When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, unhoused students struggled to stay connected, and district officials don’t know how many have fallen through the cracks
Portland had 1,217 students experiencing some form of homelessness last fall. With the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, Portland Public Schools is expecting that number to increase when classes resume later this year.
Now, the district is in the process of figuring out ways to keep those students from falling through the cracks.
The district did not initially respond to an inquiry about how it intends to engage with students identified as homeless this fall, but later said its homeless liaisons will return to work Aug. 20 and will work with schools to identify newly homeless students.
On Friday, PPS spokesperson Karen Werstein provided Street Roots with a plan the district is implementing to engage with marginalized students and as a response to the overall impact of the pandemic on students and their familes, some of which was already underway but is now being expanded upon.
For one, it will have a social worker for every high school and elementary school and additional counselors at middle schools, all of whom will be trained in “trauma informed supports and racial equity and social justice,” said Werstein.
PPS will also be partnering with outside mental health providers in order to offer teletherapy, and it plans to hire additional substance use specialists to assist students struggling with mental health and substance use disorder. It's also in the process of finalizing “ways in which we can creatively support our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) students and families,” she said.
The number of students who will be new to housing insecurity this fall is still unknown. At last count, homeless students made up about 2.5% of the overall student body.
School districts’ definition of homelessness is broad. Under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a homeless child lacks “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence” during the school year.
Kathy Gaitán, who oversees the McKinney-Vento homeless student liaison program for PPS, said every school district employee is trained to identify families who may be experiencing unstable housing. Each district has a coordinator who meets with families to connect them with resources, including food and supplies.
Staff at PPS uses a continually updated dashboard identifying homeless families, and Gaitán said the numbers were actually down at the beginning of June this year relative to the same time last year.
But how well those students are doing academically is tougher to ascertain. So far, it’s difficult to compare the academic outcomes, including dropout retention rates, for unhoused students between this year and last year.
Werstein said the school district tracked students “very differently” once students and teachers transitioned to distance education, making it difficult to draw a direct comparison.
“Once we were out of buildings, schools worked really hard to keep all their students enrolled and kept in constant contact with them this spring, but that level of involvement looked very different depending on the student,” Werstein wrote in an email to Street Roots. That contact may have included the students’ teachers, principals, community partners and counselors.
“We did not unenroll students like we would normally do for things like no shows or 10-day drops,” she said. “We tried to keep kids enrolled and connected to the school they were already connected with.”
But officials strongly suspect some students likely fell through the cracks this spring.
“We know we had students who struggled and either have been or will be referred to our reconnection services program (which helps students who have unenrolled get back on track) as we start to come back to school,” Werstein said.
She said when school resumes this fall, the first two weeks will be focused on orienting students. During that time, “we will also be working hard to ensure that all families have the technology and access to the internet to participate in distance learning,” she said.
District officials know that under normal, pre-pandemic circumstances, houseless students were already less likely to graduate on time than their peers in stable housing.
School districts track adjusted cohort graduation rates — the number of students who graduate within four or five years. Students are dropped from the cohort if they drop out, but also if they die, become incarcerated or migrate to another country.
In the 2018-19 school year, 61% of homeless students graduated within four years and 70% finished within five years. Their rate of graduation was much lower than the overall rate for students in the general population, who graduated at a rate of 84% for four years and 87% for five years.
With the pandemic underway, PPS closed schools in mid-March and pivoted to online learning once it became clear they wouldn’t be able to open again soon.
At the beginning of April, parents on foot and in cars lined up for blocks and waited for hours to get laptops PPS loaned out to families so that students could access school.
For unhoused students, the logistical aspects of attending school were exacerbated by that shift, since many don’t have consistent access to the internet. While school district officials have worked to keep low-income students connected to education services, including houseless students, it’s not clear how many have left school, fallen behind or seen their grades drop due to the pandemic.
This spring, the district loaned out nearly 15,500 Chromebook laptops to students, Werstein said. It’s also paying for 645 Wi-Fi hot spots — at a cost to the district of $20 per hot spot per month.
Werstein said each hot spot will support five devices. The connection is fast, she said, but speed depends on where the user is located and how many devices are accessing the hot spot.
According to social services organizations that work with houseless youths, getting students online was, all things considered, pretty straightforward.
“It’s definitely been much harder for our downtown youth population to find the time to study and to prioritize studying over their general needs being met,” said Riley Schaefer, a career-training specialist with New Avenues For Youth, a nonprofit that works with homeless and at-risk youths.
The organization also has two tutors funded through PPS with federal education funding earmarked for services for low-income students. The tutors have been offering tutoring remotely over Zoom for a total of 16 hours a week.
But online learning requires a computer, internet access and access to classroom materials, which Schaefer said many youths don’t have or don’t have consistently.
New Avenues for Youth offers some computer lab time, and tutoring is still available but on an appointment basis, rather than a drop-in basis.
Typically, there would be 10 to 15 students in the classroom in the nonprofit’s GED program at any given time. By July of last year, 35 had completed their GED in the previous calendar year.
This year, the goal was to help 40 students get their GEDs, but only 23 had finished the program by the spring, and GED tests aren’t currently being offered.
Since the program scaled down, Schaefer said, just four or five students have come in to access the computer lab.
Sean Suib, executive director at New Avenues for Youth, said the organization hopes that when Multnomah County is approved for Phase II reopening, the organization will be able to offer site-based, socially distanced tutoring again.
As of this writing, Multnomah County is still in Phase I — permitting the reopening of restaurants, bars, personal care services and fitness centers — and officials plan to stay there indefinitely before reopening.
Brant Nelson, a career development coach at Outside In, another nonprofit that works with homeless youths in Portland, said the number of students receiving education supports through the organization was 18 this year, down from 41 in March.
But he said numbers also dropped last spring, though not as sharply.
Outside In’s Education Resource Center pivoted to fully online learning at the onset of the pandemic. Amanda Haner, its employment and education manager, said everyone accessing the organization’s GED services is either in transitional or supported housing and has received a laptop through the nonprofit’s food box program.
In mid-July, Portland Public Schools released released its tentative plan for reopening schools in the fall. The district stressed that it will open buildings only when public health experts say it is safe to do so, but it is considering a model where students would spend only two days per week on campus, then resume virtual learning during other parts of the week.
The district’s plan does not mention unhoused students specifically, but at the beginning of July, it sent a letter to families and staff saying the district would prioritize Black and Native students and engage with groups that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. It also said it would focus on “connecting with our students in order to access basic needs, including meals, computers, social emotional support and internet access.”
But officials anticipate there will be homeless students as the pandemic ensues.
Oregon extended its deadline for the annual district count of homeless students to last through the end of June in order to identify and count students who became homeless due to the pandemic, said Dona Bolt, the state coordinator of the McKinney-Vento program for the Oregon Department of Education.
“Our anticipation based on unemployment and all those things is that we’re seeing a larger number (of houseless students) in August and September,” Gaitán said.
The Next Generation is a Street Roots series that focuses on the well-being and housing stability of children and young adults, locally and nationally, and explores the work being done to prevent another generation from becoming homeless. Street Roots received funding from Meyer Memorial Trust's Housing Advocacy Portfolio to develop dedicated reporting for The Next Generation series.
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