Helping Homeless Students

Nearly 24,000 individuals experience an incidence of homelessness every year in King County, Washington. Of these individuals, nearly 5% are school-age children struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy while their families get back on their feet.

In 2002, Congress reauthorized the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act to provide federal funding to assist school districts across the country address the needs of homeless students.

Since the reauthorization of McKinney-Vento, service providers in Washington State noticed that while some trigger indicators like free school lunch programs were experiencing large increases in participating students, the number of homeless students identified by those schools were remaining stagnant. Washington Appleseed was asked to help investigate compliance with the McKinney-Vento Act and make sure homeless students were receiving all of the services available to them.

How Washington Appleseed is Helping

Working with Riddell Williams PS and Columbia Legal Services, Washington Appleseed is gathering information on homeless students through Public Record Ask requests. An analysis of the returned information will help identify school districts that might be non-compliant with the McKinney-Vento Act and, therefore, not delivering the full breadth of services to homeless students. Pending the results of the analysis, Washington Appleseed and community partners will determine what methods will be needed to move schools toward compliance: education, persuasion or litigation.

Latest News

Information from initial Public Record Act requests to Washington school districts have been compiled with some interesting results: the average increase in the number of homeless students reported by participating school districts was 11%. However, schools receiving Public Records Act requests reported an average increase of 180%.

This data suggests that simply sending Public Record Act requests has resulted in identification of more homeless students and, therefore, more homeless students receiving the services dictated by McKinney-Vento.

A round of follow-up requests was recently sent to each school district focusing on areas where there appear to be issues regarding their McKinney-Vento compliance.

Pro Bono and Community Partners

Riddell Williams PS

Columbia Legal Services

Thank you to our pro bono volunteers: Mike Pierson, Jeff Walsh and Casey Trupin.