Our mission to examine why K-12 homeless students in rural communities often go without the services they are entitled to actually began in a city.
Midwest Newsroom reporter Kavahn Mansouri and STLPR reporter Kate Grumke showed how a school district was aggressively investigating — and unenrolling — unhoused students in Hazelwood, Missouri. In the course of their reporting, Mansouri and Grumke learned that there were significant problems facing homeless students in rural school districts, including the four states covered by The Midwest Newsroom.
Research shows youth experiencing homelessness have higher rates of absenteeism and lower academic performance and graduation rates than youth who have stable housing.
“Homelessness has been obvious in our communities for a long time, but if it’s not addressed in the appropriate way, we have generational negative outcomes of housing insecurity,” said Deirdre Nicholson, executive director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.
At the heart of the reporting in our “Unhoused/Unschooled” series are students and families in unstable housing situations, school districts trying to stretch limited dollars, and caring teachers and staff trying to make a flawed system work.
The system is built on the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. It is a federal law that requires public school districts to enroll students experiencing homelessness, even when proof of residency is lacking. The law gives K-12 students the right to remain at the school they attended when they had permanent housing. It also obligates school districts to provide them with free transportation and academic support.
Our investigative series found that Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska school districts are undercounting students who are homeless, which means thousands are not getting the support they need.
“The prevalence of youth homelessness is comparable between urban and rural areas. It’s just hidden and more difficult to identify,” said Barbara Duffield, the CEO of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit education advocacy organization.
In the course of our work, state homeless education coordinators in Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska provided valuable information and perspectives, but no one from the Iowa Department of Education was willing to be interviewed.
With partner reporters at Iowa Public Radio, KCUR (Kansas City) and Nebraska Public Media, The Midwest Newsroom explored the many challenges embedded in McKinney-Vento and found examples of workarounds and stopgaps that aim to support students experiencing homelessness. Here’s a summary of what we learned. You can find the entire series here.
What we learned:
Not all school districts identify homeless students.
Homeless youth advocates agree that under identification is the leading challenge for homeless students in the country. For a student to receive aid, they or their family must self-identify with a school district, or the school district itself has to determine the student is eligible for aid.
“Potentially half of students who are experiencing homelessness are not being identified,” Duffield said.
“If you ask people to close their eyes and picture what homelessness looks like, you will have maybe a stereotypical image of somebody under a bridge or in a tent or something like that,” said Kenya Haynes, a program specialist for the National Center for Homeless Education.
Homeless liaisons are trained to identify eligible students through several different avenues, including enrollment questions, interviews with family and by noticing trends in a student’s behavior. Not all school districts have dedicated liaisons. As KCUR’s Jodi Fortino reported, liaisons in small rural districts wear a number of hats.
Maureen Tabasko, the Kansas homeless education coordinator, told The Midwest Newsroom the stigma attached to homelessness can scare people who are eligible for aid away from being identified.
“They’re afraid to get in trouble,” Tabasko said. “They’re afraid someone’s going to call DCF (the Department for Children and Families) or social services — or maybe even the cops.”
Student privacy can also be a barrier. In Nebraska, only 22 out of the state’s 244 public school districts reported an exact count of students receiving McKinney-Vento resources in the 2022-23 school year. According to information from a public records request, an additional 36 districts had nine or fewer students, but the exact counts were not released.
There’s not enough money to go around.
Enacted in 1987, McKinney-Vento provides federal money to states to distribute to school districts for free transportation, academic support and waivers of certain student fees.
The federal government allocated nearly $129 million for McKinney-Vento students in 2023. The annual allocation is split among roughly 4,900 school districts across the country, according to federal data.
The total amount of McKinney-Vento funding held by the four Midwest Newsroom states is about $3.5 million. It is supposed to serve about 49,000 students identified by school districts as homeless.
“You look at how many school districts there are in the country and in each state, and it just doesn’t go that far,” Duffield told The Midwest Newsroom.
According to U.S. Department of Education data, each state in the region covered by The Midwest Newsroom provides fewer than 5% of its K-12 school districts with McKinney-Vento funding.
Funding is not guaranteed.
Throughout The Midwest Newsroom’s four-state region, most school districts receive no grant funding from McKinney-Vento funding pools.
Accessing McKinney-Vento grant funding is a competitive process. School districts apply to states for subgrants by submitting statements of need and demographic information about their students. State education departments allocate McKinney-Vento funds based on the merit of applications.
With tight budgets and small staff sizes, rural school districts often find it more difficult to compete with larger districts for subgrants.
Tera Bock, Missouri’s homeless education liaison, said:
“You can imagine the grant (applications) that are coming in from those urban districts are probably a lot stronger. Those rural school districts probably just have one designated person, and it’s probably also the superintendent, or the principal, or someone else holding other roles,” she said.
It takes a village — and possibly a nonprofit.
A McKinney-Vento subgrant is restricted to spending on services like transportation, free meals, college prep and early children education support. If a district does not receive a grant it applied for — or doesn’t apply at all — students may go without the services the law mandates.
The Midwest Newsroom found a pattern of nonprofit organizations and community members stepping in to provide support and services where federal laws and funding fall short.
Only 14 Iowa school districts received a competitive subgrant award in the last 2021-2024 cycle. In Winterset, school officials work with a community-funded nonprofit called CRISP to meet a wide variety of needs for homeless students and their families — going beyond what McKinney-Vento provides: housing, car repairs for parents, even winter coats.
Jolie Peal of Nebraska Public Media reported on two rural school districts that rely on community and nonprofit support to meet the needs of students who are homeless.
“It takes a village, in a sense, because the school can only help with what’s within the school. My job is to try to help bridge that connection with outside of school,” said Marquel Harlan, the Winnebago Public Schools McKinney-Vento liaison.
It won’t be simple to fix.
There are decades of research about McKinney-Vento and many critiques of its shortcomings.
When it comes to recommendations, some observers — like this researcher — urge states and school districts to:
- Improve identification of homeless students
- Provide liaisons with more resources
- Ensure compliance with the law
Others agree with the community approach, urging school districts to partner with local businesses and nonprofits to meet the needs of homeless students.
As Duffield of SchoolHouse Connection said, the lack of money is a key element of supporting the nation’s homeless students — whether they live in rural or urban settings.
There is bipartisan support in Washington to increase funding for homeless education.
A letter signed by 35 members of the U.S. Senate urges that the 2025 budget provide “robust funding for programs that assist community organizations, school districts, and public agencies around the U.S. in uplifting and serving children and youth experiencing homelessness.”
More than 120 members of the U.S. House of Representatives submitted their own letter, stating, “an increased appropriation would help move our American communities significantly closer to being able to meet the largely unmet need of providing support services and housing options for minors and young adults experiencing homelessness.”
In 2022, the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity analyzed data and found some 300,000 students across the country are likely homeless and not receiving benefits they are legally entitled to receive.
About the data
Like all datasets, education data comes with challenges. It can take more than an academic year to compile and release education data, so typically trends are not noticed on a macro level until significant time has passed.
That’s why through this project, the 2022-23 academic year was used as the baseline, as it was the most recent data available from each state when reporting started on the project.
Additionally, because federal data is aggregated from state data, additional delays occur for the release of federal data.
States also take their own unique approaches for sharing data. The Nebraska Department of Education released its numbers based on a public records request but chose to not release exact counts of eligible McKinney-Vento students for school districts that had nine or fewer eligible students.
While understandable from a privacy perspective, that limits the ability for researchers and the public to do data analysis on the state as a whole.
Also, comparing education data to population data is problematic as a school’s demographic profile is typically different from the community as a whole. The prevalence of homeschooling, religious and charter schools — as well as recent immigration — can make districts more or less diverse from the broader community. Therefore, conclusions applying census data to school districts should be made with caution.
Explore the data
Kavahn Mansouri, Daniel Wheaton, Jolie Peal, Meghan McKinney and Jodi Fortino contributed to this article.
MORE: Find the entire series here
REFERENCES:
- Center for Public Integrity
- A Question of Priorities: A Critical Investigation of the McKinney-Vento Act
- Scholar’s research into homelessness finds flawed supports for students
- SchoolHouse Connection: More than 150 members of Congress commit to Homeless Children and Youth Funding
METHODS:
For this article summarizing the findings of an investigative series, the writer consulted previous news coverage that forms “Unhoused/Unschooled.” In addition, she reviewed articles from other sources that consider the McKinney-Vento Act.
TYPE OF ARTICLE: Explainer - Provides context or background, definition and detail on a specific topic.
