NEWS

Homeless families fell off the map during the pandemic, MNPS is trying to get them back on the radar

BY HANNAH HERNER

When school buildings shut down during the 2020-2021 school year, thousands of homeless students went “missing.” School liaisons lost touch with students in precarious housing situations, or didn’t get the chance to identify them to begin with. Some moved out of the district altogether.

Metro Nashville Public School’s H.E.R.O program has identified 2,501 students experiencing homelessness so far in the 2021-2022 school year. At the end of last school year, that number was 2,659. But those numbers are both unusually low compared to the 2019- 20 school year, with 3,964 students receiving support from the program.

“Certainly it's not because homelessness was still not an issue,” says Catherine Knowles, homeless education program coordinator for MNPS. “It's because when students were not present, in person in the school building, it was a little bit harder for staff to do that identification. We still had our standard way of identifying students through paperwork and enrollment process, but you know, every year about 40 percent of the kids we ended up helping are because someone at the school notices or has a conversation with the student and realizes that their situation has changed and then makes a referral.”

The drop in identified students experiencing homelessness was a national issue. A report prepared by SchoolHouse Connection and Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan found that 420,000 fewer youth have been identified as experiencing homelessness in the 2020-21 school year. That’s a 28 percent decrease in fall of 2020 compared to the fall of 2019. Under-identification was a problem even before this, as the report estimated that schools were failing to identify one million students even before the pandemic.

FINDING “LOST” STUDENTS

The 2020-21 school year involved a lot of delivering supplies to families, and bringing social workers, school counselors and volunteers in on the mission.

MNPS’ Navigator program, which began in the fall of 2020, built on that collaboration. Staff members throughout the school were assigned families to check in with throughout the year. This gave families another staff member who wasn’t their classroom teacher to call on. It was offered not just to homeless families, but to all families in the district. The goal was to refer these families to available services if needed, ensuring that fewer slipped through the cracks. MNPS has presented the Navigator program at a national conference and hopes it can be duplicated at other school districts, Knowles says.

“I think the pandemic pushed us to really find a different way to engage with students and families,” Knowles says. “The idea was, principals would use every available staff person in their building. It wasn't just classroom teachers, it was front office, it could be hall monitors, people from a variety of school roles, but just to get that staff number up as high as possible so that they were communicating just with small groups of students. Just to engage with students and parents, to have another person in the school building to connect with and to relate to and reach out to for help and support.”

Project Reconnect is another program introduced in an effort to help students who missed the start of this school year, too. If students miss the first 10 days of school, typically they’re automatically withdrawn. With nonprofit partners, MNPS reached out to families that had missed those first 10 days. Working one-on-one helped lower barriers of the complicated paperwork required to enroll a student, Knowles says.

The CARES Act gave $14 million to K-12 education, and that could have been used for McKinney-Vento students, but it wasn’t specified or suggested. Only 18 percent of districts measured specified that the funding was being used for homeless students, the University of Michigan report found.

The McKinney-Vento Act provides homeless students with certain federal protections, including being able to stay in the same school if their housing situation changes or they move out of the district, free meals and having access to transportation in that event as well. The H.E.R.O. program is part of this guarantee.

Knowles says the H.E.R.O. program benefitted from CARES Act funds and they’re using it to invest in more staff positions, specifically six family outreach positions. Smaller caseloads will allow staff members to spend more time reaching out to families, especially those who are homeless and tend to be transient.

“A one size fits all approach certainly does not work. I can give you a resource list or I can give you Where To Turn In Nashville guide, but someone really needs to be able to take the time to learn a bit more about your individual story, and then best map those resources and things that will improve the likelihood of success for you,” Knowles says.

JAMIE’S STORY

One family that was able to stay in touch throughout the pandemic was Jamie Daugherty and her three daughters. Now ages 9, 11, and 13, they’ve been a part of the H.E.R.O program since they were in Pre-K. The program has provided toiletries, food boxes, and arranged transportation from the hotel they’re living in, to school.

In the year away from the school building, her daughter was asked to do jumping jacks as a part of gym class, but in a hotel it would have disturbed neighbors. Her daughter got a C in the class. Connectivity issues also posed a problem.

“Living in a hotel, you don't have internet access all the time. And if you didn't have it, you had to pay extra for it which is like, two extra dollars a day. My kids did miss a lot of school because of that. Of course Catherine [Knowles] knows about it. It didn't fall back on me at all because they knew my circumstances and my situation,” Daugherty says.

In the beginning of 2021, after nine years of staying in shelters and hotels as a family, Daugherty found a place for her and her daughters to stay. Less than a year later, they could no longer afford it. She lost her job at iHOP after 15 years working there. In those 15 years she had 11 surgeries. A full knee replacement sidelined her most recently, and she wasn’t able to earn enough money for rent.

As a single mother, Daughtery says she could comfortably afford $800 per month in rent. The place where she was renting was a stretch at $1,400. Now she’s paying $459 per week, which adds up to $1,836 per month. It’s the taxing cycle where paying week to week prevents families from saving up enough for a down payment on a new place. She’s on waitlists for public or income-based housing, but she said at times her income was actually too high to qualify, while still not high enough to pay market-rate rent.

“The fact of it is, is not having enough money to afford a place because rent is so high. When you live in hotels to try to make it, you still don't get ahead,” Daugherty says. “I feel like, no matter what I do, how hard I work, I can't get ahead with my kids.”

A Fairview native, Daugherty’s housing precarity started at 19 when she aged out of the foster care system. She was on the streets for around five years before she had her first daughter and started in shelters and hotels. When her youngest daughter was just 3 months old, she was evicted, and went into a hotel for seven years, because that’s how long an eviction stays on one’s record.

Moving out of Nashville isn’t on Daugherty’s radar. Two of her daughters are on Individualized Education Plans and she worries they won’t get the same support elsewhere. Plus, without the support of family in Nashville, the H.E.R.O team is her main support system.

“I like the support that Miss Catherine Knowles and the school gives my kids because they love them to death and they know our situation and they support us regardless of our circumstances,” Daugherty says.

The H.E.R.O program doesn’t directly get people into housing, but it can try and make families feel connected through the transience that homelessness already was, and the pandemic exacerbated.

“I think the story that so often doesn't get told or maybe that the community misunderstands. Its' once you get the housing, that's not necessarily the end of the journey of the struggle,” Knowles says.

This story is the second in a series on how students and families are fairing during the pandemic.