Undercounting Homeless MoCo Students Undercuts Access To Help: Report

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD — School districts nationwide, including in Maryland, vastly undercounted the number of students experiencing homelessness, a critical first step in receiving assistance, according to “Unhoused and Undercounted,” an investigation from the Center for Public Integrity.

Nationwide, the undercounts cut about 300,000 students out of benefits that could have helped their families, including free transportation to school, according to the investigation by journalists Amy DiPierro and Corey Mitchell of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization.

The groundbreaking analysis, based on the 2018-19 school year before pandemic interruptions in data collection, is the first-ever attempt to quantify how dramatically school districts undercount the number of students who are experiencing homelessness.

Because losing a home can be a critical turning point in a student’s life, school districts are required under federal law to help them. About 2,400 school districts nationwide — whether in regions with severe hardship, cities or prosperous suburbs — didn’t report a single student who didn’t have a regular place to sleep, “despite levels of financial need that make those figures improbable,” DiPierro and Mitchell wrote.

“And many more districts are likely undercounting the number of homeless students they do identify,” they continued. “In nearly half of states, tallies of student homelessness bear no relationship with poverty, a sign of just how inconsistent the identification of kids with unstable housing can be.”

Montgomery County Public Schools, for example, reported that 0.8 percent of its 165,267 students experienced homelessness during the 2019-20 school year. That's 1,296 students, according to DiPierro and Mitchell's reporting.

Homelessness has myriad effects on students’ academic performance, including whether they graduate from high school. Failure to graduate can blunt opportunities for stable employment and increase the risk they will continue to experience housing insecurity in adulthood, the report noted.

According to 2018-19 U.S. Department of Education data, homeless students graduate at much lower rates than students who have regular housing. In Maryland, students experiencing homelessness graduated at a rate of 65 percent, compared to 87 percent for all students.

Eighteen states saw graduation rates among students experiencing homelessness that were more than 20 percentage points behind the overall rate of graduation in the previous two school years.

The reporters found racial disparities as well, with Black and Latino children experiencing homelessness at disproportionate rates. American Indian and Alaska Native students, as well students with disabilities, were also over-represented. In 36 states and Washington, D.C., the rate of homelessness among Black students was at least twice the rate of all other students.

The following list is the number of homeless students in Maryland from 2017 to 2020.

• SY 2017-18: 17,601 (2.0 percent)
• SY 2018-19: 16,202 (1.8 percent)
• SY 2019-20: 15,548 (1.7 percent)

The following list shows the number of students in Maryland who were experiencing homeless reported by race during the 2019-20 school year. This includes ungraded students who were 3-to-5 years old and kindergarten through grade 13.

• American Indian or Alaska Native: 54
• Asian: 89
• Black of African American: 8,168
• Hispanic or Latino: 3,482
• Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: 16
• Two or More Races: 938
• White: 2,801

Nationally, Black students make up about 15 percent of the nation’s public school enrollment, but 27 percent of students experienced homelessness in the 2018-20 school year. Hispanic and Latino students made up 28 percent of enrolled students, but 32 percent of homeless students. Students with disabilities make up 14 percent of the total enrollment, but 19 percent of homeless students.

Schools are required to help homeless students under the McKinley-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, “a federal law so little-known that people charged with implementing it often fail to follow the rules,” the reporters wrote.

Enforcement is “nearly non-existent” among federal and state governments, they continued, “and funding so meager that districts have little incentive to survey whether students have stable housing.”

Homeless students are those living in motels, hotels or campgrounds because there are no better options; emergency or transitional shelters; cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations and similar settings; or shuffling between the homes of friends and extended relatives.

“It’s a largely invisible population. The national conversation on homelessness is focused on single adults who are very visible in large urban areas,” Barbara Duffield, executive director of the Schoolhouse Connection, told the reporters. “It is not focused on children, youth and families. It is not focused on education.”

The Center for Public Integrity made its report available to news organizations nationwide. Read the full report.