The number of homeless children are rising quickly in New York City. There were 87,000 school children living in homeless shelters or temporary housing in the 2013–14 school year, according to the New York City Department of Education, which is a 71 percent rise since the 2007–2008 school year.
Of course the problem isn’t just confined to New York City. Nationally, 2.5 million children were homeless in 2013, an 8 percent increase from 2012. Nearly half of the children were under the age of six, according to a 2014 report from the National Center for Family and Homelessness. The number hit a record high in 2011–12. The number of homeless students has mostly been attributed to fallout from the recession, lack of affordable housing, a high poverty rate and domestic violence.
The Importance Of Keeping Track Of Homeless Students
There is a common misconception that children need to be living on the streets to qualify as homeless. A child can be homeless because they are living with a relative or are in temporary housing. Although education advocates often focus on impoverished students, homeless students are often invisible in the debate on educational inequities. Even though focusing serving low-income students does help homeless students, there is no question that homeless students fare even worse academically than low-income peers with stable housing. Over the years, several studies have found that homeless students are more likely to perform poorly academically or drop out of school and that, even controlling for risk factors such as poverty and low parental education, homeless students were six times likely to repeat a grade.
“They were lumped in with the economically disadvantaged, which of course they are but what we know from state data and other research is that they’re at a greater risk of educational failure …. They have a much greater chance of dropping out of school and schools need to know that,” said Barbara Duffield, director of policy and programs at the National Education Association for Homeless Children and Youth. “Policymakers need to know that, and they need to be able to track it because there may be different interventions, not academic interventions, but things like transportation and counselors, that need to be done if the most at-risk students are going to have a chance of being successful in school.”
What’s Already There To Help Homeless Students
Before anything else can be done to help homeless students, first they have to be seen, said, Heather Kindschy, a social worker for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights in New Orleans, who said that some schools aren’t complying with The McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Assistance Act of 2001, which requires schools have a homeless liaison and provide transportation for homeless students. She said she’s worried that data on homeless students could be inaccurate as a result. The way to properly account for students is to have them self-report at the beginning of the school year and another round is completed in the middle of the year because the data changes quickly.
“I think my stress comes more from the idea that these kids aren’t even being identified. If they don’t have a homeless liaison, then how are they reporting the data and if they aren’t reporting the data how are they reporting to the state? I don’t know how, if other places don’t know they’re supposed to have this data. It’s kind of crazy to think about,” Kindschy said.
The Senate version Every Child Achieves Act, the major education bill working its way through Congress, address homeless students in groundbreaking ways, Duffield said. An amendment offered by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (D), which passed the Senate and now faces a reconciliation process with the House bill, would require schools track academic progress for homeless students and foster children. The bill would also require states to monitor how school districts assist homeless students and requires that homeless liaisons be allowed a certain amount of time for training. Previously, homeless children were not included as one of the subgroups whose academic progress was tracked by school districts, which included students of color, disabled students and English language learners.
“McKinney-Vento is a blueprint for getting kids enrolled in school and having stability in school but how kids actually fare in school — the whole point is to get an education so you can get a job and not be homeless anymore,” Duffield said. “So how do students actually perform academically? For the outcomes, it’s going to be the whole of the school body that is responsible, so I think looking at outcomes in terms of assessments and graduation rates really help pinpoint the unique needs that these students have.”
Getting Homeless Students The Help They Need
A Government Accountability Office report released last year conducted interviews in 20 school districts, and found that officials in eight out of 20 school districts said under-identification of homeless students was a problem. Although 13 of 20 districts conducted housing surveys at the time of enrollment, all 20 relied on referrals from schools or service providers. The school districts cited a few challenges to complying with federal law on providing for homeless students, such as the cost of transporting the children, and limited staff and school resources to provide services.
Kindschy said she dealt with reluctance from schools to comply with McKinney-Vento when she was a school social worker three years before taking her current job. Although she said many schools, both public and charters, are able to follow the law, many schools either aren’t aware of the law or don’t think it applies to them. Kindschy said a couple of New Orleans charter schools were resistant to providing transportation or didn’t have a homeless liaison.
“One time a couple of years ago, they were not going to provide the transportation because it was in Jefferson Parish, the neighboring parish to Orleans. After really getting into it with their civil attorney, it was like, no, they need to provide transportation. I think it’s because transportation because is so expensive,” Kindschy said.
Sometimes Homeless Kids Fall Through The Cracks At Charter Schools
Kindschy referred to another charter school that was not aware of the federal law and said they couldn’t provide school uniforms for the students when she approached them at the beginning of the school year.
“We had a school that said, ‘No, we don’t have a homeless liaison and we don’t have any funds to help with school uniforms and other things,’ which was a de facto way of keeping them out of school. I don’t know how malicious it was versus ignorance,” Kindschy said. “But it was just very annoying to me. I think the administrator was new and I had to send her the federal law because she didn’t know what McKinney-Vento was. She thought it was some kind of policy that didn’t apply to her.”
It’s actually not that uncommon for social workers to have problems with getting charter schools to comply with McKinney-Vento.
“I think there’s definitely some confusion about how the federal law applies to charter schools. There have been issues with charter schools not understanding how the law applies to them, that it does apply to them, and you know for the most part it applies to them as it would any other school, unless for example, there is specific charter around math where a child needs to meet that criteria,” Duffield said.
In 2013, the U.S. Department of Education released a brief focusing exclusively on charter schools’ compliance with McKinney-Vento. The brief explains that charter schools with deadlines for enrollment or lotteries may have to make accommodations for homeless students, because they may not be in the area by the time of the deadline or lottery. It suggests revising policies that provide barriers for homeless students, such as extending application deadlines if slots are still available.
However, it also explains that charter school policies, including enrollment caps, can’t be used to override a homeless student’s ability to continue their education in their original school they attended when permanently housed if they become homeless between or during academic years.
What The Federal Government Needs To Do
The Every Child Achieves Act, which is still in conference, may lead to the improvement of the quality of education for homeless students, but there is only so much that schools can do, Duffield said. Although schools could benefit from more funding to provide services for homeless students, Duffield points to what she calls the Obama administration’s lack of attention to homeless students as one reason students aren’t getting the help they need.
“The federal emphasis on homelessness has not been on families with kids or youth. It has really been on single adults and veterans. That’s been this administration’s priority and as a result services for families and youth, not just schools, have taken a backseat,” Duffield said. “It’s ultimately incredibly shortsighted, because youth who are homeless today could be those homeless adults tomorrow. I could say we need more liaisons or more time or we need more funding and that’s true for the school response, but the school response takes place in a larger context of the overall national response.”
Congress has done its part to limit funding to increase grants that would help schools comply with the McKinney-Vento Act, despite the fact that the homeless student population is growing. The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Development proposed $2.10 billion in funding for the 2015 budget year, the same as last year, after the Obama administration proposed a budget that would have increased the grants by 14 percent or a $300 million increase. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee proposed $2.14 billion.