University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

High and dry: homeless education in Los Angeles and the United States

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High and dry: homeless education in Los Angeles and the United States

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Content HIGH AND DRY: HOMELESS EDUCATION IN LOS ANGELES AND THE
UNITED STATES

by
Matthew Jonathon Mundy

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(JOURNALISM)

May 2008

Copyright 2008 Matthew Jonathon Mundy

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT............................................................................................................ iii

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND? ................................................................................ 1

LITTLE SCHOOL ON THE ROW …………………………………………….. 5

LOS ANGELES: A SEA OF DESPAIR ……………………………………….. 11

A CLOSER LOOK ……………………………………………………………... 14

THE BIG PICTURE: “A HIDDEN TRAGEDY” ……………………………… 18

OPTIMISM: A DAUNTING TASK ……………………………………............. 23
BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................... 24

iii

ABSTRACT
Homeless students suffer from a wide variety of problems in their pursuit of their
education – from less educational continuity, to more unstable home lives, to difficulties
in enrolling, to a lack of basic funds to help them get through their school year,
homelessness has a significantly negative effect of education. With approximately 13,500
homeless students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, 170,000 in California, and
nearly one million in the country, there is a clear need for drastic action.
However, the federal government has not come up with nearly the funds
necessary to combat this crisis. This inability to recognize the severity of the problem has
contributed to a worsening of the situation, and with the housing crisis and a recession
looming, this problem will only get worse. Everybody involved in this, from the
administrators at the top to the students themselves, are forced to try to make miracles
happen on a shoestring budget, and – unfortunately – these miracles just aren’t
materializing. Without any new funds, say people involved with homeless education, a
crisis that is already sabotaging the futures of the most vulnerable students is only going
to get worse.

1

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND?
It’s a Friday evening on Skid Row, and the fierce deprivation that clogs the area’s
sidewalks during the day has abated – somewhat. The sidewalks are now just busy with
misery, not overwhelmed by it, as if someone had just cracked the lid on Skid Row and
let some of the pressure out, giving it a little breathing room until morning. Once dawn
breaks, of course, the poor and destitute who were lucky enough to snag one of the few
beds at one of the area’s missions for the night will come trickling out onto the streets
again, where they will cluster together with their garbage bags and their grocery carts –
indeed, their entire lives – and wait to start the whole cycle again. Most are men, most are
single, and most probably won’t make it out of here.
Inside the Union Rescue Mission, however, it’s a different matter entirely. Hope
dares to rear its head here – far more so than outside its doors – and men, women and
children are bustling around. It’s not exactly nice here – drab, sterile concrete hallways
do not a nice building make – but it’s better than outside, and for many people it is,
however briefly, their home.
A short elevator ride upstairs is the women and children’s wing, where the
youngest – and most invisible – residents of Skid Row call home. While they are not far
from the mean streets outside, the Mission does a pretty good job of at least somewhat
psychologically insulating them.
Down one of the halls is the family entertainment room, and it’s a small but
welcome haven from the staleness of the rest of the building. The room, an explosion of
bright colors with toys littered all over the floor, is bustling with activity. Arlene Olivares
2
and her children are there, and Arlene’s oldest daughter, Ailene Cuenca – 11 years old,
quiet but with a maturity beyond her years – is talking about how she has a tough time
doing homework at the shelter, where she and her family share a room with three other
families.
“There are a lot of kids in my room, and it’s too noisy,” she says. Dressed in a
grey hooded sweatshirt and shorts, she had been helping out her mother with her
youngest sister when she asked me what my favorite subject is – English, I told her – out
of the blue.
Ailene’s situation is better than it was two-and-a-half years ago, though, when she
and her family were homeless for a year and moved from motel to motel every four
months, forcing her to switch schools each time. “I fell behind [in school]… When I go to
one school I learn something, and I go to another school I learn the same thing, and when
I go to another it’s harder,” she says, fidgeting with her hands.
Her mother – short but carrying that authority around her children that only a
mother could carry – agrees, noting that even though it’s loud and difficult for her kids to
get work done at the shelter, it’s still better than moving around.
“It’s hard on them, it’s hard,” she says. “They get settled in one school with the
schoolwork and all of their friends, and then they have to start all over with another one.”
The statistics on homeless schoolchildren agree. Nationwide, with each change of
school a child is set back academically from four to six months. Forty-one percent of
homeless children will attend two different schools in a normal year, and 28 percent will
attend three or more different schools. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone,
Ailene is just one of 13,521 homeless students in K-12 who have been identified as being
3
homeless. In California, she’s just one of 178,014, and in the country she’s one of
907,000 – further, all of these numbers are drastic undercounts, assure those in charge of
identifying students, as due to the difficulties of tracking and identifying the students and
their families it’s nearly impossible for authorities to get accurate counts.
While the numbers of homeless schoolchildren are daunting, the amount of
money doled out by the federal government is – to say the least – inadequate. Funded
through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, in 2007-08 homeless students
only received $61.9 million. That works out to less than $70 per identified student, an
amount advocates say falls far short of the money that these children need to overcome
the significant obstacles their living situations put in front of them.
Further, the program is not even funded to its full allotment. The Education for
Homeless Children and Youth Program of the McKinney-Vento Act – the sub-section
that deals with homeless schoolchildren – is allotted $70 million, an amount that, even if
fully funded, falls far short of what is needed. That amount will be rising slightly for the
2008-2009 school year, to $64 million, but still falls short of the $5 million increase
requested by homeless youth advocates.
“The program is woefully, woefully under-funded, and it has been throughout its
20-year-history,” said Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for
the Education of Homeless Children and Youth in Washington. “Just as there is a lack of
awareness about homelessness with the public, it’s also an issue with legislators.”
The Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program, which aims to
“improve the educational outcomes for children and youth in homeless educations,”
earmarks its funds for a sprawling diversity of purposes. These include: the provision of
4
tutoring; broad evaluations of where efforts need to be directed; professional
development; medical, dental, mental and other health services; transportation not
otherwise provided for through federal, state, or local funding; before- and after-school
programs; costs resulting from tracking, obtaining and transferring necessary records;
education programs for both parents and schools; school supplies, and others.
The program, funded by what would generously be called a pauper’s budget,
struggles mightily to fund all of these activities, leaving hundreds of thousands of
homeless students with little to pin their hopes to. Advocates for the students worry about
the long-term effects of this ongoing crisis.
“I see this problem getting worse,” said Duffield. “There are not new monies
being put into the federal budget, and there’s all this mortgage craziness… Our numbers
are going to go up, and we’re already not meeting the need.”
“If this doesn’t scream no child left behind, I don’t know what does,” said Leslie
Croom, who until recently was a member of the United Coalition East Prevention Project
in Los Angeles, which does extensive work with homeless students. “If the school is not
prepared for… these kids, they’re just going to end up with kids who fall through the
cracks.”

5
LITTLE SCHOOL ON THE ROW
Skid Row is, by and large, a distinctly monochromatic area – its sidewalks a dull
grey, its buildings almost uniformly drenched in drabness, its denizens cloaked in faded
second-hand clothes – so any color in the area is bound to draw attention. This is even
more so when the colorful aberrations are large murals painted on the side of portables at
an elementary school, and are joined by the sounds of children running around, shouting,
laughing, playing – all sounds that strike discordant notes with the anger and misery that
defines the neighborhood that surrounds them. The school, the only one in Skid Row, is
Ninth Street Elementary School, and approximately half of the 400 children – ranging
from grades K-5 – are homeless.
Most of the kids attending Ninth Street come from the area, whether they are from
the shelters – two of Arlene Olivares’ children are students here – or the hotels. Many
come from all over the county as well, due to an obligation within McKinney-Vento that
students be able to stay enrolled at their original school, despite where they may have
moved.
While a good idea on balance, as changing schools often unnecessarily and
drastically disrupts children’s learning, there are drawbacks as well. Due to the transient
nature of homelessness, many students who are constantly moving all over Los Angeles
County are forced to travel up to two hours to attend school, making it remarkably
difficult for many students to be on time at all.
“You’re between a rock and a hard place,” said Pamela Hughes, the principal at
Ninth Street. “You want them to come to school and get that continuity, but the buses
don’t always run on time, so the parents bring them in late.”
6
Soon after, Hughes was interrupted when a young student walked past us with
her backpack on at about 11am. “Hi Glenn,” said Hughes cheerily, before confiding that
she was just now making her way to school – a few hours late. “They come all the way
from way south… But you have to give credit to the mom for getting her here.”
Other examples of students having their education broken up by repeated moves
abound. One first grade student, said Hughes, has been to eight different schools already.
The statistics facing homeless schoolchildren are startling. Homeless children are
four times more likely to drop out of school and two times more likely to score lower on
standardized tests; one in ten homeless students will miss at least one month of school
each year, 36 percent have repeated a grade, and 14 percent – double that of other
children – are diagnosed with a learning disability; and all of these problems are caused,
exacerbated and impacted in myriad ways by their troubled environments.
“It affects their learning,” said Hughes. “It would affect an adult’s learning as
well. They’re trying to survive, their parents are trying to survive, they’ve got to wonder
whether or not they have a place to say. We’re talking about children with such
uncertainty… And most of their parents are really trying hard too, and they’re doing the
best that they can do, but sometimes their minds are not always on learning.”
Emotional and physical problems are also rife among homeless children: They get
sick twice as much and go hungry twice as often as other children; 25 percent have
witnessed acts of violence within their family; more than 20 percent of homeless
preschool children have serious enough emotional problems to require professional care,
and; 47 percent have psychological problems like anxiety, depression, or withdrawal, as
compared with 18 percent of other children.
7
Sleepy students are also a problem, said Hughes, for many students are unable to
get enough rest as a result of the turbulence and loudness that frequently characterize
their home situations, whether they are living in dormitory settings, doubled up at an
apartment, or have a disruptive family situation.
“Many times we have to decide if we’re going to wake up a student when they fall
asleep in class because they’re missing their education, or are we going to let them
sleep?” she asked. “Sometimes we’ll bring them in and I’ll let them sleep in during recess
or lunch time, but I tell the teachers they have to wake them up… Because we have to
educate them.”
The stigma of homelessness affects the children’s self esteem as well, and can
lead to discrimination among the students themselves.
“We have children who are here because their parents work in the area, and
they’re considered to be in the highest echelon,” said Hughes. “The kids in the hotels are
in the middle because they’re not getting free stuff, and the kids in the shelters are at the
bottom. It’s a caste system.”
The harsh environment of Skid Row and the tough domestic situations of many of
the kids can also be harmful, said Dan McSweeney, a counselor at Ninth Street who is
funded partially through McKinney-Vento dollars, a godsend for the money- and
resource-strapped school.
“What are they going home to?” asked McSweeney, his thick Irish brogue belying
the fact he has been working in one position or another at Ninth Street for two decades
now. “They get on a bus and it drops them off at 6
th
and San Pedro, and there’s guys
down there hanging around and carts and drugs and urine and shouting and screaming
8
around the back… If you’re a kid you begin by being frightened by it and after a while
you become used to it and hardened by it, and you become accepting of it. And then you
become sort of a part of it, because you have to survive in there.”
This often leads to discipline problems, which both Hughes and McSweeney
cited as one of the most exacting and demanding aspects of their jobs.
“I find there’s more aggravation and more fighting on the part of kids who live in
homeless situations and kids who live in hotels down here,” said McSweeney. “They
don’t have that same sense of security, they have to fight… It’s survival of the fittest, it’s
almost like the jungle… The volume is up, the aggravation is higher – fuses are easily
lit.”
While discipline and other problems are a common occurrence at any school, and
especially Ninth Street, further problems arise as parents – mainly mothers – are difficult
to get a hold of, as many lack phone numbers or a reliable way of being contacted.
All of these problems have helped land Ninth Street into those most dreaded of
bad books – those of No Child Left Behind, a federal education program that applies its
standards, and the tests that measure those standards, equally between schools – whether
they be on Skid Row or in Beverly Hills.
Ninth Street has failed to meet its standards for the English Arts for two straight
years, at least partially as a result of their high numbers of English language learners, and
the bar will be set even higher this year, virtually guaranteeing that the school will fall
short of the standards for a third straight time. Hughes argues that schools like hers
should be judged by different standards than schools in wealthier areas, as a result of the
9
bevy of problems that teachers face in trying to properly convey the material to their
students.
“[Our students] have the capability to learn, but a lot of the time they don’t have
the continuity in their learning because they’re in and out [of school], and it may not be
that important to them right now,” she said. “Am I going to have a place [to stay tonight],
is my mother going to be there when I get back, and who’s going to be there, my mother
or her boyfriend? These are the things our children have to deal with.”
While a diversity of problems plague Ninth Streets’ students, the school finds
itself without many of the resources they need to properly deal with their unique student
body.
“I need physical resources, like a full-time psychiatric social worker… a lot of the
children have emotional problems,” said Hughes.
The school also lacks a full-time nurse – McSweeney often fills that role because
he’s in the first office and is the primary parent contact – and a variety of other positions.
“We could use another teacher – a few more teachers here,” said McSweeney,
citing two fifth grade teachers who are “bulging at the seams,” with 33 students each.
“We used to have Pre-K, but we don’t have that anymore… We could use a van
probably, to take kids on a field trip or something… We have to hire and pay for buses.”
The school also doesn’t have a full-time music or art teacher.
With all of these problems facing Ninth Street students, it is – understandably –
sometimes difficult for the adults at the school to remain optimistic in the face of such
overwhelming odds.
10
“I’m sure some will end up in gangs,” said McSweeney, his rough, calloused
hands grabbing his head. “They’re so behind, some of them have been out of school,
some have had to repeat grades… They have poor role models… I hope that someday,
when I’m confronted by some gang or something, that one of the members will be
someone who went there, and they’ll remember and they’ll be like ‘Oh, you were at
Ninth Street,’ and they won’t shoot me because they’ll remember, and there will be a
sense of compassion. And that’s the whole thing – you have to be hardened.”
“How do you maintain your humanity in this context?”

11
LOS ANGELES: A SEA OF DESPAIR
More than most, Los Angeles is a city in crisis as far as dealing with homeless
schoolchildren. The Homeless Education Program - the LAUSD program in charge of
homelessness in the district - employs a meager five counselors, one of who stays in the
office. These counselors are supposed to be identifying homeless students, engaging in
broad-based outreach services, and making the necessary linkages between homeless
parents and schools. With five, that’s an impossible task – that’s an improvement,
though, as up until last May they only had one counselor.
“No, we’re not adequately staffed,” laughed Melissa Schoonmaker, who as the
LAUSD pupil services and attendance coordinator is in charge of the program. “These
families need someone who can help them navigate through the system, and four
counselors in the field with 13,000 students not enough. It’s better than it was, but it’s
still a far cry from what we need.”
Financially, the picture isn’t much better. The program received $796,000 in
Title I funding, a stream of federal funding reserved for school districts with a high
percentage of students from low-income families, from the district for this academic year.
Unfortunately, all of the money she receives goes towards paying her staff, which, aside
from the five counselors, includes another part-time counselor and a few office aides.
As far as money to help out the homeless schoolchildren in a more tangible way,
the program received a meager $128,000 in federal McKinney-Vento funds for the 2007-
2008 school year. With more than 13,000 counted homeless schoolchildren in the
LAUSD, that funding works out to less than $10 per child, making it impossible for all of
these students to be adequately provided for.
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“It is woefully under-funded,” said Leanne Wheeler, who as a consultant at the
California Department of School and District Accountability Division is in charge of
distributing McKinney-Vento funds throughout the state and overseeing their use. She
remains optimistic, despite it all. “You have to have a positive outlook and use that
shoestring budget to make miracles… Melissa and her staff are doing a tremendous job of
implementing the law under the circumstances that they face.”
One of the most important uses for the little money that they do receive goes
towards identifying and helping homeless parents and their children navigate through the
often complex school bureaucracy. Identifying them can be difficult, as the homeless
definition used for students under the McKinney-Vento Act is broader than the standard
for homelessness used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Under McKinney, a student is homeless if his or her family is living in hotels or motels,
transitional housing or shelters, abandoned buildings, parked cars or other facilities not
designated as a regular living facility, trailers or campsites due to lack of adequate living
accommodations, families that are sharing housing with other families due to financial
reasons, and runaway youths living on the streets or couch-surfing at their friends’.
“The real problem is identifying them,” said David L. Brewer, LAUSD Supt.
“We’ve done a lot of development with teachers and administrators to help identify them,
because a lot of them don’t self-identify. Once we identify them, then we’re providing
them with services that they need.”
Unfortunately, many families both in the LAUSD and throughout the country are
unaware of the right of equal access to education that homeless schoolchildren are
guaranteed by McKinney-Vento. Many schools are also ignorant of what obligations they
13
have to fulfill. While some have large populations of homeless schoolchildren, many
do not and this can make it difficult for parents trying to enroll their children, mainly
because they lack a permanent address and the money to help purchase the necessary
school materials that the district must provide under McKinney-Vento.
Olivares ran into this problem when she and her children were bounced around
from motel to motel a couple of years ago.
“The schools were not helpful… I told them we were homeless and they didn’t
help,” she said, adding that things are much easier now, as her children attend schools
that have substantial homeless populations. “They just gave me a hard time in even
getting [my children] into schools, because I didn’t have a permanent address. I told them
our situation, and they just made things hard.”
A recent change in county policy has made things easier though, as legislation
recently passed by the LAUSD mandates that every school must designate someone
currently working there to act as a homeless liaison, to be in charge of contacting the
Homeless Education Program if they have a homeless student.

14
A CLOSER LOOK
It’s a weekday afternoon and Mario, a lanky high school student, is enjoying the
friendly confines of a youth center in downtown Los Angeles, where he plays video
games, watches television, and gets help with homework. That he is also homeless almost
goes unnoticed in the warm and supportive environment of the Central City Community
Center (CCCO), a faith-based organization headquartered in downtown’s Skid Row.
“I think [Skid Row] hardens me a little, yeah, but you persevere with God.
Nothing’s impossible here,” he said.
Central City dispenses hope and other services not covered by the federal
McKinney-Vento homeless act, offering help with homework and sometimes even food.
Nestled away on 6
th
Street and San Pedro in downtown Los Angeles, you could pass
CCCO’s green doors with nary a glance. There’s no sign for CCCO, and its big metal
doors open up to the sidewalk that smells of urine. Inside, though, is a completely
different story. In one room, kids sit around reading to each other, with their individual
lockers lining the walls in the kitchen. In another, teenagers gather around the brand new
computers, laughing at YouTube videos while a plasma screen TV perches above a
Playstation 3 in front of some brand new couches, which themselves sit just in front of a
brand new kitchen. Walking into CCCO is – both literally and figuratively – a breath of
fresh air.
CCCO operates two programs out of its space – Say Yes! for elementary school
students, most of them from Ninth Street Street Elementary School in South Los Angeles,
and the Youth Development Program for junior high and high-schoolers, who come from
all over the county – and is part of a small network of small non-profit organizations
15
downtown that help out, as best they can, schools beleaguered with plentiful homeless
students and less than plentiful funds. Schools on Wheels, Las Familias del Pueblos, and
Para Los Ninos serve Los Angeles homeless kids by assisting them with their studies and
helping them broaden their horizons by taking them on field trips to places they would
otherwise not get a chance to see. Other organizations assist in other ways as well – the
Los Angeles Food Bank, for example, donates 125 food backpacks to Ninth Street
Elementary every second Friday, the contents of which go back with the kids to their
homes so they can eat properly. And in Orange County, one organization extends
assistance to families on the verge of homelessness, those who have lost their homes and
are living in hotels, the last refuge many homeless families typically enjoy before they
move to the shelter system or the streets. The “motel ministry” of Orange County
Community Advocacy Forum, co-founded by two graduate students at the USC School
of Social Work, is an example of secular nonprofits merging with faith-based initiatives.
Like other organizations, CCCO offers after-school services to its 50 registered
students four days a week. Most of these kids are referred to them by local missions,
schools, from the organization’s own outreach efforts, or from word-of-mouth. The
organization is able to maximize its help by coordinating its efforts with the schools and
focusing on the one-on-one learning experiences that so often are lacking at the students’
schools, while creating and maintaining close relationships with parents as well.
“It’s mentoring and an after-school program for helping with homework… and
giving kids the opportunity to see the world,” said Grady Martine, executive director at
the Christian organization. “It’s about relationships and it’s about dignity… We say,
confidently, that we know every single family in the Skid Row area, personally.”
16
The tangible assistance – help with schoolwork and relief from shelter life – is
coupled with another critical service: Offering these homeless children and youth hope.
“When you see them as they get older, they seem to more and more realize their situation,
and get more cynical and more guarded,” said Matt Raab, a team leader at Schools on
Wheels, which helps homeless children around the city with personal tutoring. “It seems
that as the years pass, they seem to get more disillusioned with everything.”
But the nonprofits’ campaign appears to help some of the homeless students
facing the hardness of life, including Mario, who didn’t want his last name used. The 6
foot 5 inches, gregarious, 17-year old African American student is sporting a black doo
rag, some peach fuzz, and has a remarkably easy charisma about him. It’s not a surprise
that he seems to be popular around the CCCO.
“Everybody around here, they used to go to my school and stuff, I was like where
y’all going after school, they just be disappearing, and so obviously they be going to the
Say Yes! Program,” he said one afternoon while at the center. “They got couches and
shit, shoot I’m down to go. Now they hooked the whole thing up, it’s like a party now,
man,” he said with a laugh.
Mario currently lives at the Huntington Hotel on Skid Row in a one-room
apartment with his mother and his two younger brothers. They moved down here from
Van Nuys about three years ago, when Mario’s mother lost her job. “Wrong place, wrong
time,” he sighed, his deep voice reverberating around his throat.
The change in atmosphere was a shock for Mario, who was unprepared for the
harsh downtown living. “I was like, ‘damn… The whole world is not nice and pleasant,’”
he said with a chuckle, remembering when they moved down to the Union Rescue
17
Mission, where they were before the Huntington. “Pros(titutes), drugs, everyday
everywhere… You learn a whole lot when you come down here.”
Mario goes to school at the Metropolitan Skills Center, a school run by the Los
Angeles Unified School District that offers him a little more freedom in his course
choices and class schedule. He hopes to become a kindergarten teacher, and is planning
to earn his GED, the high school diploma equivalent, by the end of this year. He is –
despite his surroundings– optimistic about the future.

18
THE BIG PICTURE: “A HIDDEN TRAGEDY”
With a paltry $64 million set aside for homeless education across the country, it
should be no surprise that virtually every school district in the country with homeless
students finds itself in some of the same dire financial straits as the LAUSD. Though
things are better than in the past – $4.6 million was allotted in 1987 – with a minimum of
907,000 homeless schoolchildren reported across the country, these current funds fall far
short.
The inability to even properly count homeless students highlights the vastness of
the problems that face the students, for without being properly located and identified, it’s
impossible to properly serve them. The likeliness that the 907,000 is a drastic
underestimate is underlined by the fact that, while states like California and Texas report
approximately 170,000 and nearly 200,000 homeless students, respectively, New York
reports just over 26,000. Duffield notes that this is a result of a disorganized and
lackluster counting system in the state, and is not the only state in the country to have
such glaring undercounts.
Further proof of this underestimate is that in 2005/2006 more than 450,000
students were served by McKinney-Vento subgrants, yet just over 5 percent of Local
Educational Agencies (LEA) received any money.
“There’s no way that half of all homeless kids live in 5 percent of the school
districts,” said Duffield. “I think this shows that if you get the money, it will give you
resources to identify the kids. Those districts get more resources and are able to identify
those kids, do that outreach and identification, and provide the services.”
19
The amount of money each state receives is based on poverty data, and not
necessarily the homeless student count, meaning that some states will see drops in the
amount of money they’re receiving, despite recording increases in their student counts.
For example, Oregon, despite seeing a jump from 11,230 students to 13,159 in
2005/2006, saw its McKinney-Vento funds decrease.
The distribution of the funds isn’t the issue though, according to Duffield.
“The problem is not the slices of the pie, but that the pie isn’t big enough,” she
said, criticizing legislators for failing to see the bigger picture. “There’s a disconnect.
There are members of Congress who are supportive of increased funding for education,
but don’t understand or know how this program fits into all the other federal education
programs.”
California, where approximately 170,000 students are forced to vie for a scant $8
million in federal funds in 2005/2006, serves as a tragic case in point. State authorities
assure that the counted number of students is – once again – a gross underestimate, and
only includes children aged 5 and older, leaving out a large number of pre-school aged
children as well.
“This is a hidden tragedy,” said Duffield. “These are kids who are invisible, who
are suffering the worst form of poverty in a wealthy nation.”
California has seen its funds decline as well, causing an 11 percent drop in
amounts received by school districts that were lucky enough to gain access to the state’s
paltry McKinney-Vento funds in the first place.
While most of the funding going towards homeless schoolchildren is to be taken
from Title I funding – reserved for school districts with a high percentage of students
20
from low-income families – these funds are often far too meager to adequately help
these students.
Further, less than half of the state’s homeless children and youth are even able to
access the McKinney-Vento funds. Due to the scattered nature of homelessness in the
state, the lack of funds available, and the sheer number of LEAs hoping to gain access to
the funds, nearly 100,000 homeless children and youth are located in LEAs without
subgrants, while a mere 70,485 are, just more than 41 percent of the total.
The consequences of this lack of funds have immediate effects. While every
school district and county office in the state is required to designate a homeless liaison,
who is supposed to ensure that the homeless students in their area gain the equal access to
education they are legally promised, the lack of money available to make this happen is –
quite simply – not there.
“I have almost 1,400 school districts to make sure they are implementing the
law,” said Leanne Wheeler, a consultant at the California Department of School and
District Accountability Division who is in charge of distributing the funds and overseeing
their use throughout the state. “Making sure that every LEA implements the law is very
difficult.”
Out of the 1,382 LEAs in the state, only 70 receive subgrants, leaving
approximately 95 percent without McKinney-Vento funding. When a 3-year competitive
grant process for McKinney-Vento funds was initiated in 2006, Wheeler received more
than 130 applications from LEAs throughout the state. She was forced to establish
relatively arbitrary maximums for these LEAs – those with more than 100 homeless
children and youth could be eligible to receive $145,000 and those with less, $75,000 –
21
and when she added up all of the money that these applications requested, it exceeded
$18 million, more than double the amount she had to give out. As a result, more than 50
of the applications were denied, while the LEAs lucky enough to receive subgrants are
underfunded. The LAUSD, with only $128,000 for over 13,000 students, is probably the
most egregious example of this.
“Even the lucky ones are funded less than what they asked for,” said Wheeler. “If
we could get more money out to our districts, they could do a better job of serving our
kids. They’re doing the best job they can under the circumstances, but if they were to be
given more allocations, more money, I think we’d have more people onboard with taking
care of these kids.”
On the state level, like at the national level, experts think that the number of
homeless schoolchildren counted is a drastic underestimate, due to the unlikelihood that 5
percent of LEAs would have more than 40 percent of the state’s homeless children and
youth. Different challenges face each LEA, though, regardless of the number of homeless
students they contain. While some, like LAUSD, might have far more children than
others, others face different and unique challenges, which informs the distribution of
funds.
“I try really hard to be fair and disperse the money equally between northern,
central and Southern California, as well as to urban, suburban and rural environments,”
said Wheeler. She cited Shasta County in northern California as an example of a county
that, while having far less homeless schoolchildren than LAUSD, faces a host of other
problems, including fewer community resources, extreme winters, a lack of regional
22
transit, and a scarcity of potential corporate partners. “I try really hard to be as fair as I
can, and create a balance,” she said.
Other state homeless coordinators describe similar problems. In Texas, Barbara
Wand James, project director of the Texas Homeless Education Office, faces a litany of
problems in trying to provide for her state, which records the highest number of homeless
students in the nation.
“Last go-around we had for subgrants, we had about $4 million available to give
out, and we had requests for about $8 million [in subgrants],” she said. “Quite a few
people don’t get awarded funds, and there are a lot of kids who need supplemental
services that don’t get them.”
Wand James, in her 17
th
year working with homeless students, is troubled that
they haven’t figured out a better solution yet to the problems these students face.
“I thought homelessness would be eliminated, and I would be out of a job, several
years ago,” she said with a laugh.

23
OPTIMISM: A DAUNTING TASK
With nearly one million identified homeless schoolchildren, a spiraling housing
crisis, a looming potential recession, record federal deficits and an already shameful lack
of funds for homeless education, the future looks bleak.
Whatever exists of a safety net for these children – and it is threadbare indeed –
exists only partially because of the less-than-largesse of the federal government. Most of
the twine for the net comes from non-profits, and without them these hundreds of
thousands of students would be far worse off.
With little money coming down the pike in the future and a crisis that is only
worsening, it would seem that pessimism would be the order of the day. For Ninth
Street’s Hughes, though, that just isn’t an option.
“I have to be optimistic,” she said. “I can’t give up on children.”
For Mario and the hundreds of thousands of other homeless youth who are the
young faces of this crisis, faced with near insuperable obstacles, it’s an almost impossibly
thin line between anger and defiance, between resignation and hope, but one they do their
best to stay on the right side of.
“I didn’t know how corrupt the world was – I was like, damn,” said Mario. “But
you go to school and stuff, keep your head straight… You’ll eventually get out.”

24
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, Shirley. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Brewer, David. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

California’s Homeless Education Program. (2007). 34
th
Congressional District’s
Homeless Education.

California’s Homeless Education Program. (2007). California’s Homeless Education
Program.

Chamberlain, Scott. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Croom, Leslie. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Cuenca, Ailene. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Duffield, Barbara. (Personal Interviews, November 2007 – February 2008).

Hughes, Pamela. (Personal Interview, December 2007).

Huizar, Jose. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Mario. (Personal Interview, February 2008).

Martine, Grady. (Personal Interview, November 2008).

McSweeney, Dan. (Personal Interview, February 2008).

National Center for Homeless Education. (2007). Education for Homeless Children and
Youth Program: Analysis of 2005-2006 Federal Data Collection and Three-Year
Comparison.

Olivares, Arlene. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Perry, Jan. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Raab, Matt. (Personal Interview, December 2007).

Schoonmaker, Melissa. (Personal Interviews, October 2007 - February 2008).

U.S. Department of Education. (2007). Education for Homeless Children and Youth
Program: Title VII-B of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, as amended by
the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
25
U.S. Department of Education. (2007). The McKinney-Vento Act’s Education of
Homeless Children and Youth Program: Funding History.

Wand James, Barbara. (Personal Interview, November 2007).

Wheeler, Leanne. (Personal Interviews, November 2007 – December 2007).

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Homeless students suffer from a wide variety of problems in their pursuit of their education -- from less educational continuity, to more unstable home lives, to difficulties in enrolling, to a lack of basic funds to help them get through their school year, homelessness has a significantly negative effect of education. With approximately 13,500 homeless students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, 170,000 in California, and nearly one million in the country, there is a clear need for drastic action.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Mundy, Matthew Jonathon (author)

Core Title High and dry: homeless education in Los Angeles and the United States

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 04/17/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Education,homeless,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name Los Angeles County (city or populated place), USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor Celis, William, III (committee chair), Cooper, Marc (committee member), Ferguson, Kristin M. (committee member)

Creator Email matthewjmundy@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1150

Unique identifier UC1108193

Identifier etd-Mundy-20080417 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-59742 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1150 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Mundy-20080417.pdf

Dmrecord 59742

Document Type Thesis

Rights Mundy, Matthew Jonathon

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu