeless student programs, hears a common refrain from school leaders when she asks why.

“They tell me, ‘We're going to take care of all of our students, whether we identify them as homeless or not,’’’ Smith said. “I remind them it’s federal law, but it’s kind of [an] uphill battle.”

Leaving homeless children out of official records is a problem even if a district does manage to support them without properly counting them, said Amanda Peterson, the director of educational improvement and support at the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction. 

“If we are not able to tell the story, we’re not able to show that there’s discrepancies in the graduation rate, then what ends up happening is that it’s easy for legislators, community members, others to just close their eyes to the issue and just say, ‘Well, if it’s not reported, it doesn’t exist, and therefore we don’t need to worry about it,’” she said. “There’s harm if we just sort of push it under the rug.”

‘Not enough money’

Federal programs provide school districts little financial incentive to survey students' housing situations more thoroughly. Money to serve these vulnerable children is limited and does not increase automatically as districts identify more of them, Public Integrity found.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Education awards funds to states using a formula that factors in poverty rates. States use their share to award competitive grants to districts.

Calling them paltry is an understatement.

The funding amounted to about $60 per identified homeless student nationwide before the pandemic. One state received less than $30 per student. 

That’s a fraction of what school districts actually spend to support homeless students, according to a recent study by the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. The four districts profiled by LPI spent between $128 and $556 per homeless student identified. In two of those districts, McKinney-Vento subgrants accounted for less than 14 cents on every dollar the district spent on homeless education programs.

And that’s the districts awarded federal grants. Most get nothing. 

Until a temporary funding influx during the pandemic, only one in four districts nationwide received dedicated funding. Washington state, which got the lowest amount in the 2018 fiscal year at $29 per identified student, passed a law in 2016 to provide additional support and resources.

“I would argue that a state like Washington has better identification, but it's not reflected in how the feds dole out the money from McKinney-Vento,” said Duffield of SchoolHouse Connection.

Even in states that receive hundreds of dollars per student, the money does not stretch far, experts said. And it’s definitely not enough to provide long-term assistance for students without stable housing.

One sign of its inadequacy: Many districts don’t even bother applying for the federal money. In Oklahoma, just 25 of the state’s 509 districts requested funds.

Smith, who oversees the state’s homeless student programs, urges districts to apply. She said superintendents tell her, “There's not a monetary benefit for us to identify them. So that's not where we're spending our time.”

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan made $800 million available to states and districts to identify and support homeless students, some of whom became disconnected from schools after the COVID-19 closures of 2020. The historic funding influx was seven times the annual budget awarded to schools to support their homeless students in 2022, making federal funds available to districts that had not previously received money.

In Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit is located, the additional funding was sorely needed, said Steven Ezikian,  the deputy superintendent of the Wayne County Regional Educational Service Agency, which helps train local districts to identify and support students experiencing homelessness.

“McKinney-Vento does not provide nearly enough funding,” he said. “Frankly, there’s just not enough money for them to do all the work for the amount of kids that we have.”

The traditional level of funding to support homelessness has left many districts struggling to fulfill the law’s requirements.

“There [are] more and more students in crisis and the districts are not really getting more and more resources to help,” said Scott, the senior youth attorney with the National Homelessness Law Center. “It comes down to resources rather than any kind of bad intent. The lack of investment in our schools over time is obviously hitting homeless students even harder.”

In April, 92 members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a “Dear Colleague” letter, urging the chairwoman and ranking member of the House Education Committee to renew the $800 million in funding, which represents 1% of the federal education budget, for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1. It would be money well spent, they argued.

“Investing in a young person’s life will enable them to avoid chronic homelessness, intergenerational cycles of poverty, and pervasive instances of trauma,” the letter read.

Budget bills from both chambers of Congress requested boosts in the program budget that are far short of what the House members requested. Federal budget negotiations will likely resume in December.

Temecula Valley Unified, the district Beth Petersen’s son attends, received $56,000 to serve homeless students through the American Rescue Plan — about $470 per homeless student identified. District staff did not respond to questions regarding funding for homeless education programs. State financial records for the several years before the American Rescue Plan show the district received nothing. 

Early on a Monday morning in October, Petersen sat at the kitchen table in her shared apartment, applying makeup under the glare of a bowl-shaped ceiling light. Her son emerged from the bathroom, barefoot but otherwise dressed for school. Petersen peered around the corner. Did he want anything for breakfast? He shrugged. No, he was fine.

But then he remembered an assignment that was due: a photo with his mom clearing him to attend a sexual education course. He stooped beside her and angled his laptop for a selfie. Beth could hardly remember the last time she needed to review any of his assignments. He was always a diligent student, even these last few months.

“Do not miss the bus coming home or we will be up a creek,” she said as the pair walked outside, the air crisp as morning haze yielded to blue sky. 

At 7:02 a.m., a yellow school bus turned the corner. It slowed to a stop before them, the fruits of Petersen’s long struggle to make the promise of the McKinney-Vento law a reality. 

The doors opened, and her son was on his way.

Chalkbeat journalist Lori Higgins contributed to this article.

The post Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Public schools are required by federal law to take steps that will help homeless students get an equal education.

But what homelessness looks like is broader than families and even some schools realize. The federal definition, for instance, includes children doubling up with extended family out of economic need or living in transitional housing paid for by a charitable group.

Beth Petersen and her son experienced both types of homelessness in recent months and had to battle for school access. Follow them through a morning one school day after Petersen resolved the problem.

The post What housing instability looks like for parents, students appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.