For students experiencing homelessness, the start of a new academic year can be fraught with anxiety. Unstable housing, food insecurity and lack of transportation to and from school are just a few of the challenges they and their families may face.
Federal law requires school districts to meet these challenges. But, as The Midwest Newsroom’s investigative series Unhoused/Unschooled found, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska school districts are undercounting students who are homeless, which means thousands are not getting the support they need. In many cases, school districts don’t even apply for available grants.
“The challenge is almost circular,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit advocacy organization for homeless education. “You don’t see the students, so you don’t think they’re there. Then you don’t set aside enough funding to have the capacity to go out and find the students.”
McKinney-Vento defines “homeless children and youths” as individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.
The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act 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.
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.
Through data analysis, The Midwest Newsroom found that, in large rural swaths of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, hundreds of school districts report they don’t enroll any homeless students, even though other measures of poverty indicate that’s likely not true.
“Potentially half of students who are experiencing homelessness are not being identified,” Duffield said.
Further analysis of free and reduced lunch numbers in those areas, as well as data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program, indicates homeless youth most likely do live in those areas — even when school districts report none. Participation in a school’s free and reduced-priced lunch program provides a more nuanced look at the rate of poverty in a school district, as the measure adjusts for local conditions.
And a review of federal education data showed the vast majority of school districts in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska receive no McKinney-Vento grant funding for the students they do identify.
In The Midwest Newsroom region, many public school districts in each state reported having zero students who are experiencing homelessness, according to data from each state’s department of education in the 2022-2023 academic year:
- Iowa: 131 of 302 school districts reported zero homeless students
- Kansas: 93 of 286 school districts reported zero homeless students
- Missouri: 111 of 518 school districts reported zero homeless students
- Nebraska: 190 of 244 school districts reported zero homeless students
While officials report there are no homeless students in their districts, there is data that belies those claims. For example, school districts in three of Nebraska’s poorest counties all reported having zero students facing housing instability during the 2022-23 academic year.
- Mullen Public Schools is in Hooker County, which has the lowest median household income in the state at $43,333 according to the latest census data.
- Ainsworth Public Schools is in Brown County, which has the second-lowest median household income in the state at $44,267, according to the latest census data.
- Garden County Schools is in Garden County, which has the third-lowest median household income in the state at $47,139, according to the latest census data.
Some districts with smaller populations of homeless students choose to not report exact figures, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Other districts report zero homeless students or don't report a value at all.
That can create challenges for state-level homeless coordinators who want to know where services are needed.
SchoolHouse Connection works with school districts and state homeless education coordinators nationwide to help identify and support students experiencing homelessness so they receive an education equal to their peers, as guaranteed by McKinney-Vento.
“The prevalence of youth homelessness is comparable between urban and rural areas,” Duffield said. “It's just hidden and more difficult to identify.”
A SchoolHouse Connection study found, when compared to school districts in cities and towns, rural areas had the largest proportion of school districts without dedicated homeless education funding.
Duffield called that finding especially troubling, as school districts in rural areas are often the only places for families and youth experiencing homelessness to access support like free or reduced-price meals and other services that are more widely available in urban areas.
Not enough money
Enacted in 1987, McKinney-Vento is supposed to ensure that youth experiencing homelessness receive an education unaffected by their housing status. The act provides federal money to states to distribute to school districts for free transportation, academic support and waivers of certain fees.
In 2023, the federal government allocated nearly $129 million for McKinney-Vento students. That number has grown from $61 million in 2013.
Across the country, about 21% of school districts received McKinney-Vento grant funding for the 2021-2022 school year, the latest year for which federal data is available.
Meanwhile, the number of students experiencing homelessness has increased by roughly 79% since 2004, according to a study by the National Center for Homeless Education. That’s an average increase of 4% every year.
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.
Throughout The Midwest Newsroom's four-state region most school districts receive no grant funding from McKinney-Vento funding pools.
According to the U.S. Department of Education’s latest data from the 2021-2022 school year, each state in the region covered by The Midwest Newsroom provided fewer than 5% of its K-12 school districts with McKinney-Vento funding:
- Iowa disbursed $697,160 across 4.3% of its school districts.
- Missouri disbursed $1.69 million across 1.9% of its school districts.
- Kansas disbursed $750,100 across 3.6% of its school districts.
- Nebraska disbursed $442,263 across 4.7% of its school districts.
In the same period, 2021-2022, Colorado provided funds to roughly 41% of its school districts. But other states surrounding the region also dispersed grant funding to a fraction of their school districts. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, only 3.1% and 3.6% of school districts received grant funding, respectively.
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.
Duffield said the $129 million in total McKinney-Vento funding is not enough to meet the needs of students trying to get an education while grappling with unstable housing. The annual allocation is split among roughly 4,900 school districts across the country, according to federal data.
“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 said.
A hidden problem
Homeless youth advocates agree 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.
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. Chronic absenteeism is a key indicator.
By law, every school district in the U.S. must have a McKinney-Vento liaison who works to identify and aid students struggling with housing.
In Kansas, state coordinator Maureen Tabasko said identifying homeless students is a challenge in both urban and rural school districts. She said the stigma attached to homelessness can scare people who are eligible for aid away from being identified.
Tabasko said many parents wrongly assume they’ll lose their children if they self-report.
“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.”
Tabasko said a challenge for rural school districts is that youth who are struggling with housing are in some cases being “taken care of” by their neighbors, meaning they may have a place to sleep and an informal support system.
Those students are still eligible for aid, but Tabasko said they can be even more difficult to identify because school district officials don’t know who or what they’re looking for.
“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. She’s worked in rural communities to help school districts and states implement McKinney-Vento.
Haynes said students eligible to receive aid from McKinney-Vento typically don’t fit the public perception of homelessness, especially in rural areas.
For instance, while some students do live on the streets, the majority in the four-state region are students who are “doubled up,” or living in temporary shared housing. This can include children who are attending school while living with extended families or even their grandparents. These students are McKinney-Vento eligible.
Haynes said students struggling with housing stability in rural parts of the country are faced with different challenges and fewer options than their urban counterparts. For example, she said, distances between schools in rural areas can make transportation more challenging.
“If you have to move 45 miles away to access a shelter or a safe place to stay — even if the districts are working together and providing that transportation — you're talking about a lot of time, probably on a highway going back and forth,” Haynes said.
When transportation falls away, it's less likely those students will get an education, Haynes said.
Why not apply?
Because school districts vie against each other for McKinney-Vento funding, Duffield said rural areas are at a disadvantage. With tight budgets and small staff sizes, these districts find it more difficult to compete with larger districts for subgrants. What’s more, those districts struggle to even identify the students who may be eligible for aid.
School district employees who are charged with identifying students experiencing homelessness are often juggling several responsibilities. Tabasko said one liaison from a rural Kansas school district also served as the district’s superintendent — and more.
“He was driving the bus. He was working in the lunchroom. He was mopping floors,” she said. “That's a lot of stuff they have on their plate.”
State coordinators in Missouri, Kansas and Iowa reported similar cases of liaisons bearing responsibilities beyond seeking out McKinney-Vento eligible students.
In Missouri, homeless education coordinator Tera Bock said liaisons in both rural areas and urban areas are stretched thin. But in bigger, urban districts, there are often teams of employees working to identify eligible students and apply for McKinney-Vento grant funding.
“You can imagine the grant (applications) that are coming in from those urban districts are probably a lot stronger,” Bock said. “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.”
Still, even when liaisons identify students, the grant funding is stretched thin among the few school districts that do get the money, Bock said. In Missouri, $1.7 million of funding is split among 13 school districts.
For Haynes, another barrier between school districts and McKinney-Vento implementation is training for liaisons.
“We sometimes see a lot of turnover in these roles as well, which can make identification harder and training harder,” Haynes said. “I think every arm of this octopus is struggling a little bit. There's not enough money for housing, there's not enough money for case management, behavioral health. There's not enough money for job training and that type of development for youth and for parents.”
McKinney-Vento funding isn’t the only money schools can put toward aiding students struggling with housing, but it has fewer restrictions in its application than other avenues of funding.
Many school districts use or are required to set money aside for students with unstable housing through federal Title I funding, a part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as the Every Student Succeeds Act.
There is no federal standard for how much money is put aside under Title I. Duffield and SchoolHouse Connection staff believe the funds are too often reserved in inadequate amounts for homeless students — or not reserved at all by school districts.
A matter of spending
A recent injection of onetime money to aid homeless youth came as a result of the American Rescue Plan Act. A federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic made more than $800 million available to state education departments and school districts across the country.
The money, dubbed American Rescue Plan Homeless Children and Youth funds, was for flexible use by school districts to aid students and their families struggling with housing. The funds could be used for things like housing vouchers, repairs to family vehicles and even clothes. School districts were responsible for claiming that money.
But, as The Midwest Newsroom reported in July, state homeless education coordinators said districts either did not know it was available or struggled to find ways to use it.
“Most LEAs (local education agencies) do not normally have funding to support their McKinney-Vento students, so when they get that extra funding, that requires a bit of a shift in their mindset as far as what the schools can provide,” Bock said. “It really requires their homeless liaison, their business finance officers or administrators to get on the same page about what they can do for McKinney-Vento students when they usually haven't had any resources to do anything.”
As of Sept. 1, there was still roughly $380 million of the one time funding to be spent across the country. Any money left after Sept. 30 went back to the U.S. Treasury, barring some extensions. The total amount of funds that went back to the treasury were not available at the time of this story’s publication.
Duffield said in districts that claimed the rescue plan funds, identification of McKinney-Vento eligible students increased, along with school district officials' awareness of the issue. In fact, she said, district officials in places that received money for identification realized there were homeless students needing services in their districts.
“We're going to see a direct impact on identification, on attendance and eventually on student outcomes as a proof point,” she said. “In Alaska last week, two of our staff talked to a very rural district who got rescue funds, and they (the school district) literally went from zero to 100 (students).”
Duffield said while the issue can seem hopeless to many, the ARP-HCY funds are proof that with increased funding and capacity, students who are struggling with housing can be better served.
“This is doable. This can be changed,” she said. “We can move the needle.”
Making it work
Throughout the region, initiatives are emerging to supplement or even work around McKinney-Vento.
A Kansas City, Kansas, program called Impact KCK is a collaborative effort between the school district and social service agencies to help families find permanent housing and other resources.
As KCUR reported in 2023, when the school district identifies a family experiencing housing instability, it refers the family to case workers who work with them until their youngest child graduates from high school.
In Nebraska, a few school districts have forged partnerships to help homeless students when federal money falls short. Local nonprofits are also stepping in to fill the gaps.
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, we want these families to know that they’re not on their own, and that we see them,” said Kayli Sauer with the nonprofit Micah's House in Nebraska.
Next in our Unschooled/Uncounted series, reporter Jolie Peal of Nebraska Public Media News shows how two school districts in that state are working to support K-12 public school students who are homeless.
St. Louis Public Radio reporter Kate Grumke contributed to this investigation.
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
Methodology
The Midwest Newsroom requested the counts of students experiencing homelessness from the state departments of education in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.
Iowa, Kansas and Missouri provided comprehensive datasets of the count of students who are McKinney-Vento eligible, although Kansas and Missouri suppressed the exact counts, citing privacy concerns.
Iowa provided a complete dataset. Nebraska provided a list of school districts with counts for districts reporting 10 or more McKinney-Vento students, as well as a redacted list of districts that had at least one, but fewer than 10 students.
For all of the states, the counts were compared with the percentage of the student body that qualifies for free and reduced-price lunches. This measure can be used as a proxy for poverty.
Comparing the rate to the actual count of McKinney-Vento students provides an indication of which districts might be undercounting the largest number of students who could qualify for McKinney-Vento. States track and release this data at different times during the year. The 2022-23 year was used, as it is the most recent academic year available across all four states. For the number of districts, nonpublic schools were excluded.
