Amid pockets of rising student homelessness, California districts tap Covid funding to help families

An injury forced the family of five to live in a leaky 1995 RV with a malfunctioning plumbing system during one of California’s wettest seasons in decades.

Ana Franquis’ husband, Oscar, was fired about two years ago after injuring his back while working as a carpenter.

Oscar provided their household’s sole income, so they applied for a pandemic-era rent support program. But they eventually received an eviction notice. Their children were 2, 10, and 12 years old — and they had three days to leave their apartment in Seaside.

It was yet another obstacle in a year beset with tragedies. Not long before the eviction, Franquis stopped working due to a cancer diagnosis and her father died.

“We were desperate and had nowhere to go,” said Franquis, whose children attend schools in the Monterey Peninsula Unified District in Northern California’s Monterey County.

Their family is one of 2,220 identified as homeless this school year in their district, with nearly 90% living doubled up.

Monterey County has the highest rate of homeless students among counties in the state: 13.4%.

The sharpest increase among districts is at Santa Rita Union Elementary, just a few miles from where Franquis’ children are enrolled. Located in the city of Salinas, that district’s homeless student population didn’t rise beyond 1.53%, or 55 students, from 2014 through 2020. But this year it has climbed to 22.24%, or 718 students.

Known as an agricultural hub lush with produce and vineyards, Salinas has long been described by residents as a place where there’s a squeeze of the low wages in an area with a high cost of living. Families living together or doubling up is not uncommon.

For Franquis’ family in nearby Monterey, where they’ve since moved, support initially came in the form of vouchers to stay in a motel while they figured out their next steps. These vouchers were paid with funding from the federal American Rescue Plan, which liaisons statewide say has given key support to homeless families through the pandemic and its economic aftermath.

Pandemic spikes student homelessness

Homelessness was on the rise before the pandemic due to a lack of affordable housing. But families have been pushed to the brink by skyrocketing rent following the expiration of the state’s eviction moratorium and inflation, liaisons said. Some areas have also lost housing to natural disasters, including wildfires, flooding and earthquakes.

While enrollment in California dipped last year, the number of homeless students rose 9%. Increases in coastal counties like Humboldt, Monterey and Ventura and in inland counties like Plumas, Mariposa and San Bernardino come after declining the previous three years. This was largely expected by experts, who say the problem of undercounting homeless students was especially egregious during pandemic-era remote learning — school staff relies on in-person interactions to identify homeless students. With mass returns to campuses, homeless numbers statewide are on par with pre-pandemic numbers.

Experts caution that statistics on homeless students can say more about how well schools are identifying homeless students than about how many students are experiencing homelessness.

“I don’t think it’s as easy as: numbers up, homelessness is up; numbers down, homelessness is down. That’s not what the school numbers are. They’re a measure of who’s identified and who’s enrolled in school,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of Schoolhouse Connection, a national homeless advocacy organization.

In Santa Rita Union Elementary, the increase heavily reflects the district’s renewed efforts to identify homeless students. In the last three years, the district hired additional liaisons and opened resource centers, the county organized identification training for all staff, and they began calling families who may not have self-identified as homeless when completing annual school forms.

Previously, office administrators filed the identification forms, and phone check-ins were not the norm. Since then, the numbers have spiked, but they believe they’re still not reaching every homeless student.

The new liaisons grew up in Salinas, so they have an intimate understanding of the families who live there.

“They’ll know that the Martinezes are living with the Lopezes and the Lopezes wrote ‘no,’ but [the liaisons] know they’re renting a room, so they get a call,” said Summer Prather-Smith, the district’s homeless liaison of the two staff members she hired.

Doubling up

Liaisons have long found that the majority of homeless students in Monterey County — and the rest of the state — are living doubled up.

This can encompass a wide variety of situations, said Jennifer Kottke, Los Angeles County’s homeless liaison. There are small three-bedroom homes with one family in each bedroom or 13 people living in one bedroom. Sometimes families are living in a garage, a makeshift lean-to on the side of the home or a camper.

While observers may think these students are technically not homeless, they do fit the federal definition of families in need of stable housing. “Where do [students] find a quiet corner to do their schoolwork?” said Cathi Nye, Ventura County’s homeless liaison. “It’s not adequate.”

Monterey liaisons also noted troubling new housing trends.

Higher rents are pushing some into lower-priced housing, which pushes others into crisis. The housing previously used by migrant and low-income farmworkers is now often taken by those priced out of higher-cost housing due to inflation and rent hikes, some liaisons said. They’re finding that any change in a family’s dynamic, like divorce, job loss or injury, is increasingly resulting in homelessness. Some are bracing for new homelessness resulting from the harvest season being delayed by recent torrential rain. Worker housing is sometimes reserved for single men, and if they are lingering in an area longer than normal to meet the harvest, families can’t move in.

Without the federally funded vouchers, Franquis isn’t sure where they would have slept on those first nights post-eviction. They were waitlisted for homeless shelters with nearly yearlong waits.

“We lost everything. Absolutely everything,” Franquis said in Spanish. “But Mr. Diaz has been like an angel for us.”

Covid money creates lifelines

That’s Carlos Diaz, the district’s McKinney-Vento liaison. He makes sure that homeless students get the help they need under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.

The act requires that every public school district, county office of education and charter school hire a local liaison to ensure that homeless youth are identified and have the education services they need to succeed academically. But educators say the 1987 act was never adequately funded by the state or federal government.

Schools receive extra funding for homeless students from the state through the local control funding formula and some federal funding for homeless education. But funding is slim and there are strict limitations about how it can be spent.

That changed in the wake of the pandemic. California received $800 million from the American Rescue Plan aimed specifically at homeless children and youth.

These funds are more flexible than McKinney-Vento homeless education funding, enabling school districts and counties to do things like pay for hotel vouchers for families that have nowhere else to go. The funds also allowed school agencies to do more of the most basic, important work in homeless education: identifying students who need help.

“These are funds that we’ve needed for a very long time,” said Susanne Terry, San Diego County’s homeless liaison.

But the funds must be spent by January 2025, and there’s no guarantee they will be replenished.

When the money was first allocated, Terry was optimistic about these new levels being sustained. She is less sanguine about that happening under this Congress. The state Legislature seems more amenable to allocating money to homeless education for the first time, but the state’s gloomy fiscal outlook seems to be dampening enthusiasm for new funding, she said.

“We are headed toward a cliff where services are just going to drop,” Terry said.

Humboldt County homeless liaison Leah Lamattina worries about future funding, though she is hopeful that the movement toward community schools will enable schools to identify homeless students and connect them with services.

Right now most liaisons are loath to hire staff or start programs that can’t be sustained when this pandemic-era funding runs dry.

San Diego meets high demand

But San Diego County hired new staff and started a hotel voucher program like Monterey County’s. Terry was blown away by the demand.

Before the program started, she received requests for emergency housing monthly. But once word of the program spread, the county got many requests a day. In one year, the program has since paid for the hotel rooms of over 600 families.

Such a program would vastly help families in Monterey County’s Greenfield Union School District, said Tony Amezcua, director of family and community engagement.

His team receives monthly phone calls from families desperate for refuge. Some recent calls have come from migrant farmworkers from Arizona and other agricultural California counties. The winter’s heavy rains pushed back the harvest season, delaying work.

As needs have grown, so has Amezcua’s team and the resources they provide. They’ve hired additional liaisons, including one who speaks Triqui, an indigenous language spoken in southern Mexico. They began offering donations for babies so homeless families can be identified sooner, and installed a washer and dryer in the resource center for families to use.

With American Rescue Plan money, they also plan to acquire gift cards for a local footwear store, a typically forbidden use of student funds. But the students need them, Amezcua said. On a recent Tuesday, donated shoes only included sizes 1, 10, 11, and 13.

“When parents say they need more, we see we need to give more,” said Amezcua.

Then there’s the issue of trust, which liaisons say is crucial when connecting with homeless families.

“The historically disadvantaged have a distrust in systems due to systemic oppression,” said Lamattina.

This was the case for Franquis. When her eldest daughter confided in her teacher that they were being evicted, she was afraid that her children would be taken. It’s a fear liaisons say is rampant.

After nearly a year of homelessness and two of financial instability, Franquis’ family secured a two-bedroom apartment about two months ago using a Section 8 housing voucher, a process they learned about from their district liaison.

Another liaison enrolled them into a program where they could access donated beds, mattresses, dining room, dinnerware and more. They are also in family therapy to help them process their ordeal.

And they have a new income source: Franquis’ husband was hired by the school district in a maintenance role. They all share one vehicle — they donated their RV to another family in need — and are still getting back on their feet, but Franquis is hopeful for their future.

“We’ve received so much more help from the district than from other places,” she said. “That’s why I’m so grateful; they were the only ones who quickly offered us support.”

Read more:

Pockets of districts across California show increases in homeless students in 2022-23 school year

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School districts across California are seeing increases in homeless students. Some of the jump stems from better efforts to help families.

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