COUNTING HOMELESS STUDENTS ONE BY ONE: OPPORTUNITIES TO GIVE HOPE

By Kathy Dunn, CCOSA Director of Professional Development for State and Federal Programs

Educating homeless children and youth can be very challenging, but so very rewarding. In the words of Maya Angelou:

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.

Section 725(2) of the McKinney-Vento Act defines “homeless children and youths” as individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. The homeless designation includes:

Children and youths who are:

■ sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason (sometimes referred to as “doubled-up”);

■ living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to lack of alternative adequate accommodations;

■ living in emergency or transitional shelters; or

■ abandoned in hospitals;

Children and youths who have a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings, also called unsheltered;

Children and youths who are living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, or similar settings, also called unsheltered; and

Migratory children who qualify as homeless because they are living in circumstances described above.

Unaccompanied youth who qualify as homeless because they are living in circumstances described above

According to the National Center for Homeless Education, homeless students were most frequently found to be living “doubled-up” with another family because of an economic hardship. School teachers and staff don’t always recognize these students’ homeless status, and indeed even the students may not think of themselves as homeless. However, the doubled-up students are eligible for the count and to be served.

Figure 1. Percentage of enrolled homeless students by primary nighttime residence, School Year 2018-19, Ungraded, 3 to 5 year olds and Kindergarten to Grade 1. https://nche.ed.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Federal-Data- Summary-SY-16.17-to-18.19-Final.pdf

Figure 2. When identifying that a student is homeless, schools must consider why the students are living in the situation to determine if their situation fits the federal definition of homelessness. The homeless student’s family must be in a situation of economic hardship, and they must be unable to provide adequate, stable, independent housing for their family. The charts below give some examples of the considerations that must be made to determine a student’s homeless status.

Figure 3. Unaccompanied Youth Eligibility. Unaccompanied Homeless Youth are living in a situation without a parent or legal guardian present. These students are counted in a school district’s Homeless Children and Youth student count if their living situation is one that meets the definition of homeless as explained by the chart from the National Center for Homeless Education below.

Preparing the homeless count is the beginning of services for students who likely carry a heavy Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) score. Oklahoma’s public schools are in the business of seeing a high ACE score as a challenge for us to bring all of our students into a climate of respect and culture of success.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to those of us in Public Education today was first given by Ron Edmunds in the Effective Schools Movement:

We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us. We already know more than we need to do this. Whether we do it or not must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we have not done it so far.