Education Week - February 12, 2020 - 20

Record-High Influx of Homeless Students Strains Schools
keep up with the swell of their most
vulnerable students-mostly with
limited money. While federal homeless education funding rose $12 million from 2015 to 2017, there was no
increase in the number of districts
receiving those subgrants. On average, per-pupil spending for homeless
students increased only $3 during that
time.
"There's no one thing driving" the
rise in student homelessness, said
Barbara Duffield, the executive director of SchoolHouse Connection,
a national homeless education organization. "There are parts of the
country where the costs of housing
have gone up. There are parts of the
country hard hit by disasters, parts of
the country where opioids and methamphetamines have definitely had an
impact. There are challenges around
persistent poverty, poverty that isn't
necessarily impacted by rising economy or wages because people aren't
working at all."
The 2017-18 school year saw wide
displacements from natural disasters such as wildfires in the West and
hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, but
Norma Mercado, the homeless liaison
for the Bastrop, Texas, school district
outside Austin, said the rising homelessness there has been caused by
deeper and less sporadic problems, including gentrification, poverty, lack of
affordable housing, unemployment,
and underemployment.
Mercado said community partnerships and wraparound services have
proven "crucial" to advocate for and
support the 100 new homeless students Bastrop has seen each year
since 2015.
Rebeka Beach, manager of Cincinnati public schools' Project Connect,
which identifies and supports homeless students, said she has also seen
a nearly 100-student increase since
last year, and the district is bracing
for more, as Beach has found even
larger increases in the community's
preschool-age homeless population.

Academic Struggles
The Every Student Succeeds Act
requires states to track homeless students' academic achievement and
high school graduation rates, and
while many states have been slow to
report the data, deep academic gulfs
have come to light between homeless
students and low-income students
with stable housing.
As of 2017-18, homeless students
lagged behind housed students in
poverty at every grade and subject
tested under ESSA. Overall, only
29 percent of homeless students performed proficiently in reading and
language arts, 8.5 percent fewer than
other low-income students. Roughly
1 in 4 homeless students was proficient
in math and science overall, compared
to a third or more of housed low-income students.
Those intense academic needs are
compounded when schools begin to

Photos by Price Chambers for Education Week

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

ABOVE: Heather Anderson,
right, a homeless liaison for
students in Paducah, Ky., public
schools, talks with Lori Colburn
at the Family Service Society,
a local group that provides
assistance to people in need.
At left, Anderson meets with
a student at Paducah Tilghman
High School-one of the 200
homeless students she is
serving this year.

see multiple homeless students in the
same schools-many of which also
serve other low-income students.
"I do notice some performance
gaps between students experiencing homelessness and their housed
peers," said Beach of Cincinnati. The
district now provides therapeutic writing groups, tutoring and college exam
preparation, peer mentoring, and parent engagement sessions at homeless
shelters, among other supports.
"I think that [a] relationship with
students is such a powerful intervention, and I think having the capacity to
do this in a meaningful way requires
more feet on the ground," said Beach.
Capacity to support homeless children has become such a concern in
Chicago that the teachers' union negotiated it into its most recent contract. Each school that enrolls 75 or
more homeless students will now get
one new full-time homeless coordinator, and the handful of schools that
enroll 140 or more homeless students
will get two full-time staff members.
While federal law requires schools
to identify and serve homeless students, in most schools, one teacher or
staff member-a social worker, Title
I director, or foster care advocate, for
example-adds those duties to an
already-full plate, according to Patricia Nix-Hodes, the director of the Law
Project of the Chicago Coalition of the
Homeless, which helped inform the
new staff requirements.

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 12, 2020 | www.edweek.org

"Clearly, as the numbers increase,
someone who has this role on top of
many other roles would not have the
time or capacity to serve those families or even to identify all the students
who might be in homeless situations,"
Nix-Hodes said.
Jennifer Modeen, homeless education director for the 7,400-student
Grand Forks, N.D., school district,
agreed. Grand Forks has 161 homeless students-10 percent more than
last year-and Modeen manages their
cases along with the district's foster
students and others who need social
services. With students scattered
across 18 distant campuses, Modeen
had to buy-and occasionally drive-a
van just to help get homeless students
to and from school, therapy, and other
appointments.
"This is really a very hidden population for a number of different reasons,
which makes the advocacy and the
community response more challenging," Modeen said.

Falling Through Cracks
Amid the overall nationwide rise in
homeless students, the number living on their own, without a parent or
guardian, also rose-by nearly 17 percent, to more than 129,000 students.
Unaccompanied children now make
up more than 1 in 10 homeless students in 29 states, and 8.6 percent of
homeless students nationwide.

These unaccompanied students
worry Heather Anderson, the homeless and foster student case manager
for the 3,200-student Paducah school
district, in Western Kentucky.
Anderson has identified more than
200 homeless students so far this
year-about 70 more than she typically has. For unaccompanied homeless students, she said, the growth has
been especially dramatic.
"I usually have like six, and I have 28
right now, which is blowing my mind.
I have never had that many, ever," she
said.
Some were left behind when a parent sought work in another city. Others left home because of parents'
abuse or drug problems. But these students can have even more difficulty
navigating school and life than other
homeless students, she said, because
insurance, housing, and other school
or social programs often require an
adult guardian's signature.
Paducah offers dental and basic
medical care on site for uninsured
students, and partners with community groups and the local library
to provide after-school tutoring
programs, extracurricular activities
and social cafes-anything to give
children safe places to do homework
and hang out for a few more hours of
the day.
But even with supports available, it's
easy to overlook students like Cara, a
12th grader in Paducah, who became
homeless two years ago, when she
and her grandmother lost their house.
(Cara spoke under a pseudonym.)
Cara's mother gave her up as a newborn and moved to Tennessee to live

near a hospital that treats her younger
brother's cancer. Cara's father was
also homeless, and all three lived
in her grandmother's car until Cara
found space with her best friend.
Her grades dropped and she frequently came to school exhausted,
Cara said. But that first year, "I didn't
really tell anybody. I just kind of went
through it."
"I know some of my teachers noticed when I walked in on a bad day."
She said, "They'd say, 'You look kind
of pale, you look like you don't feel
good.' ... But you know, they don't
really ask me about it, more like, you
know, 'Oh, she's having a bad day, so
let's just leave it alone.' "
This year, Cara reached out to Anderson for help, as her grandmother
and father cycled in and out of hospitals for ongoing respiratory illnesses
and chronic, untreated diabetes. Anderson has helped Cara find academic
help to bring up her grades and get accepted into Middle Tennessee State
University, where she will live in the
fall with an older sister on campus.
In graduating, Cara provides reason
for hope. States have varied wildly
when it comes to helping homeless
students make it through high school,
with four-year graduation rates ranging from 44 percent to 87 percent. In
22 states that provided five-year graduation rate data, 41 percent to 83 percent of homeless students earned a
diploma in five years.
But Cara's the kind of student who
keeps Anderson up at night.
"It bothers me that she wasn't identified last year, and I'm wondering how
can I get better at identifying the students who keep it a secret?" she said.
Anderson isn't alone in her concern.
Even as their numbers rise rapidly,
homeless students are getting harder
for schools to find. Federal law defines
as homeless any child who doesn't
have a "fixed, regular, and adequate
nighttime residence," but the number of homeless students staying
in shelters, transitional housing, or
temporary foster care placements-
places operated through agencies or
community groups that give schools a
heads up when new children arrive-
has declined since 2015-16.
By contrast, tens of thousands more
homeless students stayed in hotels or
doubled up with other families than
was the case previously, in part due to
housing policy changes that favor providing homeless families with hotel
vouchers instead of shelter space.
And the number of students living
entirely unsheltered, such as in a car
as Cara did, more than doubled from
roughly 43,000 students in 2015-16 to
nearly 103,000 students in 2017-18.
"In shelters at least there's more
services, there's stability, we can do
transportation easier," said Duffield
of SchoolHouse Connection. "But
when families are diverted to motels
or to these really precarious situations
with other people ... then we see kind
of persistent homelessness because
families kind of had the rug taken out
from underneath them and they have
even fewer supports."

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Education Week - February 12, 2020

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