Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Urban school districts across the country are educating an increasing number of homeless students. As mandated by the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, school districts collect information about the housing status of students throughout the school year, including the type of unstable housing they reside in. The country’s second largest district, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), experienced a 50% increase in the number of students identified as homeless between the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school year. Consequently, LAUSD is grappling with how to support these students within the classroom and after the school day is over.

As large urban school districts seek to serve homeless students, a better understanding of their school, neighborhood, and residential contexts would assist in more effectively deploying resources and supports. The existing research has found that homelessness is associated with a variety of negative academic outcomes and increased likelihood of engaging in risk-taking behavior. Yet less is known about the unstable housing, school, and neighborhood contexts that homeless students inhabit. These contexts may be important mediating or moderating factors that ultimately influence academic and behavioral outcomes. Neighborhood characteristics and unstable housing arrangements may even predict prolonged or future homelessness. Research on school, residential, and neighborhood environments can contextualize the experience of homeless students and could be useful in creating more targeted interventions to meet homeless students where they are.

Using rich administrative student-level data panel from LAUSD, school-level data from the California Department of Education, and neighborhood-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS) spanning from the 2008-09 school year to the 2016-17 school year, we explore the characteristics of the schools homeless students attend and the neighborhoods they reside in. Employing descriptive statistical techniques we address the following research questions:

1. What are the characteristics of the schools, neighborhoods, and the type of unstable housing arrangement that homeless students utilize?
2. How do students cycle in and out of homelessness and how does this vary across neighborhood, school, and unstable housing arrangements?
3. How do neighborhood characteristics and type of unstable housing arrangement predict future homelessness?

Initial findings suggest that between the 2008-09 and 2016-17 school years between 7,000 and 16,000 students report being homeless annually in LAUSD schools. In the 2016-17 school year 3.1% of students identified as homeless. Homeless students attend schools that are more likely to be lower performing, have larger numbers of free and reduced-price lunch (FRL), and have larger numbers of students of color. The majority of homeless students were living in the homes of family or friends, often referred to as ‘doubling-up’.

By attending to context, we hope to uncover important environmental factors that add to our understanding of where homeless students attend school and live, and even predict the frequency of and likelihood of future homelessness. These environmental factors may ultimately help explain why students experiencing homelessness experience academic success or failure. Moreover, these findings will be valuable to districts and researchers working to improve the provision of services and protections to homeless students.