But room rates consume most of the $650 a week her husband earns from construction. The family depends on prepaid grocery cards from the to cover other basic needs.

“Without that, we probably wouldn’t be able to eat some days,” Menkedick said.

Gas station cards allow her to get her 17-year-old daughter to school. A T.J. Maxx gift card purchased a dress for the girl’s first dance. The district, she said, has “gone way above and beyond” to help families in such dire situations.

But those services and others like them could soon be jeopardized. The extra $800 million in federal funding districts across the country have relied on to cover emergency expenses for the nation’s homeless students runs out later this year. 

In , advocates called on lawmakers to extend the spending deadline for another year. Once those funds expire, many will be scrambling to keep serving families in crisis. 

“I don’t think a lot of people realize — especially people in Washington, D.C. — that when they were allocating these funds as a response to COVID, this was money we have actually needed for a really long time,” said Susanne Terry, coordinator of homeless education services for the San Diego County Office Education. “We don’t see it as COVID relief; it’s just relief.”

California’s ‘most vulnerable’

The money came at a critical moment. Since the pandemic, homelessness has continued to rise, with rates hitting last year. Among families with children, there was a over 2022, federal data shows.

The needs are particularly great in California, which has the highest per capita next to Washington, D.C. Last year, the state spent over $7 billion on roughly focused on reducing homelessness, but most of those efforts didn’t reach students. 

Terry’s office used some of its $960,000 from the relief program to create a new position, a specialist who helps shelter staff follow outlining services to  homeless students.

The training came at the right time for Veronica Sandoval, the first-ever education coordinator at Father Joe’s Villages, which runs homeless shelters in San Diego. She was unfamiliar with how to help families, often refugees, who were being turned away from schools because they lacked the required paperwork. The shelter also serves mothers who escaped domestic abuse.

“Their priority is surviving and making sure that their kiddos are fed,” Sandoval said.  “Sometimes education is not at the top of the list.” 

With the specialist’s guidance, Sandoval learned how to help parents find transportation, overcome language barriers and navigate the bureaucracy of registering for school. Now, for the first time in the nonprofit’s 70-year history, all of its school-age children — about 180 —  are enrolled.

Sneakers and backpacks 

The pandemic aid legislation, a bipartisan amendment to the 2021 American Rescue Plan, totaled eight times the amount states typically receive from the federal government to who frequently double up with other families or live out of their cars. Many districts received dedicated funding for homeless students for the first time, according to the SchoolHouse Connection report, which was based on a national survey of over 1,400 homeless liaisons.

Some districts used the money for store and gas cards. Others paid for short-term housing, mental health services and technology like laptops and cellphones. 

More than half of the respondents said they plan to use federal Title I funds to continue some of the services, but 35% don’t plan to provide the same level of support.

Like a ‘widget maker’ 

But not all districts have been as efficient as Hacienda La Puente at spending the money. Because the funds will expire later this year, some districts prohibited departments from hiring extra staff that they’d have to let go.

Without extra personnel to purchase supplies and coordinate short-term hotel stays, finding ways to distribute the funds is often viewed “like an added thing on your plate,” said San Diego’s Terry.

Contracting and purchasing rules have also been “roadblocks to quickly and effectively spending” the money, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection. 

She received one email from a frustrated homeless liaison whose request to purchase a van to get students to school was rejected. A state official responded that “a yellow school bus” was the best way to get students to school. 

The liaison wrote to Duffield: “If we had enough drivers and yellow buses we wouldn’t be asking for a van.”

Such hurdles help explain why a quarter of the homeless liaisons worry the funds will dry up before they have a chance to spend it. Ohio districts, for example, still have not spent almost half of the $18.8 million they received, according to the state’s . And have only spent about 45% of the $9.93 million they received.

Liaisons say they need more time to spend the money. Some received it late, and others proposed ideas that were turned down. One New Hampshire district rejected requests to spend the money on eyeglasses, taxis for students and clothes, according to a liaison quoted in the report. Officials said staff first had to “exhaust all community resources.”

Those findings echo Jennifer Kottke’s experience at the Los Angeles County Office of Education, where she serves as a homeless education project director.  The county received over $3 million from the program. She asked to spend $280,000 on school and hygiene supplies — a request, she said, that should have taken about three months to approve. Instead, it took twice that long. At one point, the paperwork required 12 signatures.

Expected in October, the order arrived just last week. The red tape, she said, hampers her ability to help families in crisis and sometimes makes her feel like another “widget maker in the factory.” 

In July, according to California Department of Education data, the Los Angeles office still had over $2.6 million to spend. Kottke used about $400,000 for a tutoring program that has served 500 students, but will terminate at the end of the school year. 

She said she’s not even sure how much funding is left. Some liaisons across the county’s 80 districts didn’t even know they had received relief funds specifically for homeless students. The same was true for 24% of liaisons nationally, the survey found.

“There are days where I just feel like I’m spending so much time generating paperwork, that I’m not getting to the core of what I should be doing,” she said. “We’ve got a very vulnerable population. We’re trying to change the landscape of homelessness.”

That background is exactly what Brenda Dowdy was looking for. Dowdy, who oversees homeless education services for California’s San Bernardino County, wanted to reconnect with the 6,000 students who stopped receiving homeless services when schools first went virtual in the early days of the pandemic. Now, Lee visits schools throughout the county’s 34 school districts to share his story and let students know there are educators who can help. 

“We wanted to get people who could truly relate to them and understand what they’re going through,” she said. “The kids are like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s me.’”

Lee’s hiring as a “peer support advocate” is one example of how educators are using the $800 million provided by the American Rescue Plan a year ago to help districts identify and support homeless students.  The funding has more than tripled the number of districts receiving dedicated funding for that population, according to a forthcoming report from nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection, based on responses from 37 states. 

Homeless students have a right to immediate enrollment in school, even without academic and residency documents, and to remain there no matter where they move. But the relief funds have expanded ways districts can respond to emergencies. Many offer families prepaid debit cards and pay for short-term hotel stays. One purchased bicycles to help students get to school. 

Experts say districts often the number of students who qualify for homeless education services, a fact the pandemic has only worsened. confirms the number of students receiving services dropped in more than 40 states after the pandemic began. Preliminary figures from a few states show the count continued to decline during the 2020-21 school year. Remote learning offered by district homeless liaisons. 

During the time they no longer saw students in person, educators missed the usual warning signs that living arrangements were unstable, such as students wearing the same clothes for multiple days or getting off at different bus stops. 

“Not very many thought that homelessness had actually decreased,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection. “The big trends in education that people are paying attention to — enrollment loss, chronic absence — homelessness is a churning factor behind all of that.” 

Some families avoided homelessness last year because of federal and a temporary federal . But many homeless students didn’t qualify for the emergency aid. Experts note that homeless families often live under the radar because they’re in and out of hotels, double up in others’ homes and sleep in their cars. 

Colorado is among the states that continued to see the number of students receiving services fall during distance learning — a 26% drop, from 20,821 in 2019-20 to 15,374 in 2020-21. 

“It’s not because we solved homelessness,” Paula Gumina, the state education department’s coordinator for homeless education, said during a recent . In an email, she attributed the decrease to chronic absenteeism, students dropping out of school and staff turnover.

The state’s Cherry Creek district used its relief funds to purchase a van to transport homeless students to school and hire a specialist to support unaccompanied homeless youth in high school, according to the SchoolHouse Connection report.

Even in Florida, where schools were open during the 2020-21 school year, the number of students served fell from almost 80,000 in 2019-20 to less than 64,000. While the state mandated in-person learning, enrollment in virtual programs , contributing to educators losing connections with homeless students.

In the Orange County Public Schools, for example, roughly half of students opted for the remote LaunchED@Home program, according to a spokesman. That year, the district identified almost 900 fewer homeless students.

With staff training and a digital questionnaire for parents replacing a paper form, this year’s count is back up to over 5,500, but still below the pre-pandemic figure of over 6,000, according to Kimberly Gilbert, the district’s senior director of federal programs. 

‘Far more students’

Oklahoma was among the states that increased training requirements for liaisons, and those efforts have paid off, said Matt Colwell, executive director of school success for the state education department. 

“We still have several districts that report zero [homeless] students,” he said. “We know there are far more students experiencing homelessness in our state than we are identifying and serving.”

In San Bernardino County, Dowdy contracts with nonprofits like , which provides scholarships and recruits youth that were homeless, in foster care or had incarcerated parents to serve as mentors.

And she’s hired a second staff member to work with Lee.

When he visits schools, Lee talks about the one person who made sure he stayed in school, applied for college and followed up with phone calls to admissions directors — a counselor at Cajon High School in San Bernardino. 

“She just gave me her time when I needed to talk to somebody,” said Lee, who survived  gunshot wounds as a child. “Nobody in my family went to college. My mother and father didn’t even graduate from high school.”

Now 24, he’s earning a master’s degree in higher education while working to give other homeless students the same attention. 

At a recent school visit, a student told him he had slept on the street the night before. Teachers often miss signs of homelessnes, Lee said, and he views educating them as an important part of his job.

“The average educator might not know that there are youth in their classrooms that experience this on a daily basis,” he said.

Most of the students at Monte Del Sol Charter School live along what is known as the Airport Road corridor in Sante Fe, New Mexico — a high-poverty, mostly immigrant community where “trailer parks hide behind fake adobe walls,” said Cate Moses, the school’s homeless liaison.

These are the families she had in mind last fall when she wrote the city council about parents who faced eviction due to pandemic-related job loss. “We now have close to 60 students who qualify as homeless under federal … law.,” she wrote. “As the pandemic drags on, their situation worsens.”

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In response, the city signed her up as a “navigator” — a community member who connects residents to social services — and gave the school $20,000 from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act to help families pay overdue rent and utility bills. She spent six weeks filing paperwork and helped about 40 families stay in their homes.

Financial arrangements like those at Monte Del Sol — between local governments and those who understand the housing needs of students — helped prevent eviction among thousands of families with school-aged children, according to experts on student homelessness. But after emerging under the CARES Act last year, they’ve mostly disappeared under the newer program, run by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Parents applying for assistance are now directed to centralized websites run by state and local governments.While liaisons like Moses can still show parents how to sign up for rent relief, they aren’t involved in distributing the funds, which can lead to bureaucratic obstacles. Experts say it now can take months instead of weeks to receive assistance.

“It is really striking that schools are left out of [the] Biden-Harris … response to the housing crisis, when they are best poised to get assistance to families,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization working to prevent student homelessness.

Duffield is advocating with the administration and members of Congress to get schools included as grantees eligible to distribute rental assistance funds. “For all the ‘re-imagining’ that is being done in the pandemic, this is a necessary change,” she said.

The tedious application process — requiring extensive documentation — is one reason why the bulk of the $46 billion in federal funds for rental assistance has . In late August, just as the U.S. Supreme Court was about to end a Biden administration , the White House an “all-of-government approach” to help Americans at risk of being evicted, but schools weren’t mentioned. The push to speed up assistance included efforts across multiple federal agencies, including agriculture, veterans affairs, health and human services, and housing and urban development — but not education.

A of Census Bureau figures showed that almost a quarter of renters with children are behind on payments, and according to federal data, about 1.4 million students are homeless. Some districts have hired additional staff to help families navigate the online application process. Moses, for example, brought on a part-time employee to assist parents and help them gather the documents they need to prove they qualify.

But Duffield added, “It would be even better if the [rental] assistance weren’t so hard to navigate in the first place.”

Before the eviction ban ended, seven progressive Democrats in the House, including Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Ilham Omar of Minnesota, wrote to President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, asking them to prioritize students’ housing-related needs.

In a statement to ����Ӱ��, Bowman said, public schools should be “allowed to take on a more deliberate role in administering the Emergency Rental Assistance Program.”

A missed opportunity

Efforts to prevent evictions and help families cover their housing costs began with the federal government’s early response to the pandemic. The CARES Act, passed in March 2020, included two streams of funding, under the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that states and local governments could tap for rent relief. Local authorities that had existing relationships with schools and nonprofits enlisted them in the effort to quickly distribute the funds — a strategy .

But when Congress designed the new program, Republicans and former President Donald Trump, who multiple times for affordable housing programs, gave control to the treasury department. The National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy organization, pushed to keep the program where it was “given the agency’s deep expertise in housing and the unique needs of the lowest-income and most marginalized populations,” said President and CEO, Diane Yentel.

Now state and local finance departments are fielding applications and managing the newer treasury department program, which, Yentel said, “has led to unfortunate and unnecessary restrictions that have made it more difficult for tenants behind on rent to receive needed assistance.”

The treasury department did not respond to requests for comment.

Star-C, an Atlanta nonprofit that provides afterschool programs in apartments near low-performing schools, distributed $4.3 million last fall, helping 3,000 families with school-aged children and targeting efforts to schools ranked in the bottom third of the state’s accountability system. Cobb County, in the metro Atlanta area, still subcontracts with Star-C to distribute funds, but other counties have brought the process “in house,” said Margaret Stagmeier, the organization’s founder. “The [treasury] program is much more complex than our first … eviction relief fund, which allowed us to focus specifically on our edu-housing mission.”

On Sept. 14, the House financial services committee, chaired by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., advanced that expands grantees to include nonprofits and courts, but not school districts.

Duffield said the treasury department missed an opportunity “to capitalize on the single best distribution system for reaching families. If schools can distribute food assistance, why not rental assistance?”

‘Who you know’

Bush, one of the House members who signed the letter to Biden and Cardona, drew national attention to families and children at risk of eviction in August when she and others slept for five days on , in protest of Congress allowing the eviction moratorium to expire.

Marilee Hill-Anderson, director of community engagement for the Sumner-Bonney Lake School District, near Tacoma, Washington, was among those who joined the demonstration.

In Pierce County, where the district is located, the rental assistance website tells applicants the turnaround time on funds could be as long as 88 days. But last fall, under the CARES Act model, Hill-Anderson worked with Sumner city officials to distribute checks within a two-week period. In all, the district helped families pay rent and utilities totalling $34,000.

“Sometimes it’s who you know and who you have relationships with,” said Hill-Anderson. “We are incredibly grateful for the federal money. But given the fact that we’ve been able to do things more flexibly because of political will, I think there are some other models we can use.”