Millions of dollars in American Rescue Plan Act funding for homeless students still remain unspent in some Midwestern states, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Education.
According to October data, about 40% of the money allocated to The Midwest Newsroom’s four-state region of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri remained unclaimed as of the deadline.
The deadline for all states to spend or allocate an $800 million injection of rescue plan funding specifically aimed to aid homeless students was Sept. 30. The October report shows that, at the deadline, more than $280 million of the funding was left to be spent around the country.
“It's essentially an incredible loss for families and for youth who really need this help to get support and go to school, which is ultimately their best shot out of homelessness in the long term,” Barbara Duffield, executive director of the education nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection, told The Midwest Newsroom in July as the deadline loomed.
Education department officials said the unspent amount will shrink as school districts apply for reimbursements and file extension requests through the states.
The federal government originally budgeted the money in 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Through the American Rescue Plan Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief - Homeless Children and Youth program, state education departments allotted tranches of money to certain school districts, which could then spend the money on a variety of services for homeless students, like transportation, food and clothes, and identifying homeless students.
But, as The Midwest Newsroom reported in July, school districts nationwide either did not know the ARP-HCY funds were available or struggled to find ways to use the money.
Collectively, ARP-HCY funds for Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska amounted to $26.9 million. Of that, about $10.9 million remains unspent.
Missouri made up the lion’s share of funds left to be spent in the four-state region, with roughly $6 million unspent of the $12.8 million granted by the rescue plan. More than 32,000 homeless students live in Missouri, according to federal education data.
Nebraska, where about 3,300 homeless students live, reported $2.4 million of its $3.5 million budget remains.
Iowa, which has about 6,500 homeless students, reported $1.4 million of its $3.6 million allotment remains.
With about 6,600 homeless students, Kansas reported $1.1 million of its $4.2 million remains.
Ann Carmoney, who coordinates the Nebraska Department of Education’s McKinney-Vento program, said she expects the state will spend its entire $3.5 million budget by January 2025, when the funds will officially liquidate and return to the U.S. Treasury. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act is the federal law mandating that school districts support access to education for homeless students.
Carmoney said many Nebraska school districts have applied for ARP-HCY extensions or are in the process of asking for reimbursement for projects already approved but not reflected in the latest federal report.
The struggle to spend
Nationwide, $281.7 million of the federal ARP-HCY funds remained unspent as of October, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That’s roughly 35% of the $800 million budget.
Only a handful of states spent more than 80% of the funding they received, including Alaska, Washington, North Dakota and Arkansas.
Wisconsin, Hawaii, Nebraska, Mississippi and Puerto Rico spent less than 50% of their ARP-HCY budgets. Puerto Rico budgeted only $2.8 million of the $19.4 million it received in funding.
School districts across the Midwest and the country struggled to apply for and spend ARP-HCY funding over the grant's lifetime. In Missouri, a pair of state House of Representative interns spent the summer of 2024 calling school districts to urge them to apply for money they were eligible to receive.
In a previous interview with The Midwest Newsroom, Missouri Homeless Education Coordinator Tera Bock said school districts’ lack of familiarity with rescue plan funding — or any funding at all for homeless students — proved a stumbling block.
“It is one-time funding. It's not going to be replaced, and the LEAs (local education agencies) and the schools know that,” Bock said. “They have to think of ways both to use the funds to help their current students and have some kind of sustainable impact while not creating a financial burden that they can't support in the future.”
Carmoney said school districts in Nebraska faced similar struggles. Many that did not have existing programs to serve their homeless student population hesitated to form programs with the funds due to the one-time nature of the rescue plan money.
“Some of them (school districts) were granted this large sum of money and trying to do anything that would be sustainable after this grant funding was over was a challenge,” Carmoney said. “They could hire people. They could start new programs. They could provide these services. Then next year, it's done.”
School districts simply not knowing the funding existed added another layer of difficulty, Carmoney said.
Deirdre Nicholson leads the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. Her organization aids members of the education system that serve students experiencing homelessness.
The association worked with education providers throughout the life of the ARP-HCY funding to help McKinney-Vento liaisons and school districts understand what was possible with the financial support.
Nicholson said a lack of training left many schools struggling to understand how they could use the funding.
“A district may have received a great pot of funds, but the McKinney-Vento liaison — again, the unsung hero of the story of homeless education — might be so far from the nucleus of power that they had to cut through so much red tape to even spend the funds,” Nicholson said.
McKinney-Vento defines “homeless children and youths” as individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.
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. Those individuals often shoulder many other responsibilities, especially in smaller school districts.
The liaisons are part of McKinney-Vento law, which 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.
Lessons learned
Still, Nicholson doesn’t see the unspent ARP-HCY funds as a missed opportunity, but as proof of concept or a “study” that additional funding for the aid of homeless students would be money well spent.
In a previous interview, Duffield of SchoolHouse Connection told The Midwest Newsroom that in districts which claimed the rescue plan funds, identification of McKinney-Vento eligible students increased, along with school district officials' awareness of the issue.
“We're going to see a direct impact on identification, on attendance and eventually on student outcomes as a proof point,” Duffield said in October. “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).”
“The value of these funds and how additional funding can really propel outcomes in a positive direction for students experiencing homelessness,” Nicholson said. “It allows us to build awareness for advocacy and build awareness for school districts to plan strategically to meet the needs of students.”
A Midwest Newsroom investigation 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.
Additionally, a 2022 Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal education data showed roughly 300,000 children and youth entitled to McKinney-Vento aid in the U.S. went unidentified by the school districts mandated to help them.
Nicholson said more funding can be key to identifying and aiding students throughout the country.
“Most of us look at the federal education definition for students experiencing homelessness — which means students who lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence,” Nicholson said. “There are so many more students eligible for McKinney-Vento services than the 1.3 million that are identified.”
At the national level, Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski lauded the ARP-HCY funding, but said more could have been done with the funding with a yearlong extension to the deadline.
Murkowski, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona pushed for an amendment to the fiscal year 2024 federal budget that would have extended the spending deadline for ARP-HCY funds by one year.
In a statement, Murkowski said the funds that do go back to the U.S. Treasury after January 2025 will mark a missed opportunity for the U.S. to tackle the hidden issue of youth homelessness.
“Make no mistake — these are funds that are still critically needed in our communities,” Murkowski’s statement read. “The youth experiencing homelessness in our states still need our support and we expect to see continued increases in homeless youth.”
Nicholson said while she doesn’t expect another opportunity like the $800 million injection to happen again anytime soon, she does believe the money that went to school districts will have a “generational impact.”
“Even if the funds weren't 100% utilized, I think the benefit of them just being in the educational ecosystem outweighs even the ability to the inability to spend them,” she said. “We really have the opportunity to pull a lever that will help us to overall lower homelessness, unemployment, even crime in some communities — it’s an investment that is beyond the initial dollars.”
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.
There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here.
METHODS
To tell this story, we interviewed state homeless education coordinators and an organization that aids coordinators and school district liaisons who work directly with students experiencing homelessness and their families to provide national context. We also used the latest data available on ARP-HCY funding from the U.S. Department of Education.
REFERENCES
- October 2024 ARP-HCY Outlay Tracker
- Center for Public Integrity: Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students
- McKinney Vento Act
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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