Twenty-year-old Mikayla Foreman knows her experience is meaningful. Dealing with homelessness since 18 and currently living in a shelter, Foreman has managed to continue her academic journey, studying for exams this month in hopes of attaining a nursing degree.

But Foreman believes there were intervention points that could’ve prevented her from experiencing homelessness in the first place.

“If someone in school had understood what I was going through, things could’ve been very different,” she said in an interview with Stateline.

As more cities impose bans, fines or jail time for adults living on the streets, young people who have been homeless say they face unique problems that could have been addressed earlier. Through more than 400 interviews and survey responses, young people across the country recently told researchers how earlier guidance and intervention might have made a difference for them. The research suggests the country is missing its biggest opportunity to prevent youth homelessness — by intervening well before a young person reaches a shelter and years before they are chronically homeless.

The , from Covenant House and the University of California, Berkeley, finds that the pathways into youth homelessness are different from those of adults experiencing temporary or chronic homelessness. A young person coming out to their family, or becoming pregnant, or experiencing untreated trauma can create conflicts that push them into homelessness. A lot of that doesn’t show up in current data.

The survey responses offer the nation’s schools and social services agencies the chance to get ahead of youth homelessness, researchers say, not only by intervening earlier, but also by pinpointing and responding to the diversity of needs among teenagers and young adults who might be close to losing their housing.

Advocates say there are multiple intervention points — in school, in child welfare organizations and inside family dynamics — where the worst outcomes can be avoided. States such as California, Florida, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington have explored some of those intervention points in policies that range from guaranteed income pilot programs to youth-specific rental assistance and campus housing protections.

Hawaii has made its youth drop-in and crisis-diversion program permanent, and Oregon and Washington have expanded rental assistance and education-centered supports for vulnerable youth. Florida now requires colleges to prioritize housing for homeless and foster students.

“With young people, we have opportunities to intervene much further upstream — in schools, in families, in child welfare — before anyone has to spend a single night on the streets. That’s simply not the case with older adults,” said David Howard, former senior vice president for Covenant House and a co-author of the new research, in an interview with Stateline.

“Even at 18, 20 or 24 [years old], young people are still developing,” Howard said. “Their vulnerabilities look very different from middle-aged adults, and the support systems they need are different too.”

One of the key points of intervention for potentially homeless youth is school. Public schools across the country since the COVID-19 pandemic.

And homelessness has many various regional factors outside of individual circumstances, such as climate-driven homelessness. More than 5,100 students in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina became homeless as a result of hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.

“Homelessness is multifaceted and lots of us slip through the cracks because the system isn’t designed for our reality,” said Foreman, a former Covenant House resident who helped conduct the new research.

Foreman’s insights and lived experience were included in the study, which showed that youth homelessness rarely begins with an eviction or job loss — frequent causes of homelessness among adults.

The top three reasons that young people experience homelessness for the first time, according to respondents, were being kicked out of their family homes, running away, and leaving an unsafe living situation such as one affected by domestic violence. Other instigators included being unable to afford housing, aging out of foster care, being kicked out of or running away from foster care, and moving away from gang violence.

However, respondents also had suggestions for ways government, schools and the community could help or prevent youth homelessness. They suggested youth-specific housing options, identifying and helping at-risk youth in health care settings, providing direct cash assistance and offering conflict resolution support within families.

Among the most common suggestions was to offer services that create long-lasting connections for young people.

“Strong relationships with non-parental adults, including mentors, teachers, service providers, and elders, were identified as especially important when family connections were strained or absent,” the report said.

The surveys and interviews also demonstrated that young people want mental health care tailored to their personal experience, said Benjamin Parry, a lead researcher on the report, speaking during a September webinar hosted by Point Source Youth, a nonprofit that works to end youth homelessness.

The research breaks out responses from a few specific groups — Indigenous, Latino, immigrant, LGBTQ+ people of color and pregnant or parenting youth — to understand their distinct needs, said Parry, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “There’s so much nuance and specificity within these different groups.”

Indigenous youth, for example, often are dealing with the effects of intergenerational trauma and alcoholism that have been projected onto them, Parry said. Those young people have far different needs than pregnant or parenting youth, he noted.

“They are like, ‘I don’t know where my next paycheck’s going to come from, I don’t know how to put food in my baby’s stomach, I don’t have a support network or someone to go to for this advice,’” he said. “That specificity is exactly why we need to understand this better and do better to tailor our approaches and responses.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

As an education support professional in Hawley, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles east of Scranton, she’s been a teacher’s assistant, substitute, district registrar, homeless liaison and attendance officer. She’s currently the principal’s secretary, serves on the city council, is a board member for the state education retirement system and is the president of her district’s educational support professionals union.

Her experience and passion for helping homeless youth were reasons why she was recently named the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s Dolores McCracken Education Support Professional of the Year.

Monaghan was the Wallenpaupack district’s homeless liaison for 15 years. She helped arrange transportation for students and when they didn’t come to school. Before the pandemic, she launched a nonprofit in an effort to find temporary housing for students who didn’t have a permanent home.

When Monaghan received news about her award in November, she said in a that she was honored to be associated with its namesake, who was the first educational support professional to serve as president of the state teachers union. McCracken died of cancer in 2018.

“Having known Dolores and witnessed all that she accomplished on behalf of education support professionals makes this so much more significant and humbling,” Monaghan said. “I have tried to use her belief that if something needs to be done, you just do it and then move on to the next project, all with the hope of improving circumstances for those around you.”

There are more than 2.2 million education support professionals in U.S. public schools, according to the . These include paraprofessionals, office staff, food service workers, security personnel, bus drivers and custodians

More than 75% of education support professionals have responsibilities for ensuring student and student safety. About 84% work full time, with an average of $37,097.

Aaron Chapin, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said in a that Monaghan is a “model of dedication and citizenship” and consistently gave back to her school and community. 

“Ann excels on so many levels,” Chapin said. “She is a compassionate leader, hardworking volunteer, skilled support professional and effective public official. As a leader in her local [union] and in PSEA, she is a strong voice for her fellow support professionals.”

Monaghan spoke recently with The 74’s Lauren Wagner. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your time as a homeless student liaison.

I was a homeless student liaison for about 15 years. I did not realize how many students are homeless in this district. A lot of people didn’t realize. Our poverty rate is 64% to 65%, but we have a good tax base because we’re land-rich. So people were like, “What do you mean we have homeless students? We don’t have homeless people in this area.” I was like, “Yeah, you do. If you really look very closely at the definition, we have a lot of homeless in this area, especially kids.” I became very interested in the topic, especially when we tried to find places for some of these kids to go. I realized there was nowhere to go in this area. 

Wayne and Pike counties are the only two counties in the state that do not have a homeless shelter. It was not a new situation for the district, it was just one that was never really acknowledged. I was able to work with the administration — even though we didn’t have a place to send the kids — and we were able to work with agencies and made sure they had transportation. The district was really good about taking care of all that. Even though I’m not the homeless student liaison anymore, I work with the person who is now the liaison, and I haven’t given up on the idea of getting a homeless shelter in the area.

In your work with the homeless community, you began the creation of Hawley Forward, an afterschool program nonprofit. How is that going?

The whole idea started prior to COVID, and we had a building that we wanted to see if we could talk to the owner into donating and turning it into a hub for afterschool programs. There was space upstairs that we thought about making into a dorm area for kids we call sofa surfers — for whatever reason, they’re not with their parents or they don’t have a place to go. With COVID, all those plans fell through. So we’re still working on that. I’ve been talking to one of the local pastors who has a church property they’re not utilizing. They’re talking with their church council, so we may be able to do something on a small scale for our students. Sometimes we just need some place for kids to spend a couple of nights because there’s something going on at home and things are not stable. We’ve had seniors who aren’t able to be at home, and we just have to get them through to graduation. That’s what we’re hoping to still be able to do.

What made you want to go into education?

When I was in high school, I wanted to go to college and I wanted to be a teacher. I got my teaching certification in New York. I taught for the Diocese of Brooklyn for a number of years, and then I moved to Pennsylvania. But there were no teaching jobs available, so I subbed for a while and then I was asked if I wanted to take a position as a teacher assistant to do attendance and study halls. That’s how I got into working at the school here. That position just gradually morphed into what it ultimately became. 

I was ready to retire three years ago, and the principal asked if I would take over as [his] secretary. He said, ‘I can coach you.’ Because I wanted to be a grandma, I worked out babysitting issues with my daughter. And I stayed on to be the administrative assistant. 

You’re the president of both a local education support professional union and the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s northeastern region. What are you working on in both positions?

I’ve been the local union president since 2009 and am finishing my third year as president of the Northeastern Education Support Professional Division. Right now, my local Wallenpaupack union isn’t negotiating. We settled a contract last year, so we’re in the second year of the new contract. But [for the regional organization], I’m working with the Bloomsburg School District. They have a whole bunch of new leaders and they’re going into a negotiation, so we’re trying to work with them to get fully acclimated. 

Advocating for a living wage for support staff is still key. I know support staff who have been in their job for 25 to 30 years and are barely making $25,000 a year. That’s not a living wage, and especially in this day and age, with the cost of groceries, gas and utilities. Even [making] $15 an hour, we have people who work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. It’s important that support staff be recognized and be paid adequately, because buildings could not run without support staff. We’re the ones who answer the phones, keep the place clean, keep the kids fed, get them to and from school. It’s a vital role, and it needs to be recognized. For a lot of years, people [thought] it was just a side job. But it’s a career for people, and we need to support them in that profession. We don’t have as many dedicated people coming in as we used to because the money is not there.

Trump wants to put money for homeless kids into a block grant. School staff are wary.

Federal funding for homeless students has helped Metro Nashville Public Schools meet kids’ evolving needs for decades.

It has sent tutors to family shelters to help children with their school work. It has paid for transportation when families got priced out of their homes and suddenly had to move cross-county.

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And it pays for liaisons like Catherine Knowles, who for 28 years has listened to what homeless families say they really need and tried to respond. That’s why the district has a hotel-friendly food pantry filled with items like shelf-stable milk, microwaveable mac and cheese cups, and just-add-water cereal bowls.

“We’re giving that recognition of: We really do see what you’re going through,” Knowles said, “and we then have the flexibility to be responsive to that because we have funding and we have dedicated resources.”

The Trump administration has proposed doing away with this dedicated funding. into a single, much smaller K-12 block grant.

, down from the roughly $6.5 billion the federal government spends now. Schools could keep spending that money on the students and activities envisioned in federal law, or on a range of other activities, such as “promoting patriotic education,” or improving instruction in math, reading, science, and history.

In the current federal budget, Congress allocated $129 million to support homeless students with McKinney-Vento funding, . That’s a tiny fraction of the roughly $18 billion the federal government spends specifically on high-poverty schools. Liaisons like Knowles worry homeless students will fall down the priority list if schools no longer get funding specifically to serve them.

“There is such increasing need among students in public education, in general,” Knowles said. “Without McKinney-Vento dedicated funding specifically spelling out our responsibilities and the rights of students experiencing homelessness, I’m just afraid it could kind of all get lost in the shuffle.”

Why Congress set aside money for homeless students

The Education Department has said the block grant would give states and schools the ability to spend federal funds more in line with their needs, “without the unnecessary administrative burdens imposed under current law.”

have said they’d welcome education block grants. And some states, , that are seeking in how they spend their federal education dollars have said they would continue to meet the needs of unique student groups, including homeless students.

Right now, the federal government gives each state money for homeless students based on their share of Title I funds, which support students in poverty. Then the state awards the money to districts on a competitive basis, because the sum is too small to divide among all of them. get McKinney-Vento funding, which means many districts are required to hire homeless liaisons and meet homeless students’ needs without dedicated funding.

But school liaisons and advocates for homeless youth are calling on Congress to maintain funding for students experiencing homelessness as a standalone program.

In the early days of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, Congress tasked states and schools with rewriting policies and collecting data about students experiencing homelessness. That work exposed gaps in support, and prompted Congress to set aside money specifically for these students in 1990.

“The dedicated funding was about responding to those barriers,” said Barbara Duffield, the executive director of the nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection. In addition to legal protections, “you also have to have somebody who goes out looking for you, makes sure you have a ride, actually makes sure you can get enrolled.”

Since then, McKinney-Vento funding has played an outsized role in under-resourced communities that lack shelters, and “where the school literally might be the source of services for these families,” Duffield said.

Researchers and school staff also point out that students experiencing homelessness have specific needs and greater academic challenges than even other children from low-income families. Homeless students have , even when compared with other kids living in poverty.

“Just imagine: If you go to a school that has high poverty, you’ve already been in poverty your whole life, and now you’re also unhoused,” said Jessica Smith, a social worker who is the McKinney-Vento coordinator for Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. “It looks completely different than a student who just is low-income. Those babies need assistance, too, but our babies need just a little bit more of a focus.”

Smith, for example, uses part of her district’s McKinney-Vento funding to take high schoolers who live on their own without help from a parent to visit colleges and trade schools.

In Tennessee’s Robertson County Schools, McKinney-Vento funding provides students experiencing homelessness with clothing that meets the district’s dress code. And recently, it allowed the district to hire a translator to work specifically with Spanish-speaking homeless families, said Jennifer Dusky, a social worker who also serves as the district’s homeless liaison.

The rural community 30 miles north of Nashville is a major tobacco producer and attracts many migrant families. As that population has grown, the translator who handles requests from across the district couldn’t meet all the needs of homeless families and still get her other duties done, Dusky said.

“It was a need, for sure, to have a dedicated translator,” Dusky said. “Homelessness is not a comfortable thing for anyone to talk about, it’s very vulnerable and very scary. And then, of course, you add in the fact that you’re in a new country, you don’t speak the language. There’s all these fears and they’re very hesitant to talk with us. I totally get that.”

When the district hired a Spanish-speaking translator who had experienced homelessness herself, she helped identify, and provide support to, more homeless children.

“You can almost see the comfort just come over their face whenever they see her and talk to her,” Dusky said.

But when the district got half as much McKinney-Vento funding from the state this year as it has in years past, Dusky got a preview of the tough trade-offs schools nationwide would face if standalone funding went away. Her district had to decide if it could afford to keep the translator and the person who maintains McKinney-Vento records. For at least the next year, the district will dip into its own pocket to do so, but Dusky isn’t sure how long that will last.

“What can our program realistically withstand?” she said. “What can our community support?”

Congress will decide if block grant proposal advances

It is unclear whether Congress will approve the block grant proposal for homeless students and other programs.

The Senate Appropriations committee in the bipartisan education budget bill they approved Thursday, and . The House Appropriations committee won’t consider the education portion of the president’s budget until it returns from recess in September.

Some worry that Congress could repeal all or part of the law that authorizes McKinney-Vento funding to make the block grant legal, potentially leaving homeless students with fewer protections. Just a handful of states guarantee homeless students the same main educational rights outlined in federal law; most do not have any spelled out in state law, .

Smith in Kansas City, Kansas, worries what that could mean for her students, many of whom stay over the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, because there are no shelters in her community. When that happens, both districts share the cost of transporting the child to school, Smith said, but she’s not sure what would happen if Missouri and Kansas decided to spend their block grants differently.

“If we don’t have something that focuses on this particular population they’ll get overlooked — as they often do already,” Smith said.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

When Congress takes up the fiscal year 2026 budget, leaders should maintain dedicated funding to support these vulnerable children.

Roughly in schools across the U.S. are homeless. These children currently have legal protections that remove barriers to enrollment and attendance. This has been the case since the signing of the federal McKinney-Vento Act by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1987. The law recognizes the challenges faced by children who lack a “fixed, stable, and adequate nighttime residence” and protects children’s right to enroll in and remain in school when their lack of stable housing might otherwise make this impossible. 

Along with legal protections, the law authorizes federal funding that helps schools identify and support children experiencing homelessness. These funds are used most frequently to provide transportation and school supplies to students and hire outreach staff who work with community agencies and train school personnel on how to connect children and families with needed services at their school and in the community. 

Since the enactment of the McKinney-Vento Act, a growing body of research has demonstrated why the protections are needed. shows children experiencing homelessness are more likely to be chronically absent from school and less likely to graduate high school, compared to the entire student body, as well as economically disadvantaged students. Teens experiencing homelessness also face significantly greater risks to their health and well-being, with a more than four times greater than their high school peers.  

While annual funding designated for helping schools serve students without stable housing makes up less than 1% of past years’ federal education budget at roughly $129 million annually, these funds have a substantial impact. In of American Rescue Plan funding targeted to improve identification and services for homeless students (ARP-HCY), school districts that received additional funding saw a 25% increase in the identification of students experiencing homelessness, as well as reduced rates of chronic absenteeism, improvements in reading, science and math, and increased graduation rates among homeless students. 

Additionally, in a of New York State schools that, school personnel reported that school districts that had previously had little awareness of the impact of homelessness on children in their schools were better able as a result of receiving dedicated funding. 

The president’s 2026 budget proposal will gut the McKinney-Vento Act and leave children who are homeless without the vital support of their schools. The proposal rolls 18 programs –- including McKinney-Vento funding for homeless students –- into a single flexible state block grant, and it cuts the collective funding for those programs .��

Proponents argue that the block grant approach does not eliminate funding for homeless students and simply provides states more flexibility in how they spend their education dollars. However, previous state block grants tell a different story. When funding for an established program is transferred to unrestricted block grants, grants often do not continue to be used for their original purpose. 

The best example of this is the replacement of federal cash assistance with the block grant for states known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Since the TANF block grant was put in place, the total amount of cash assistance provided to families in real value from 1993 to 2016. This decline did not coincide with a ; instead it was driven by fewer needy families receiving assistance. The most recent fiscal data available shows that as of FY 2023 nationally went to basic assistance, with some states . 

By cutting the overall budget for the 18 federal education programs covered in the proposed state block grant by 70%, states will be in a position of scarcity trying to cover program needs that cannot all be met. We saw this during the pandemic when only 18% of school homelessness liaisons said their districts spent federal coronavirus relief education funding on services for homeless students –- despite that being an allowable use of the funds. Without the backing of a federal requirement that homeless students be identified and served by schools and a corresponding budget allocation, funding for students who are homeless will be eaten away by other programs in many states, and legal protections will disappear.

There is still time to ensure that the final education budget does not strip away the educational rights of students experiencing homelessness. Congress should not include the McKinney-Vento program in any block grant, but rather keep it in its current form, as the budget proposal does for both Title I programs that serve students in high-poverty areas and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act programs. By preserving the McKinney-Vento program, we can ensure that being homeless as a child does not determine the course of that child’s education or future. 

In Kern County, the first rule in counting homeless students is not saying “homeless.”

Instead, school staff use phrases like “struggling with stable housing” or “families in transition.” The approach seems to have worked: More families are sharing their housing status with their children’s schools, which means more students are getting services.

“There’s a lot of stigma attached to the word ‘homeless,’” said Curt Williams, director of homeless and foster youth services for the Kern County Office of Education. “When you remove that word, it all changes.”

Largely as a result of better identification methods, Kern County saw its homeless student population jump 10% last year, to 7,200. Those students received transportation to and from school, free school supplies, tutoring and other services intended to help them stay in school. For the purposes of this data, the definition of homelessness is broader than .

The trend is reflected statewide. In the latest state enrollment data released last month, California had 230,443 homeless students — a 9.3% increase from the previous year. Some of the increase is due to the state’s ongoing housing shortage, but most of the increase is because of better identification, advocates and school officials said.

Homeless students face numerous obstacles in school. They have higher rates of discipline and absenteeism, and fare worse academically. Last year, only 16% of homeless students met the , some of the lowest scores of any student group.

“Schools can’t solve homelessness, but they can ensure the students are safe in the classroom and getting the education they need to get out of homelessness,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of Schoolhouse Connection, a national homeless youth advocacy group. “That starts with identifying the child who’s homeless.”

Challenges of counting homeless students

Under the federal McKinney-Vento Act, schools are required to count their homeless students throughout the school year and ensure they receive services. Homeless students also have the right to stay enrolled in their original school even if they move.

For many years, schools struggled to identify homeless students. Under state law, schools must at the beginning of the school year asking families where they live — in their own homes, in motels, doubled-up with other families, in shelters, cars or outdoors.

Some schools were less-than-diligent about collecting the form, or reassuring families understood the importance. Often, homeless families were reluctant to submit the form because they were afraid the school might contact a child welfare agency. Immigrant families sometimes feared the school might notify immigration authorities. And some families didn’t realize that sharing quarters with another family — by far the most common living situation among homeless families – is technically defined as homeless, at least under McKinney-Vento.

A 2021 by former Assemblymember Luz Rivas, a Democrat from Arleta in the San Fernando Valley, sought to fix that problem. The bill requires schools to train everyone who works with students — from bus drivers to cafeteria workers to teachers — on how to recognize potential signs of homelessness. That could include families who move frequently or don’t reply to school correspondence.

The bill seems to have helped. Last year, the state identified 21,000 more homeless students than it had the previous year, even as overall enrollment dropped.

Still, that’s probably an undercount, researchers said. The actual homeless student population is probably between 5% and10% of those students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, according to the National Center for Homeless Education. In California, that would be a shortfall of up to 138,713 students.

Influx of funding

Another boost for identifying homeless students came from the American Rescue Plan, the federal COVID-19 relief package. The plan included $800 million for schools to hire counselors or train existing staff to help homeless students. Nearly all schools in California received some money.

About 120 districts in California won grant money through the McKinney-Vento Act, which last year dispersed about $15.9 million in California to pay for things like rides to school, backpacks, staff and other services. Districts are chosen on a competitive basis; not all districts that apply receive funds.

But those funding sources are drying up. Most of the pandemic relief money has already been spent, and President Donald Trump’s recently approved budget does not include McKinney-Vento funding for 2026-27.

The cuts come at a time when advocates expect steep increases in the number of homeless families over the next few years, due in part to national policy changes. Republican budget proposals include cuts to Medicaid, food assistance and other programs aimed at helping low-income families, while the immigration crackdown has left thousands of families afraid to seek assistance. For families living on tight budgets, those cuts could lead to a loss of housing.

And in California, the shortage of affordable housing continues to be a hurdle for low-income families. Even Kern County, which has traditionally been a less pricey option for families, has seen a as more residents move there from Los Angeles.

Joseph Bishop, an education professor at UCLA and co-author of a on homeless students nationwide, said the loss of government funding will be devastating for homeless students.

“California is the epicenter of the homeless student crisis, and we need targeted, dedicated support,” Bishop said. “Folks should be extremely alarmed right now. Will these kids be getting the education they need and deserve?”

Better food, cleaner bathrooms

In Kern County, identification has only been one part of the effort to help homeless students thrive in school. Schools also try to pair them with tutors and mentors, give them school supplies and laundry tokens, and invite them to join a program called Student Voice Ambassadors. There, students can tour local colleges, learn leadership skills and explore career options.

As part of the program, staff ask students what would make school more enticing — and then make sure the suggestions happen. At one school, students said they’d go to class if the bathrooms were cleaner. So staff improved the bathrooms. At another school, students wanted better food. They got it.

Williams credits the program with reducing absenteeism among homeless students. Two years ago, 45% of Kern County’s homeless students were chronically absent. Last year, the number dropped to 39% – still too high, he said, but a significant improvement.

“Without McKinney-Vento funds, the Student Voice Ambassador program would go away,” Williams said. “How will we keep it going? I don’t know.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

Williams and her children with relatives, but in late November were told they had to find somewhere else to live. She called the city’s homeless response team at least three times seeking help, but her situation wasn’t deemed an emergency, and she never received assistance in finding somewhere to stay; in November she said she was no family rooms were available. So they began living out of a van, frequently parking in the casino garage where her two children died. It was only after that tragedy that she was finally given a spot in a shelter.

Homelessness has seen a sharp uptick across the country in recent years, but the increase has been the most dramatic for families with children age 5 and younger, multiple data sources suggest. “The most common age that someone is in shelter nationally is under the age of 5,” said Henry Love, vice president for public policy & strategy at Win, the largest provider of family shelters in New York City. This trend means more and more families with young children are scrambling to find somewhere to live.

This housing instability can have a lasting impact on children, affecting their cognitive and social-emotional development and leading to learning delays and academic challenges. Those challenges are likely to follow them throughout their education and even later into their lives.

In its of homelessness in America, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported that the number of homeless people increased by 18% last year, reaching the highest level ever recorded. The problem is even more acute for families with children: They experienced the largest single-year increase, with a rate that climbed by 39% between 2023 and 2024. That came after a increase in homelessness for families with children in 2023.

Those numbers are alarming, said Donald H. Whitehead, Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, even as he noted that the department’s data is an undercount due to challenges with identifying homeless people and how they’re classified.

HUD doesn’t break the data down further by children’s age. But other sources indicate that the youngest children are increasingly at risk of living in homelessness. “What we know to be true is more young kids are experiencing homelessness,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit focused on homelessness and education.

According to an estimate generated by SchoolHouse Connection and the Poverty Solutions initiative at the University of Michigan, there were 681,180 children nationally under age 6 experiencing homelessness in the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent data. That represents an approximately 23% increase over the 2021-2022 school year, “twice the increase for school-aged children,” Duffield said in an interview. The nonprofit expects to publish the data in April.

In January, SchoolHouse Connection for the 2022-2023 school year, showing that 451,369 children ages 3 and younger were experiencing homelessness that year. That represents about a 24% increase over the 2021-2022 school year. 

The same trend appears in more recent for children attending Head Start, which provides free early childhood education to low-income children below the age of 4. Homelessness among those children rose nearly 13% between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, the largest increase since the start of the pandemic. Overall, the figure for children attending Head Start is up 28% since the 2021-2022 school year. 

The increases are “unfortunately consistent across data sources,” said Erin Patterson, director of education initiatives at SchoolHouse Connection.

The higher numbers could reflect better efforts to locate children experiencing homelessness. The American Rescue Plan provided $800 million in pandemic-relief funding that to identify more children in unstable housing. Head Start’s former director, Khari Garvin, was particularly on increasing enrollment among homeless children. “If it’s about finding and enrolling and identifying, that’s a good thing,” Duffield said. 

But the increases are also driven by troubling forces. Pandemic-era protections and funding that helped keep people housed have come to an end. Until it was by the Supreme Court in August 2021, a federal eviction moratorium barred eligible tenants from being kicked out of their homes; state and local eviction moratoria lasted longer, with Oakland, California’s in July 2023. Some converted empty hotels to housing for homeless people. States from Congress’s CARES Act to offer rental assistance, and then Congress passed two rounds of rental assistance totaling $46.5 billion. All of those measures have now expired.

In the meantime, the cost of housing has climbed dramatically nationwide. Rents 29% between 2019 and 2023, far outpacing income growth, and last year a record number of American households spent more than 30% of their incomes on housing. Such increases often trigger evictions, and the people of eviction are families with babies and toddlers. 

Homelessness among young children may also have risen with the arrival of migrant families, many of whom had nowhere to stay except shelters. Domestic violence often forces victims and their children to flee their housing situations and enter shelter systems, and there was an in such incidents during the pandemic. Many families have also recently been pushed out of their housing by natural disasters, from the flooding in North Carolina to the fires in Los Angeles. “Those have lingering effects,” Duffield said. “People don’t get their feet right away and the more vulnerable you are the longer it takes.”

Having children is also expensive and can tip families into poverty. Research has that a quarter of all poverty spells start with the birth of a child. “People who are on the cusp can quickly slide into homelessness,” Patterson said. 

Even as homelessness among young children and their families is on the rise, they often get left out of homeless counts and homeless services. The vast majority of these families don’t live on streets or in shelters, but instead double up inside friends’ and families’ homes, which HUD doesn’t count as technically homeless and may be harder to identify. Others live in motels and hotels, which again doesn’t count for HUD’s purposes. 

“The homelessness system itself doesn’t see families with young children and it doesn’t prioritize them,” Duffield said. “They’re often an afterthought.” As Williams’s story showed, they can get turned away if they technically have somewhere to sleep, like a car or a couch.

By contrast, the federal McKinney-Vento Act, which provides school districts with money to support students experiencing homelessness, includes in its count those who are living with other families, in hotels and motels, or in substandard conditions. 

The difference shows up in the data. The U.S. Department of Education’s estimate of the number of homeless students has since 2004, with a spike during Hurricane Katrina and a dip during the pandemic. And yet the number of homeless families reported by HUD has remained relatively flat in comparison over all of those years. 

One thing is clear, though: Homelessness has huge ramifications for young children. “It is a traumatic experience,” Whitehead said.

Research has found that children who experience homelessness are to have developmental delays. It can even interrupt such basics as potty training. Housing instability means many families move frequently between schools, disrupting a child’s education. “As a former teacher, if a child can’t feel safe and is not stabilized, they can’t learn,” Love said. 

Children who experience homelessness are more likely to and suffer from . Once they reach school age, homelessness is tied directly to higher absenteeism rates and lower test scores.

“Any experience of homelessness, even short-lived, can impact a child’s development even after the family has been stably housed,” Patterson said. But, she added, “The younger and longer a child experiences homelessness, the greater the cumulative toll of negative outcomes.”

Enrolling children in safe, high-quality early education programs can mitigate those issues and “help create a sense of normalcy and calm in otherwise tumultuous and toxic circumstances,” Patterson said. But just 7.4% of Head Start eligible children who were homeless in 2023-2024 were actually enrolled in Head Start or Early Head Start. Young children in public pre-K classrooms or Head Start programs run by school districts can receive help through the McKinney-Vento Act with transportation, food and other priorities.

Other solutions range from the specific to the systematic. Prioritizing homeless families for services, including early childhood education, could help. More accurate counts would also give a clearer picture of who is homeless. Another solution would be to offer more housing vouchers targeted for this population, similar to those offered to veterans or unaccompanied youth, or simply to provide cash without strings attached.

“Give people money,” Love said. “That’s really the crux of it. People are under-resourced.”

Of the roughly migrants who have arrived in New York City since March 2022, about a are school aged children. Late spring tallies estimate at least have enrolled in the city’s public school system.

But experts serving them say the approach to housing and by extension school placement – which includes new families – is “haphazard” at best, threatening the safety and stability of children. 

“We deal with trauma all the time. We work in homelessness, but what we are experiencing is a whole other level,” said Henry Love, vice president of policy and strategy for Women in Need, the largest family shelter provider in New York City and the nation.

WIN is operating several migrant-specific shelters throughout the city, predominantly converted hotels. 

Love, who holds a doctorate in developmental psychology, explained migrant children are experiencing compounding traumas: violence or instability in their home countries, death and uncertainty during the journey to the U.S., and housing instability in the city. They are still in survival mode, and many are experiencing PTSD while attempting to find normalcy in schools. 

“We’re not putting the resources into these kids for them to be able to grow and develop in the best way possible,” said Love. “… We’ve been in this for two years, we’re going to continue to be in emergency mode. At some point, we have to think about what’s happening for these kids long term.”

In conversation with The 74, Love discusses what migrant youth are experiencing in the city today and the failures of the systems serving them, while cautioning against the creation of a separate housing system for migrants. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Thinking about this particular population of newcomers, what’s top of mind for you right now? 

The kids. I feel like that’s been the issue from the onset of this. I’m a former educator, I used to teach elementary school. Just knowing what these kids have gone through, and how young so many of them are, and how critical this age is in their development … the majority of the young people that we have who are asylum seekers are under the age of 6 or 7. 

My barber, who’s from Venezuela, came with his son. He’s 56, telling me the story: Seeing a baby get his head smashed in and dying. Seeing dead bodies on the way up through . All this stuff. What does that do to a six year old? 

This is what I’ve heard from every single parent that I have talked to about what they’ve gone through to get their kids and their families here. There’s base level trauma of what caused them to leave wherever in the first place. And then there’s the trauma on the journey. And then there’s a trauma at the border. And then there’s the trauma being shipped to New York. And then there’s the trauma of being homeless here. 

On top of that, now for no reason besides to harass people, [New York City] is gonna do the 60 day eviction rule? There’s no words for just how cruel that is. What does this mean, for a population that specifically needs to be stabilized more than any other population, and we’re doing one of the things that is the most destabilizing?

How have you seen eviction orders play out?

I feel like it’s purposely complicated.

Basically, for the purpose of this conversation, we’ll say there’s two systems. Agencies that fall under the jurisdiction of the city are having shelters open up underneath them, like Housing Preservation and Development, Emergency Management.

Then there’s the Health and Hospitals system – unique because it’s a quasi-gov agency. Because of that, the right to shelter doesn’t apply the same way to them as they do to the rest of the city agencies. [The 60-day rule is under effect for families with children staying in .] That’s also why we think that the Mayor is trying to get people into these places. 

Most families are in facilities that don’t have a 60 day order, but what we are experiencing is horrible. What the city has been doing is sending all of the families out of Department of Homeless Services tier two shelters, which is mostly what we run and specialize in, and into migrant facilities. They are mostly hotels. 

It’s short notice. We’ve had buses just pull up like “get on” and we’re like, what? What’s happening? 

Same day eviction sort of thing? 

It’s a same-day eviction. We were like, “we need notification. What — you want 30-40 families?” We push back on that. 

There was also another incident where we got notified within 24 hours. We communicated to the families at this particular [Brooklyn] site. When we first opened this shelter in that space a few years ago, there was so much pushback from community members against the opening of a homeless shelter. Eventually what happened was like some of the community members did a petition and they allowed us to open it. After that, there was a much better relationship with the school. 

All that to say that when we had an influx of folks coming into our sites, particularly asylum seekers, all of them went to this one elementary school. Their PTA has just loved all these families. When they heard about this [move] notification, they were like, what the hell? They organized a protest … It’s been beautiful to witness. 

There’s limited things that we can do. We can’t tell them no, we can’t stop them. We say, we can’t force you all to get on the buses, but eventually DHS police will come. And that’ll be really ugly. I don’t have words to describe sitting down with the PTA moms who were asylum seekers — they’re begging me to not transfer them. 

One of the women took her phone out and had this really heartbreaking story from her 11 year old who was at school and was texting her, “Mommy, I’m afraid to come home, the police could be there.” That is what these folks are experiencing during this. 

I’m seeing that transferring regularly — from our facilities to another which doesn’t have the 60 day rule. But forced transfers like that, that are all of a sudden, are very inhumane. I can’t even fathom what’s happening for those kids. And some of them are having to do this every 60 days. 

Thank you for sharing those stories. You mentioned this was happening pretty regularly, sometimes 30 to 40 families at once. How and when were you able to successfully push back? 

I guess [we were sometimes successful] in terms of delaying, but ultimately, the city’s argument is, ‘we’re transferring to the migrant facilities because we’re gonna provide better services.’ We know that’s just not true. It’s unequivocally untrue. 

We opened up a migrant facility, took it over from the city. They had minimal services. They didn’t have anyone that spoke Spanish on staff. Once we put our staff in who spoke Spanish – we only hired people that did – there was a line out the door. 

They’re like, oh, ‘we’re providing legal services.’ No, they’re not. ‘Oh, we’re providing food.’ I’ve never seen more disgusting food in my life, and I have seen prison foods and all kinds of stuff. 

Again, this is in the migrant facilities specifically? 

This is in the DHS migrant hotels where most of the families are, but there are still some families in the Health and Hospitals sites. Those are the big ones like Floyd Bennet Field [in southern Brooklyn]. Floyd Bennett is not a place where a child should ever be. It’s semi-congregate, it’s unsafe. 

We saw what happened when there was that bad storm a few months ago. Everybody at the last minute was forced to down the street. 

Are there loopholes you’ve been seeing used to move families in other shelters? 

No, because of the court mandate [of the right to shelter]. But my concern based on how the city is moving is that they’re trying to create two separate and unequal systems. 

Every time they’re separate, they’re always unequal because they’re not resourced the same way. This is our history in this country. Their justification is that they’re providing specialized X Y and Z [in migrant shelters], which is the same thing they said for segregated schools in the South. 

I think that they will eventually try to ask the courts and the powers that be to apply the 60 day rule to DHS migrant facilities. They haven’t done that yet. 

It’s murky. This has always been my question to them, OK, so when does somebody become a New Yorker? Is it two years? A lot of these folks have timed out and are undocumented. Do all of our undocumented families have to go through this system too? Is it 10 years? When do they get to use the New Yorker system? 

What have you been hearing and seeing about their needs that you feel like is being ignored right now? 

The kids and the trauma — I feel like no one’s talking about the kids at a very basic level in all of this. This is arguably one of the biggest issues of the presidential election, and no one is talking about the fact that the majority of these folks are families with kids.

We deal with trauma all the time. We work in homelessness, but what we are experiencing is a whole other level. We’re not putting the resources into these kids for them to be able to grow and develop in the best way possible. 

Like I said, they’ve seen violence where they came from, which is often what made them leave … then they come here and it’s complete destabilization and chaos. The only rationale for the 60 day rule is to harass people, make them not want to come to New York.

Some I’m imagining are experiencing PTSD in your care as well. How are they finding support?

The moms to me was a highlight – how they’re helping families navigate all this, advocating. Yes, I feel some kind of way that I’m getting screamed at by this group of angry Park Slope moms. But at the same time, it’s a beautiful thing that these women are out here all day fighting for each other. 

We had a group of kids that went to Central Park and a couple of them freaked out. I’m like, why? 

‘Because it reminded them of the .’

So for us as an organization, we’ve been thinking about trauma informed care. What does that look like for kids that have arguably been through some of the most intense trauma on earth?

How we think about our colors, how we’re interacting with folks, language access. Particularly in our migrant facility in the Bronx, we tried to be able to connect folks into the community. Part of the reason we took the shelter was because of where it was located — we knew we were gonna get lots of people who were gonna be Spanish speaking and this is a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. Just being intentional, because I think so much of what has happened in the past two years has been completely unintentional. 

It’s in emergency mode. But we’ve been in this for two years, we’re going to continue to be in emergency mode. At some point, we have to think about what’s happening for these kids long term. 

Most places haven’t really opened Pandora’s Box because they haven’t had the language access, particularly for mental health services. And if they did it all this stuff would come up. What’s happening is that it’s not, and honestly, in the first six months to year, people are still in shock. But now it’s coming out. It manifests in these really weird and interesting ways. 

We’re talking tens and tens of thousands of the kids that need very specialized support. They may not be able to express it in our language, they may not be getting the services that they need and, or their parents may not know or be familiar with how to navigate our systems. 

I get my haircut, and [my barber] is speaking to me in English the whole time. I was like, how long have you been here? Five months. I’m like, you’re fluent. How did you do that? ‘I want to learn English, I want to be here, I want to work.’ We have not given folks the resources they need to be able to do that. 

The wait time for work permits is also exorbitantly long. Can you share about the work that families have been able to find? 

Honestly, I haven’t heard very many people who are recent arrivals, who came after March 2022, who have work authorization and can legally work. 

People mostly are working out the books. Everybody’s working. And they have to, to survive. 

More so for the men is delivery, which has been interesting. There might be someone who has a Doordash account and he might rent his out to like two or three other people. It may look like he’s doing 12 or 20 hour shifts, but he’s actually doing like, maybe a five hour shift. If you go to any of the migrant facilities, there’s just tons and tons of scooters and motorbikes because that’s what they do. 

For the women, I’ve heard a whole host of different things like cleaning. The folks who are vending on the streets and so forth — we’ve seen that skyrocket, because folks have very limited options. 

People find a way, working manual or dangerous jobs that are often . 

We’ve seen that. We do legal clinics and help them with asylum applications and there was one woman who didn’t show up because she was like, I will lose my job. My boss said I would lose my job. We’re like, well, you need to come here so you can legally work. They feel, but if I do, I might not have a job at all. They dangle [employment] over their heads. 

Often, they’ll say, oh, I’m gonna pay you next week. And then they don’t pay the next week. 

Everywhere you turn in New York, you see and feel this population. Recently a ; . 

It’s a cultural thing. People are here and they’re used to doing certain things maybe in Honduras or Sudan and they can’t do that here with their kids. 

Specifically in shelters, like not being able to leave your 17 year old child at home. You can’t leave anyone in the shelter alone under the age of 18. There’s a lot of these situations where it’s like, if I’m a mom and I’m struggling and I have my four year old that has to be with me and I can’t afford daycare, he’s gonna come with me and we’re gonna sell candy. [That cultural difference] is putting them in really precarious situations. 

And then Mayor Adams’s administration … were passing out flyers about, don’t have your kids street vending. As if that was going to make people stop. 

That’s a piece to this conversation, too, that I think people have not thought a lot about. [Families] may have been in a situation where they’ve never been under surveillance now they’re under hyper surveillance. Their movement restricted. 

For a lot of them, schools become the most stable place in their new lives. Our prior reporting showed some of the relationships jeopardized by the 60 day eviction rule and forced transfers. Can you talk a bit about whether you’ve seen families successfully enroll and stay in a given school?

My barber was just showing pictures of his son at school, how he was so excited to go learn and have friends, be social and play. It allows them to escape. The one thing that [the city] could not do is to mess up the kids’ schooling. At least let the kids go to school. 

In your experience working with these various city agencies, what has concerned you the most?

They are still thinking the way they did about this in August of 2022. Advocates and everyone had warned them about all this years prior. People knew this was coming.

It’s not Governor Abbott – I mean he exacerbated it – but it wasn’t just him. This has been happening for a decade, but people have chosen not to pay attention to it. 

The thing that keeps me up at night is the election and Trump’s immigration plan. Now we have created these systems where basically we’re going to have tens of thousands of kids [like DHS migrant facilities]. Will immigration buses show up and detain people? What does a mass deportation look like? That’s the thing that worries me the most — what are they thinking, are they planning for this? 

The other thing is the way that Adams’s administration has gone about advocating for support from the federal government and the state has been deplorable. We need more resources, we need more support. But [their support] has been haphazard, and they are not thinking about this long term. People are in mass migration around the world that’s not about to stop any time soon. It’s just an utter disregard for reality. 

One last question — the youth that were in Central Park and were triggered when reminded of the journey here, what happened that day? How are they?

I don’t know what the rest of the story was. I heard about it because at our migrant facility, we created a program called LEAD, which is legal empowerment and assistance for displaced families. We provide legal support but also social emotional services. The director has tons of stories.

The asylum process is horrible. It’s the least trauma-informed thing ever – basically tell me about the most messed up thing that’s ever happened to you in detail. We had many people breaking down. We were very mindful of who it was happening to, making sure that they were followed up with a clinical social worker to get some support. How do we make sure they have someone with them that they feel can support them? How do we make sure that if they’re couples that we break them up [to talk] because there might be domestic violence? Making sure they have food, making sure they have childcare so the kids aren’t hearing some of the stuff that may have caused them to leave. 

This is all a work in progress and for us, we’re trying to learn what a longer term model looks like to support families that are going through this level of trauma. 

When I was talking to one mom, I was like, look, my hands are really tight. The best thing that you can do is tell your stories. People need to hear this. People need to see the pain, they need to see what you’re going through. 

Alaska school districts risk losing access to up to several hundred thousand dollars in federal funding aimed at homeless students if they aren’t able to commit to spending it by the end of September.

The was included in a federal law providing pandemic relief, and national advocates have been pushing for Congress to extend the deadline, as it became clear that money could go unspent.

The exact amount Alaska districts could lose isn’t clear. Alaska districts have spent nearly 70% of their $2.3 million boost, leaving more than $700,000 unspent, according to the . The Department of Education and Early Childhood did not respond to a request for the most up-to-date figure or whether districts are on-track to spend down the balances.

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U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, worked on an amendment to the 2021 American Rescue Plan that secured $800 million nationally for students experiencing homelessness nationwide. Alaska districts received about eight times their usual annual funding.

The National Conference of State Legislatures called on Congress to extend the timeline to spend the money, under the terms of a longstanding federal law, known as the , aimed at ensuring homeless children’s access to schooling.

Barbara Duffield, the executive director of the national advocacy group SchoolHouse Connection, said the NCSL’s resolution is significant, even if it is likely too late for an extension from Congress.

“The window for that extension, sadly, has gone,” Duffield said. “Not for a valiant and a smart and a popular fight, but because of all these other dysfunctions in Congress.”

She said the resolution did more than ask for an extension; it showed the importance of the funding across states and territories.

“It puts a body of state legislators on record as saying we should have had more time. And moving forward, there needs to be more of a priority in investing in this population,” Duffield said.

The most recent state data shows that , and that the number has risen over the last several years. Most of those students live with another family, but about a fifth live in shelters and 10% are unsheltered.

Increased funding and programs typically leads districts to identify more students who are homeless, according to SchoolHouse Connection’s research. That data shows that the actual number of students that are homeless is typically 50-100% more than the official school count.

School districts in Anchorage and Kenai used the money to bring on additional staff to work with unhoused students. The Child in Transition Program in the Anchorage School District used its additional funding to hire two full-time staff for remote sites and five part-time staff in high schools that are there to support students on campus and connect them to services. David Mayo-Kiely runs the program, which has operated since the 1990s and has 10 staff members.

“They check in on attendance, they check in on grades. They’re just sort of there to be another ally for these students, someone they can go to,” he said.

Those roles are important because of how homelessness can negatively affect students at school. Students who are homeless are chronically absent at roughly the rate of their housed peers, which is known to be detrimental to academic performance. They are also nearly 30% less likely to graduate than their housed peers,.

ASD’s program also spent money on internet hot spots for students, professional development for the staff, and supplies. Mayo-Kiely said the district will leave only a very small amount of money unspent.

“The funding has been wonderful for us,” he said. “We were interested in having an extended funding, but we had been planning the entire time that this funding would be expiring by the end of this calendar year.”

And he said the funding will have a lasting effect, even though it expires at the end of the year: The investment in staff demonstrated how important those on-campus “allies” were for students, so now the district is using money from other grant programs to continue funding them.

The that urged Congress to extend the deadline was a priority of Sen. Löki Tobin, D-Anchorage and chair of the Senate Education Committee, after the Alaska Legislature failed to pass a similar resolution drafted by her office. Tobin is a member of the NCSL Education Standing Committee.

“Our hope with this resolution is to say, ‘Could we continue to use McKinley-Vento funds in this manner — hiring additional support personnel to provide wraparound services for the entire family?’ and also for us to think about how we might be able to reserve some of the remaining funds to continue serving students into the FY25-26 school year,” she said.

The funding that came with the pandemic boost also has more flexible spending rules that mean districts can spend it on student transportation to the same school, even if the student’s address changes — such as if they move in with a friend’s family or begin living in a shelter. Districts can waive certain enrollment requirements temporarily to make sure the student starts on time, and even help with school supplies.

“We have a significant increase in youth experiencing homelessness that has persisted, and we know that it’s not going to be an easy fix,” Tobin said. “Particularly with the lack of affordable housing in the Anchorage bowl, with some of the instability and low wages in some of those entry and mid-level positions. So we’re really anticipating that this population is going to continue to need additional resources and attention.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

With all the talk about using federal pandemic relief funds to solve such challenges as student absenteeism, lagging academic performance and adolescent mental health crises, relatively little attention has been paid to the $800 million in COVID aid that can be used to address a hidden but significant driver of these, and other, post-pandemic educational problems: homelessness.

Homelessness is easily overlooked in the classroom and the community, because children without homes are very rarely on the streets in plain view. They are more likely to bounce between the homes of other people, motels, cars and other less visible locations, especially in rural and suburban areas. Even with significant undercounting, public schools identified more than 1.2 million children and youth experiencing homelessness in 2021-22, a slight increase over the previous year. The of students experiencing homelessness is more than double the rate of all children, and they graduate at significantly lower rates than students from low-income families with stable housing.

Federal lawmakers have given school districts an opportunity to address the problem with in American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth Funds, money that can be used for the identification, enrollment and school participation of children and youth experiencing homelessness. Allocated through both competition (an initial tranche of $200 million) and formula (a second tranche of $600 million), the funds have reached 53% of school districts to date — the number of districts reached with annual homeless education funding allocations in the past.

Some districts are using the resources in creative ways to support families and encourage attendance. Lawton Public Schools in Oklahoma, for instance, is providing cell phones to students who are experiencing homelessness on their own, purchasing a vehicle for transportation and hiring mentors and outreach specialists. Before receiving the federal funds, the district employed traveling counselors to help get homeless students to school until they could be included in the district’s transportation system. But variation in counselors’ schedules made these arrangements unreliable. Purchasing a dedicated vehicle helped to address the problem. The district is also using the vehicle for “home” visits to students and families and to transport students to health services.

Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia, learned from its attendance specialists that students in homeless families often lacked laundry, school supplies, clothing, jackets and other basic needs. The district is providing store cards to support them — and to build trust to re-engage families in learning. The district is also using the COVID relief funds to provide homeless students with dental care, glasses and specialized transportation.

Clifton Public Schools in New Jersey also prioritized students’ immediate needs by purchasing $50 store cards from local retailers such as Walgreens, Target and Shop Rite and $25 gas cards. Families meet with the district’s supervisor of counseling and student services to determine eligibility and prioritize their needs. The district uses the cards to purchase items, and delivers them to the family or the school. This approach has led to an increase in the identification of students in need because families have been more willing to share their homeless status once they’re aware of resources to support them.

The school district in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, is using its federal aid to provide students experiencing homelessness and their families with hotel stays of three to five days. These provide families with extra time to figure out their next steps and keep their children safe and in school. As a first step, district’s community outreach director developed partnerships with local hotels with a letter outlining the definition of homelessness under federal law and the unique needs of families in Lafourche Parish. The district then worked with its social workers to establish the services that families would receive during their short-term hotel stays, including meals and transportation. The social workers welcome arriving families to assess the support needed during their stay.

Alaska’s Anchorage School District found that paying for car repairs for families or teens is more economical than providing taxi services. If a family reaches out to the homeless education program, staff members determine if car repairs are feasible and ask the family or youth to obtain an estimate. The program will cover up to about $200 in car repair costs, and families are asked to pay a portion of the expense. Once the repair is completed, staff members use a school district credit card, submitting receipts with the car repair business’ name and amount charged.

There is to identifying and supporting students who experience homelessness to make the most of the one year remaining of the federal funding. Including homelessness in school, district and state efforts to strengthen academic recovery, improve attendance and bolster student mental health is essential to move the needle on these core challenges.

As the number of unhoused students in California’s public schools continues to rise to pre-pandemic levels, experts and educators fear that today’s economy paired with the state’s unrelenting housing crisis will lead to unprecedented rates of homeless youth.

According to updated data released today by the California Department of Education, there are about 5.9 million students enrolled in public schools this school year, close to 40,000 fewer students than last year or a .7% drop. But the number of students experiencing homelessness increased by 9%, about 16,000, to a total of approximately 187,000 kids.

The overarching cause of homelessness among all Californians is the perennial shortage of affordable housing in the state, according to Angela James, a researcher at UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools.

“It’s alarming to me, quite frankly,”  James said. “Housing instability may be deepening in California as a result of the pandemic.”

The new data signals a return to pre-pandemic numbers. Last school year, about 2.9% of students qualified as homeless. The percentage is up to 3.2% this year, about the same as it was in 2019-20. 

“As a state we have not made the housing and well-being of our population a priority,” James said. “Sadly, social policies have not been responsive to the needs of young people and their families.”

Experts struggle to explain why homeless numbers dropped during the pandemic. They said students and their families may have been moving around during the early months of quarantine, so they may not have been counted. Or unhoused students may have just been falling through the cracks.

“In some cases, districts could be getting better at identifying students,” said Dion Burns, a senior researcher at the . 

Student homelessness rose this year for the first time since 2020. The count includes students living in motels, trailer parks, campgrounds or public spaces.

While statewide numbers indicate a return to pre-pandemic levels, 13 of the 20 largest districts in the state have more students experiencing homelessness now than they did in the 2019-20 school year. At one district, Kern High, the number more than doubled. 

Since 2015, rates of homelessness were rising gradually up until 2020, when they started dropping steadily. Student homelessness rose this year for the first time since 2020. 

The California Department of Education uses a  of homelessness that includes students living in motels, trailer parks, campgrounds or public spaces. 

School districts and county offices of education employ liaisons who keep tabs on students and families experiencing homelessness. James said they’re often shorthanded, so collecting data may have been a challenge, especially during the chaos of 2020 and 2021.

At the Monarch School, a school for unhoused students operated by the San Diego County Office of Education, administrators have seen an increased need. Jesus Nunez, the communications director at the school, said students are experiencing more housing insecurity in recent years, along with more of the mental health challenges and traumas stemming from a lack of stable housing.

“If students’ basic needs aren’t being met, it doesn’t matter what teaching strategies are being used,” Nunez said.

The Monarch School serves about 300 students. The school day is longer, starting at 8 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m. Nunez said the school offers more counseling and services like art therapy. 

“I think everybody at the school wishes we could do more,” he said. “We don’t turn away a lot of students, but unfortunately some students do need to go back to their school of residence because there isn’t space available here.”

Many unhoused students and their families have been evicted from their homes, James said. She recalled her own personal trauma of having her family’s furniture moved out to their front lawn when they were evicted. With no home, students and their families might go from one temporary shelter to another with no sense of how long they can stay in one place.

“The degree to which that impacts a child cannot be underestimated,” James said.

She added that teachers are fortunately better prepared to work with these students than they were in past decades. When a student acts out or even gets violent, a teacher might try to calm the student instead of resorting to disciplinary actions like detentions or suspensions.

According to the state’s new data, the numbers of foster youth, students with disabilities and students from low-income households have all increased by between 2% and 3%.    

The rate of decline for overall enrollment shows signs of stabilizing after plummeting in the first years of the pandemic. Kindergarten enrollment took the biggest hit, but is starting to climb back up. Enrollment went from about 71,000 in 2020-21 to about 130,000 this year, but state officials said it’s partly due to the state’s expansion of transitional kindergarten.

This story was originally published by .

By the time Chaunceey Chery turned 18, he had moved nearly two dozen times. 

For years, he bounced between apartments and hotel rooms in Vermont and Florida as his mother struggled with substance abuse. His family, he said, spent more hours than he can estimate driving back and forth on I-95, which runs the length of the Eastern Seaboard. 

As a teenager, Chery tried out online school to maintain continuity amid the many moves, but family turmoil and his own mental health challenges prevented him from fully engaging in lessons. For nearly two years, he hardly learned anything, he said.

At 15, he began living with relatives in northeastern Vermont, hoping for more stability. He began regularly attending school in an alternative program meant for students facing adverse circumstances and was able to land a job, but he felt he was “walking on eggshells” living in a space that was not his own. Meanwhile, his housing nightmare continued as one aunt got evicted, another had landlord difficulties and his uncle’s house got foreclosed. 

“I felt like I was quadruple homeless at that point,” he said.

Circumstances like those that Chery endured as a young person trying to survive and stay in school now threaten to become increasingly common in rural areas, as experts warn of a in remote towns and villages.

In St. Johnsbury, Vermont where Chery lives, the school district’s homeless liaison, Kara Lufkin, said her caseload has jumped to nearly two dozen students this school year after hovering just above a dozen for the two years prior. Lori Robinson, the liaison for a nearby school district in the wider Northeast Kingdom region, also said she’s now serving the most students she ever has since starting the role in 2020, when a nationwide eviction moratorium protected families. 

Federal funding for low-cost rural rentals has been slashed in recent decades. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program that once helped finance the construction of new apartments in sparsely populated areas of the country has been — squeezing an option long relied upon by many rural households.

But local factors also play in as Vermont is phasing out its pandemic rental assistance program. Rebecca Lewis, regional director of Northeast Kingdom Community Action, said her organization is bracing for “a lot more” families to lose their housing in the next six months.

Vermont has the second-highest per capita rate of homelessness in the nation, lower only than California’s, according to a December 2022 report from the . At the same time, the Green Mountain state provides temporary shelter to a higher share of its residents without homes than any other state, with 98% safely indoors on a point-in-time count from last year.

While dwarfed in size by places like New York City, where the number of homeless students , rural students without housing face challenges that are distinct from those in metro centers. Emergency shelters, public transportation and cell reception tend to be scarce or nonexistent. Quiet places to work like libraries and coffee shops may be miles away. And in far north regions like St. Johnsbury, one winter night without proper shelter can be lethal.

As a homeless liaison, Lufkin understands it’s her job to mitigate these difficulties as much as possible. She coordinates transportation to and from school when families need it and often provides youth in need of winter gear with jackets, hats and gloves. Robinson, in the district next door, celebrated being able to scrape together the equipment and transportation for a student on her caseload to play football in the fall and basketball this winter. 

Still, much remains beyond their control, Lufkin said, and some conditions can cripple learning for homeless youth regardless of whether they’re happening in a teeming city or the remote reaches of New England. 

“[Students] may not be sleeping as well if they’re sleeping on a couch,” she said. “If you’re hungry, your focus isn’t on reading that textbook or doing that math work.”

These are just a few of the many factors that explain why youth experiencing homelessness have worse education outcomes than any other peer group, with the lowest overall attendance, standardized test scores and high school graduation rates of all students. The limited data that exist suggest roughly the same share of youth in rural areas experience homelessness as in urban areas, but with .

“It’s definitely a survival mindset,” said Chery. 

For the embattled teen, a level of stability finally came when, at 18, he entered a temporary housing program for homeless youth run by Northeast Kingdom Youth Services. He finally had a space to himself without worrying about eviction.

“It felt like I could breathe for a second,” he said.

He began taking courses at the local community college, which conveniently was walking distance from where he was staying. He applied to nearby Northern Vermont University for the spring term and was accepted, attending school there for three months until the COVID school shutdowns of March 2020 derailed his plans.

The disruption underscored the fragility of his situation, he realized. At his new college, he had depended on his dorm room as his only place to stay and often felt a level of “imposter syndrome,” he said, as it seemed that other students were more prepared for the coursework and campus culture. He had a long way to go before fully recovering from the traumas of his teenage years, he thought to himself.

“I got out of those situations that I was in, but now there’s so much more work to do trying to build a life, lay the foundation.”

Homeschooling while homeless

For Elysia Gingras, the spiral into homelessness didn’t come until she was in her 30s with five children, who now range in age from 9 to 13. 

The once financially comfortable seven-member family now stays in two rooms at an inn in St. Johnsbury as a part of Northeast Kingdom Community Action’s supportive housing program. The family burned through roughly $15,000 in savings, the mother said, after their dog attacked their nephew in an incident that was heavily covered in local outlets. While the family followed the injured toddler to hospitals in Boston and Hanover, New Hampshire, a health inspector condemned their apartment of five years, forcing them to crash at a nearby Comfort Inn — a move they thought would last a couple of weeks, tops. 

Now two years and hundreds of unsuccessful rental applications later, Gingras has come to understand just how tough the area’s housing market is. Even with her husband working full time as a roofer making over $20 an hour and her selling Arbonne cosmetics part time, nothing has panned out yet.

“I look [for rentals] every day, and I’m not exaggerating,” Gingras said. 

“Every place that we thought we were gonna get, it was like this constant roller coaster of getting your hopes up and finding out, nope, we didn’t get that one.”

Low-priced housing units in the Northeast Kingdom have been in short supply for years, explained Patrick Shattuck. He works as executive director of Rural Edge, the region’s main affordable housing development organization and its largest landlord. The Kingdom’s population of roughly 65,000 is both shrinking and aging, he said, meaning big houses that used to be occupied by young families now often hold just one or two elderly inhabitants. 

At the same time, the rise of seasonal tourism — with enticing skiers in the winter and the popular drawing mountain bikers in the summer — have led some property owners to convert rental units into more lucrative AirBnBs. Despite the efforts of Shattuck’s organization to maintain and add affordable options to the market, apartment prices have soared. Local institutions like schools and hospitals, he said, have lost would-be hires because the candidates can’t find affordable places to stay.

For the Gingras family, the housing squeeze has translated into some major life adjustments. Elysia Gingras, previously the type to bake homemade bread and meal-plan a month in advance, had to serve cereal and Hot Pockets when they first moved to the inn due to lack of kitchen access. 

She homeschools four out of her five children from their two motel rooms, but they now complete worksheets on clipboards rather than at the kitchen table. By homeschooling, Gingras is able to incorporate the family’s Christian faith into the school day, teaching prayer alongside math lessons, spelling quizzes and visits to the local Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium. She ensures all her children make their beds nicely each morning so their shared area stays orderly and there’s floorspace during the day for group yoga breaks.

But for all the family’s work to maintain normalcy, keeping up morale can be tough at times, the mother told The 74 just after New Year’s. The last few months were especially difficult. 

“Everybody’s trying to be joyful because it’s the holidays, but how do you really have a merry Christmas when you’re all in a hotel?” she said. “When we see [the other unhoused parents] outside and we’re like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ It doesn’t even matter what you say … because we’re here. We’re still here. And it’s like that unspoken acknowledgement of pain.”

Identifying and supporting students

Gingras, with her self-created curricula and Harry Potter read-alouds, exemplifies something Brittnee Dwyer, two months into a job with Northeast Kingdom Community Action, has quickly come to realize.

“It doesn’t mean if someone’s homeless that they’re a bad parent,” the newly hired housing specialist said.

But still, Asia Goldsmith, the Gingras’s neighbor at the inn, sometimes can’t avoid the creeping thought that she’s failing her three children. After spending the summer couch surfing and camping, the four of them have been at the hotel since September. She’s proud of her kids for earning good grades this school year thanks to afterschool tutoring provided by the district, she said. But she asks them to conceal their home life as much as possible.

“They hate that they can’t have friends over, but, I don’t know, I’m embarrassed,” Goldsmith said.

Her family had not yet connected with the school district’s homeless liaison, she said.

“I imagine there are probably families out there who are not on our list but are maybe experiencing homelessness for one reason or another,” Lufkin acknowledged. She said she couldn’t comment on individual families’ cases for privacy reasons.

The district is working to improve its efforts at identifying students experiencing homelessness so they can provide them with the needed services, she said. The liaison runs professional development sessions to help school staff learn the possible signs of housing insecurity. Bus drivers, for instance, can flag if a young person’s pickup location fluctuates, indicating that the family may be in a couch-surfing situation, she said.

The superintendent of the St. Johnsbury School District did not respond to requests for comment.

Over 2,750 Vermonters are experiencing homelessness according to a from early 2022 — more than double the state’s pre-pandemic level. The state’s overall percentage increase in homelessness from 2020 to 2022 was the highest in the nation. 

Much of that rise, advocates say, may be residents who once fell under the radar while doubled-up with relatives but were forced to seek independent shelter because of families’ COVID concerns.

“We started to see more people who had no place to go,” said Shattuck, the Rural Edge director.

In response, state lawmakers have approved major investments to add more affordable housing to the market. Vermont built 800 new low-cost apartments in 2022 and has another 800 currently under construction, Gov. Phil Scott said in his January State of the State . He said the state helped 1,300 families transition out of homelessness last year.

“Housing is having its moment in Vermont,” Shattuck said.

Chery, for his part, is seeking to address the issue from another angle. After relying on the transitional housing offered by Northeast Kingdom Youth Services as an 18-year old, he now serves as a case manager for the program. 

Having lived in the shared apartment building, the 23-year-old understands the challenges the young people he works with are facing — and he knows what it can mean for their schooling.

“There’s this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality about education,” he said. But for housing insecure youth, “getting to a place where you’re stable enough that you can fully commit to education, that’s another whole journey.”

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.

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.

Our 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. 

Washington received in 2019 about $1.5 million of McKinney-Vento grant funding to distribute to districts, and the state’s Homeless Student Stability education Program provides $876,000 per year.

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  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.

This originally appeared at  and is published here in partnership with the .

Located in one of Los Angeles’ lowest income neighborhoods, Ninth Street Elementary enrolls students who live in the Fashion District bordering Skid Row, with 24% of their students homeless and 51% of students English Learners. 

Because of their family circumstances, Ninth Street principal Jeanette Reyes realized many of her students were coming to school hungry. Reyes, a first year principal, had a solution. 

“My cafeteria is open all day in case my babies are hungry,” Reyes said. “They can come and they can eat.”

The effects of the pandemic along with food insecurity and other issues contributed to deep learning loss in at least 100 LAUSD schools with similar student populations to Ninth Street. Now, the district is launching targeted support for the schools’ recovery.

LAUSD selected Ninth Street Elementary as part of the effort after students’ scores on state tests made the school among the lowest achieving in the district.

After a difficult year of online learning, Ninth Street students who entered kindergarten during the 2109-20 school year and were back in person for second grade were among those who experienced the biggest academic losses. 

Ninth Street Elementary second grade teacher Vanessa Estrada said many of her students are unable to write their first and last name, a skill taught in kindergarten. 

“[They] missed out on all those experiences,” said Estrada. “It’s not the same on the computer as it is in person.”

Ninth Street students were especially hard hit because most students lacked the resources, such as laptops and reliable wifi, to learn at home. 

“Having the camera on and for (educators) to see that there are ten different people in the same room. Small children and older children,” said Reyes. “That was very hard.”

Preschool and kindergarten students suffered during the pandemic as “pandemic babies. They’ve been at home…cooped up and they don’t know what coming to school is like,” said Lillia Guerro, a preschool and kindergarten teacher at Ninth Street. 

“We’re a family. We’re all here for the same common goal, which is our students. It takes every single piece of this puzzle to make this puzzle complete,” Reyes said, adding how most of the teachers at the school have two years of experience or less. 

Here are some key strategies that Ninth Street has implemented to help students recover from the pandemic:

1. Extended tutoring

For the first time, Ninth Street Elementary implemented summer school and Saturday school for the second year.

Reyes praised the commitment of her teachers, adding that all staffers scheduled to work on those days were present and participated enthusiastically — despite half of them being new to teaching.

“I cannot ask for more,” Reyes said.

2. Creating support systems with families

Many teachers said parent involvement and communication were important to the success of their children.

“That’s one of my big things is communicating with parents about their (childrens’) academics,” said Estrada, who works with first-grade students’ parents. 

To communicate with parents, teachers use platforms such as Class Dojo, especially for younger students, sharing photos, videos, and multiple language translations.

“This is what your child needs help on…that’s really where we do a lot of the talking about standards, talking about where your child is, where they need to be, and what are the steps that we need to follow to get them there,” said Guerro.

The school has also incorporated coffee with the principal and hosted parent workshops to develop relationships between parents and school administrators.

Most recently, Ninth Street created a book club designed for fifth-grade parents to read the same books that their children are reading to support them. 

“What I want is for the parents to have a clear picture of what the students are doing, what they’re learning, and how they are struggling…It’s all about building…those relationships with them so that they can trust us,” Reyes said.

3. Differentiated learning and assessment

Ninth Street Elementary is using a system known as DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Learning), to monitor progress to pinpoint the skills students are most missing. 

Depending on their score, these students are placed into four categories: Intensive, Strategic, Benchmark, and Challenge. 

“There was a decline in academic performance. We cannot deny it, but we’re working towards improving that,” Guerro said.

4. Providing technology, necessities, and emotional help

“As for my students, they suffered a lot,” Reyes said, adding that is why the school has put into place resources to help students who experience food and housing insecurity.

“Having resources…so that if a child comes in with sandals, I can provide shoes or backpacks. The bare necessities that they need,” Reyes said.

Emotional support and mental health has also become a priority at Ninth Street. A full time social worker visits classrooms providing lessons on mental health.

“I was an inner-city student myself. I went to elementary, middle school, and high school down the street right here in South L.A. It gives my students the opportunity to understand that a person that looks like them…that came from the same upbringing can become a principal,” Reyes said. “That means that the world is their oyster. They can accomplish anything they want.”

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

The little girl was 6 years old, and life hadn’t been kind to her. 

When Catherine Meek walked into a homeless shelter for their tutoring session, she found the child hiding under a desk. 

No questions asked, the volunteer joined her on the floor and began reading to her. For an hour a week, the session would allow the girl to be just a kid, getting the assistance she needed, and for at least a moment forgetting about the circumstances that put the girl educationally behind by about a grade. 

The space remained their meeting spot for six sessions until, one day, Ms. Meek walked in to find the girl sitting at the desk waiting for her. 

“I had, I remember, the biggest smile on my face, and she did too,” Ms. Meek says. “I think even at that young, vulnerable age she understood that something had changed, that there was a set level of trust, that she could trust me.”

Ms. Meek lights up recalling that moment – one of her greatest success stories as a volunteer tutor for School on Wheels, a nonprofit addressing educational needs of children K-12 who are experiencing homelessness. She and the girl worked together for about two years until the child moved out of state and they lost touch. 

Recently, Ms. Meek – now executive adviser to the organization – attended that no-longer-little-girl’s wedding after they reconnected through social media.��

A brainchild of the late Agnes Stevens, a retired schoolteacher, School on Wheels began in 1993 when she started tutoring kids living in shelters on Skid Row, an area of Los Angeles known for its large homeless population. In the next few years, she formalized her efforts, recruited more volunteers, and grew the organization with the help of Ms. Meek, who joined in 1999. 

“She was the inspiration and teacher and had the education background, and I had the business and financial background,” says Ms. Meek. “The need was there in 1993, and it’s just grown astronomically since then. One in 30 kids in California in a classroom is homeless.”

The organization grew steadily, partnering with shelters, school districts, motels, libraries, anywhere homeless families could be – even reaching those living in cars, in foster homes, and on the streets. With year-round operations in six counties, prior to the pandemic, the organization reached more than 3,000 homeless children a year, and it recruited and trained more than 2,000 tutors annually. During the pandemic, the number served dropped to about 2,000, and tutors were down to 1,300. Annual funding reached $3.5 million in 2020.

“Students experiencing homelessness move on average about three to four times a year, and with each move, it’s estimated that they fall behind four months academically,” says Charles Evans, the organization’s executive director. “Our whole goal as an organization is to really try to fill in those academic gaps.”   

School on Wheels doesn’t get into the students’ backgrounds but focuses solely on assessing the kids’ educational needs – like a fourth grader who is two grades behind in reading or a 10th grader who’s struggling with pre-algebra and biology – and matching them with tutors. 

“We’re really here to just support the child, and I think a lot of our families like and appreciate us and what we do for them,” says Mr. Evans. “We don’t pry and try to figure out why a family became homeless.”

The children are assessed every few weeks to make sure they’re improving. Ms. Meek says that in 2021, K-4 students improved their literacy skills by 21%; in the past six months, fifth through eighth grade students increased math skills by almost one grade level, and self-efficacy surveys showed a 40% increase in confidence in ninth through 12th graders. 

Leavening the community

Before the pandemic, tutors would meet students wherever they were – motels, shelters, libraries. But tutoring sessions have been remote – via donated Chromebooks and laptops – in the past couple of years. The drastic change had benefits and drawbacks. On one hand, students could stay in touch with tutors even on the move. On the other, School on Wheels had to pivot from handing out backpacks and school supplies to figuring out how to get digital equipment into kids’ hands and making sure they had Wi-Fi access. 

The digital transition was already in progress when COVID-19 hit, says Mr. Evans. Now, the organization is returning to in-person sessions, particularly for younger kids. But it will keep the hybrid model.   

The School on Wheels’ Skid Row Learning Center, which closed and was completely made over during the pandemic, is getting ready to welcome kids again. Many clients of the center come from one of the biggest shelters in California, the Union Rescue Mission just down the street. 

Mr. Evans, who runs the learning center, describes its leavening place in the community: Staff used to pick up about 25 children at the Union Rescue Mission as they got off the school bus and walk them to the learning center for after-school programs. They’d sing along sidewalks where people sitting on the ground would put away drug paraphernalia or anything inappropriate for young eyes. Later, the organization worked with the school district to have students dropped directly at the learning center’s front door and is likely to return to that system in the coming school year. 

Erasing stigma

Outside of tutoring, School on Wheels is out to erase the stigma of homelessness. Many of the families the organization works with found themselves homeless through no negligence of their own – victims of domestic violence or economic hardship, doing their best to get back on their feet.

For example, one single mother in her 20s, who for security reasons asked not to be named, left an abusive relationship, and ended up in a shelter with her four young kids. When she noticed her children falling behind in school, she connected with School on Wheels.

“It’s been the best thing ever, because my kids love their tutors,” says the young woman, who works and goes to school. She now gets reports from school that her kids are doing much better: “The teacher did see a lot of improvement in [my daughter’s] math and her spelling.” That motivates her to do better herself, says the mother.

Angela Sanchez gets it. The School on Wheels board member experienced homelessness during her last two years of high school, after her father lost his job and couldn’t afford rent. 

“Once we went homeless, I wasn’t sure what my options would be or if I would even be able to go to college,” she says, adding that she hid her circumstances to avoid the stigma. School on Wheels changed her outlook: Ms. Sanchez’s math tutor was a grad student in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology who didn’t see her as a homeless kid, but understood her dreams and aspirations. 

“I literally had a rocket scientist helping me with my math homework,” she says. 

He gave her a tour of Caltech, the first college she ever visited. The experience opened her eyes to possibilities and got her thinking about career options. She says it also gave her the confidence she needed to get her undergraduate history degree and master’s in education. Now in her 30s, she’s an equity consultant, a published author, and homeowner. 

Aside from a literacy program for the youngest kids and tutoring specific subjects for older students, School on Wheels helps high schoolers plan their futures – getting into college, getting a house, and becoming independent. 

“Homelessness keeps you locked in a mentality of day-to-day survival. But that shouldn’t stop anyone from thinking about what it means for life afterward, and I think we forget a lot about that,” Ms. Sanchez says.

This originally appeared at  and is published here in partnership with the .

Even after we moved out of the shelter, there were times I feared we would have to return. It was a scary ordeal because we lived with different people each night. Sometimes those people were not happy and made life difficult. That experience made me appreciate having food and a permanent home. It also made me want to give back and help others.

That’s why, when I was 9 years old, I created a nonprofit organization to supply many of the things students experiencing homelessness may need. I started the because I saw a lady and her children begging for food outside a grocery store. After learning they were homeless and hungry, I knew I wanted to do something to help because I had been in their shoes before I was adopted. 

Now, my organization fills Ziploc Gallon storage bags with food that can be eaten right out of the bag and toiletry items that they need to have good hygiene. I also include words of encouragement such as the Daily Bread, which is a booklet that gives inspirational readings for each day, or handwritten notes to give recipients hope that better days are coming and can help their mental well-being.

Before school starts, we give out book bags and school supplies so youth experiencing homelessness have what they need to be ready for school.  We also give socks, hats, gloves, coats and scarves to help them prepare for the cold weather. I wish I could help more but I do know that what I do does make a difference and that makes me feel good.

But my work is not enough on its own. It is important for the schools to understand the challenges faced by youth experiencing homelessness or living in temporary housing. They need help to navigate these challenges and support them through these tough times. This is what I think leaders and educators should understand, based on my personal experiences and my volunteer work.

Some of the problems homeless students face are not having shelter so they have issues with feeling insecure and they also experience a problem with absences. Since attendance issues are something they deal with, it leads to other problems. These students usually lack emotional support from parents or guardians because they are so overwhelmed. The parents or guardians sometimes do not know what they are going to eat or where they will sleep. This causes students to feel like they don’t belong and can negatively impact their mental health. Students experiencing homelessness report feeling depressed at than students who have homes and loving families. 

Being homeless can also lead to behavioral issues, causing problems in school, especially if people know your situation. Sometimes behavioral problems arise because students are ashamed to be around others, especially when they have poor hygiene and don’t smell so good. Students are often bullied, talked about and shunned because of their poor hygiene. Poor hygiene can also lead to issues like bad breath, body odor and poor health. 

One of my most memorable experiences with my organization was giving out book bags, and toiletries at a hotel that temporarily housed some homeless residents. A little 6-year-old girl ran up and hugged me really tight and kept thanking me because in her bag, she received some deodorant. She was so excited that she would have deodorant to put on and did not have to worry about people talking about how she smelled.

Homeless students may suffer from illnesses and accidents more than their peers. Since they do not always get the right health care, their bodies may not be in good shape and they may have dental issues. These students often face hunger issues. For many students living in poverty, schools are not just a place for learning but also for eating regular meals. Many students dread the summer months because they know they will not have regular meals like when school is going on. This also can contribute to them feeling depressed at higher rates than students who are not homeless.

Their living situations can lead to academic challenges. These homeless students do not have stable situations to learn and study. Sometimes they are moved from school to school. Many times they lack school supplies, which also affect their grades.

School leaders can support these youth by keeping a close check on them to assist them with any needs they have. It is important to make sure they have the materials necessary to complete school assignments. It is also important to make sure that the mental and emotional needs are met as well. If we pay attention to these things, we will help even our homeless youth to have some amount of success.