Timothy Scalona is a first-year student at Suffolk Law School.
In my second world, I was an honors student, a track athlete and an avid video gamer. I listened to other students talking about going out with friends after school, and I spoke not one word about my family’s foreclosure or poverty. I disappeared into my textbooks: Schoolwork served as a distraction and a sedative, burying the hunger in my stomach, the isolation from my peers and the constant threat of homelessness.
I graduated in 2016. Today, as students are returning to in-person classrooms after a year of covid-19 lockdowns, I know that many of them will walk into homeroom bearing more than a bookbag and a face mask. Leaving a hotel, shelter or friend’s couch, they will carry the trauma of eviction and displacement.
Lost wages, unemployment and the end of the federal moratorium on evictions threaten to spawn a wave of homelessness. That inevitably means a crisis for children.
Since 1987, homeless children have come under the purview of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which guarantees “equal access to the same free, appropriate public education . . . as provided to other children and youths.” However, the law does not provide sufficient resources to truly support that educational guarantee, or to ensure compliance with its mandated protections.
Under McKinney-Vento, school districts are required to identify homeless youth and provide their families with referrals to housing, mental health and health-care resources. They must arrange transportation to schools within the district. They must appoint liaisons to oversee these efforts. To help pay for the programs, the districts can apply for grants from the U.S. Education Department, administered through the states — though not all receive funding.
My younger siblings and I received free transportation to our school. Not all homeless students, however, are so lucky. Individual districts are allowed to decide what kind of transportation assistance they will offer homeless children — and because transportation is expensive, and the cost is not fully covered by McKinney-Vento subgrants, they “have an inherent disincentive” to provide these services, according to a report from the Urban Institute. Even worse, as the report said, the same financial concerns give schools a disincentive to identify homeless students at all. Many children fall through the cracks. A recent University of Michigan report notes that before covid-19 closed most classrooms, U.S. schools were failing to identify about 1 million homeless children and youth. Now, “due to distance learning/school building closure” during the pandemic, “as many as 1.4 million homeless K-12 children may be unidentified and unsupported by their schools.”
Even with the best of intentions, school districts often feel they lack the time, authority and resources to meet their obligations. The law has no explicit requirement that liaisons and staff have trauma-informed knowledge and training for supporting homeless children. In Massachusetts, where I still live, many of the liaisons listed in the state directory are school superintendents and administrators — not psychologists or social workers.
Finally, existing protections don’t address a major component of students’ well-being: their relationship with other students and the culture of the school environment. This is a failure in meeting the spirit of McKinney-Vento. Homeless students need protection against classism and bullying. When I was young, one of my brothers was taunted as “homeless” after he skipped a school dance, and a fight ensued. The bully wasn’t punished, and the underlying situation was never addressed. The environment that should have been a refuge from our families’ stress was instead another source of insecurity.
Multiple studies have demonstrated that existing federal protections do not provide homeless children educational or material stability as they face worsened educational and mental health outcomes. While the Biden administration committed nearly $600 million in American Rescue Plan funds to support homeless children and youth, Congress can and must go further by increasing funding for the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Program and Emergency Solutions Grants — as some in Congress have already suggested — and restructuring the program to ensure that schools provide trauma-informed services and a welcoming environment to homeless youth.
Congress can also amend the law to require that homeless liaisons must be appropriately trained and connected with area resources. Finally, government must address the broader homelessness crisis, making strategic investments in public housing, education access, transportation and more so that individuals and families never confront displacement in the first place.
Just five years ago, I lived with one foot in each of two worlds. Motivated by the promise of higher education, however, I became one of the fortunate survivors of youth homelessness, eventually obtaining bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Now, I have entered law school, and I hope to one day defend people experiencing eviction and housing insecurity, while addressing systemic policy failures — many of which my family confronted. I know our government, and our schools, can do better by our homeless children.
