Haven’t heard of the Midwest Newsroom?
It's a regional collaboration between NPR and some of the member stations in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska.
The goal of Midwest Newsroom’s Unhoused/Unschooled project is to help people all around the Midwest understand a federal law to help homeless students.
KSMU’S GREGORY HOLMAN: The focus of this series of news reports is on rural communities — places like Lexington, Nebraska and Exeter, Missouri. You can find the complete Unhoused/Unschooled series at this link hosted by our partners at KCUR in Kansas City.
But today on Ozarks Public Radio, we're welcoming one of the lead reporters for Unhoused/Unschooled, Kavahn Mansouri. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Portions were originally broadcast January 17 on KSMU Radio.
Kavahn, welcome to KSMU.
MIDWEST NEWSROOM’S KAVAHN MANSOURI: Thanks for having me.
Q. So Kavahn, here in Springfield and throughout the Missouri Ozarks, the main providers of services to people who don't have stable housing are nonprofit groups and churches. But your team's reporting on this project focuses on a federal law called the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. Can you just start us out by giving us a rough overview of what McKinney-Vento tries to guarantee for unhoused students in our nation's public schools?
A. Yeah, the law ensures that students who are dealing with housing issues — that can range from people who are living on a friend's couch to people who are actually, you know, out on the streets — get the same sort of quality of education as their peers who have stable housing. That can mean federal dollars that go down to the school district level, but it also gives them certain rights to the sort of education their peers would get, like a ride to school where they might not have one, you know, when they miss school, some tutoring, or things like that, along with a whole sort of litany of other things that come with it. But basically, the law is there to protect these students who don't really have a lot of support in their lives, to get them to school and try to give them the best education they can to kind of break that cycle of homelessness.
Q. Now, as you and Midwest Newsroom got working on this Unhoused/Unschooled series, your reporting team found gaps in the services provided to homeless students in most of those school districts that you checked out — compared to what the law says, at least. And Kavahn, can you just go over that situation for us?
A. Yeah, that's right. You know, we spent about a year looking into this, this information, this data. Aand what we found is that, particularly in rural areas of the Midwest, there are just giant gaps in service. These school districts are struggling to identify their students that are homeless. “Undercounting” is the word that we typically used for this, and it's a very systematic problem. The blame doesn't really lie at anyone's feet, but it is a problem where, you know, every arm is just kind of struggling. There's not enough funding for this. There's not enough people who are trained to actually identify who [and] what a student who's dealing with housing issues actually looks like, and how to aid them. And then there's — at the federal level, there's just a lack of support for the McKinney-Vento law, making it kind of a — you know, it's a law that really struggles to do the job that it's meant to do.
Q. Now, I want to pick up on one thing you said there that goes beyond gaps in services. It's that not all of the school districts even identify that they have students in their district who are homeless. Some of the districts identified that they have these students and others — officially, at least — there's no homeless student in the district. What's going on there?
A. Yeah, if you look at the Midwest, you can take our data, and you can even look at maps that are federally available, and it will show you that in these large swaths of rural areas, they're basically saying that they have no homeless students, which, if you look at, you know, not only Census data, but also free and reduced price lunch data, it will show you that that is just very, very unlikely.
And we're talking about, not just one or two schools, [but] a very large amount of schools in rural areas saying ‘we do not serve any homeless students.’ And our data just shows that’s not likely the case. Education officials in the four states that we spoke to, as well as just experts in the field, and advocates, [say] it's really difficult for these school districts to actually identify these students, not only because the training is not there, and that it's difficult to identify these students who might be, you know, living on a friend's couch, living with their grandparents sometimes, or just don't really have a stable situation. Maybe they're jumping from house to house, you know, once a week, and it's just hard to identify. And on top of all that, you know, most parents who are dealing with this sort of thing, they’re worried about telling a school district like, Hey, we're dealing with housing issues. They're worried they'll lose their kids.
But on top of that, the people who are in charge of actually identifying students often wear a lot of hats. I think the most notable for me in my reporting was when I talked to a Nebraska official about this. She told me that she had worked pretty extensively with an assistant superintendent who is in charge of identifying students at their school. This is a McKinney-Vento coordinator position, and every school district in the country is required to have this. But because of that requirement — which is a good requirement, I should note — but because that is a requirement, sometimes that gets kind of slapped on top of a lot of responsibilities that somebody already might have at a job.
So in this case, this is an assistant superintendent who was doing that job, serving lunch in like, the line at school, driving a bus, mopping floors after school, and then also, on top of all that, having to identify students who are struggling with housing, which is a really difficult thing.
And I think that really encompasses the problem: These very vulnerable students who are hard to sometimes find are basically, you know, just another responsibility of a person who might have, like, a ton of different things to do.
Q. So I definitely have some questions about the issues that you just brought up there. The first one, I think, to give people a sense of the scope of this: Do the advocates and experts have any sense of how many kids, or what percentage of homeless kids, are falling through the cracks in this system you described?
A. It's hard to say definitively. But they imagine quite a bit, not just in rural areas. Especially because homelessness, in general, is up. The recent Point-in-Time Count for this year [2024] — which is an annual count of how many homeless people are struggling with housing in the U.S. — has homelessness rising again this year.
And that means there's more individuals who are out there, and it's really difficult to say how many people, and how many students ,are falling through the cracks. But, you know, the advocates I talked to [say] that it's no small number. It's not a small percentage of students. This is a lot of students.
And it's because having housing issues can be a very broad array [of ways it happens]. The definition is wide. And the children who are actually out on the streets are probably, in some aspects, maybe the easiest to find. It's the kids who are, you know, living on a friend's couch or just going from house to house every week, those are the difficult ones to find. And that's where advocates and experts that I spoke to really think that a lot of kids are falling through the cracks and missing a lot of school because of that, and sometimes [may not] even go to school at all.
Q. Now I imagine a lot of people, a lot of listeners, might assume that every school district in the United States gets some of this funding to address homelessness among the student body, but that's not true. Can you explain how McKinney-Vento funding goes through the states to the school districts?
A. Basically, there is a annual pot of funding. It's around [$129 million], and that's spread across all of the country's school districts. So if you think about that, that's thousands of school districts out there. So we're talking about not a huge amount of money, if you were to compare it to a lot of other sort of government funding, and then it is spread paper-thin.
So you know, if you were to look at the data, it would be pretty clear: How is this money going to really fund [solutions for] a whole problem of student homelessness? We found in our four states, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, only about 5% of all those school districts actually received any McKinney-Vento funding. Now, that's not to say they don't have other funding going towards homeless sort of issues at their schools.
There's other kinds of funding, but [McKinney-Vento] is one of the main pots [of funding] that goes towards this, and it is really stretched just razor-thin.
Education officials that we spoke to, in the states that were willing to speak with us, agree that there's not a lot of money there, and then there's an entire grant process that's competitive in nature. That makes it even more difficult to get that money.
So if you're a rural school district out in the Ozarks, for instance, and you have one individual who's working as the McKinney-Vento coordinator, they are basically trying to get that money through a grant process, and they may be going up through a school district, maybe in the city, that has like six people working on that process.
So it's pretty easy to to imagine who might come out on top on that process, someone who's, you know, one person who's wearing a lot of hats, who's trying to get some funding for a program, or for a student that needs some aid, or for the school district — or six people who are on a team and their sole job is to do that work. Basically every arm of this system really struggles.
Q. Now, I did a little bit of napkin math. You mentioned that nationwide, it's [roughly $129 million] that goes out in this federal funding. In Unhoused/Unschooled, Midwest Newsroom found there's roughly $3.5 million of the McKinney-Vento money available for Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, and that money is spread around among 49,000 students identified as homeless by those school districts. And again, we know that not all the students are even identified. Do the experts consider that to be enough money? I did a little napkin math, and it seemed like in the four-state area, we're talking about maybe $71 per kid.
A. Yeah, no, no, they don't. [Experts] don't think that's enough. Again, if you think about, okay, for instance, let's say, there's a kid who's living five minutes from school and their housing situation changes, and suddenly they're living with a family member that is now 20 minutes from the school. The school district has to pay for their transportation. That is what is required under the McKinney-Vento law. $71 a student — that's to say, if every student was getting this — is not going to go far. There's a lot of students that need this service, so that sort of money doesn't get very far, and experts basically agree that funding needs to raise, and in just in recent memory, you know, there's been bipartisan support to raise the funding from McKinney-Vento, and even American Rescue Plan Act funding that went toward this sort of funding.
But it's just it's not enough, and even the bipartisan pushes to raise that money haven't gone anywhere. They kind of stall out. Everyone seems to agree that more money is desperately needed to help this population, but little is actually being done to improve the situation.
Q. I wanted to shift to sort of the nonprofit world with this, the community volunteer world with this. Unhoused/Unschooled found that there are many groups and individuals who are stepping up to address student homelessness, where this official, taxpayer-funded system falls short —and maybe that's happening, especially in the more rural districts. Really curious about some of the findings there, Kavahn.
A. A lot of communities step up. And in my initial reporting and findings, I ran into that sort of common thread throughout. In rural areas, the concern is there, but there also is this idea that, “well, we know who these kids are,” the community steps up, and they help out. I think that is what everyone with their best intentions hopes is happening — that is, you know, if the school district can't, if the federal government can't, then the communities, the churches, the unhoused advocates, they're going to step in, step up and help.
And that does happen. We found a lot of instances of that in certain communities where the school district knows that this thing is going on, they don't have the funds.
But this, you know, this group is stepping in to help out, you know, whether that's providing some transport or providing some free tutoring, sometimes it's even a matter of, just like, you know, providing some clothes.
So we do see that a lot, especially in rural areas. If you’re here in St Louis, you know, there's so [many] unhoused advocates out there doing work to make sure not only students, but just the homeless population in general is getting the support that sometimes they're not getting from whether it be city officials, to state officials, to even federal officials.
Again, I go back to sort of this idea that was kind of prevalent throughout this entire project: It's really a systematic issue. I think everyone really is trying to do their best, but where the system is failing, the community does try to step forward in places that can.
But, you know, I think another common thread that I saw is that a lot of people worry that that's, well, that's great, that there's a lot of kids who are not getting those services, and still falling through the cracks.
Q. I want to highlight that earlier this month, our colleague Jodi Fortino with KCUR visited the public school district in Exeter. That's a small town here in the Ozarks, over near Cassville, and Fortino interviewed a homeless student liaison named Ashley Fry.
And like you're describing Kavahn, Ashley is the school principal [at Exeter]. She's also the district's athletic director, transportation director, high school counselor, foster care coordinator and softball coach, and on top of that, is the homeless liaison. So Ashley's situation is pretty common in a lot of these rural districts, as far as folks trying to address this?
A. Yeah, that's just a perfect example. That is a story that we've heard over and over again, and just basically the best way to explain the situation. I mean, look, you know, Jodi Fortino identified one individual. I mean, how many jobs there? That's gonna be really difficult. And I'm sure [Principal Ashely Fry] is working her tail off to do her best. And that's something we heard from every homeless coordinator: These are people who really care. They want to do a good job. But they also have — I think everyone who works in education is trying to do their best out there. But it is a system, especially when it comes to these McKinney-Vento students, that is really struggling.
Q. Last question here. Are there any reforms or solutions being debated right now, whether on these more local levels or even in Congress, as far as how best to help these public school kids who don't have stable housing? It certainly seems, as we've gone over this, that there might be a gap between people who would say, “well, let's fix McKinney-Vento. Let's maybe fund it more,” and others who would say, “well, let's go ahead and lean on community volunteer development, because that seems more effective.” I'm curious where the state of that debate is, if we know.
A. Sure, yeah: There was a letter signed by about 35 members of the Senate to urge some more robust funding for the 2025 federal budget. But that has not gone anywhere. But you know, again, there's a lot of conversation, there's a lot of hope, there's a lot of pushing for it. It's important to point out that in the that American Rescue Plan Act, [the Biden administration’s signature COVID relief law, which followed the first Trump administration’s CARES Act] funding that went directly towards homeless youth was called ARP-HCY. It was very flexible funding. It could go towards anything from transportation, like we've said, all the way to things like a hotel voucher for the family, and I think even in one or two times in Missouri, I read about a family getting a voucher to help their them fix their van so they could get to get to school. And that was about $800 million of American Rescue Plan funding that was kind of injected straight into this.
Now, not all that money got spent, and there was a real struggle to get it spent throughout the country. We did a story on that recently. But there have been some pushes to basically, you know, increase that funding. There's been a sort of, sort of joint agreement that there needs to be more money, but that one-time funding is basically all that we've seen so far. The budget has stayed mostly the same for the past three years, I believe.
And even with that push, we're still kind of waiting to see if there's going to be more money for this.
Q. If you're just joining us on KSMU Ozarks Public Radio, we've been talking with Kavahn Mansouri. He's an investigative reporter with the Midwest Newsroom. That's a partnership between NPR and many of the public radio stations in Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. Their recent series on homelessness in the public school districts is called Unhoused/Unschooled. You can experience the entire series here.
Kavahn, thanks for being with us on the broadcast today.
A. Thanks so much for having me.
For KSMU News, I'm Gregory Holman.
