The McKinney-Vento Act: It's Origins and Funding

“Homelessness alone is not sufficient reason to separate students from the mainstream school environment,” the law reads.

In the years that followed, amendments came and went. It was eventually renamed the McKinney-Vento Act in 2001, adding Rep. Bruce Vento, a Democratic from Minnesota.

The law today protects the rights of all students to education, no matter their housing situation. It also calls for identifying which students are homeless (or in foster care) and connecting them with adequate services to ensure equal access to education. The McKinney-Vento Act is not a funding mechanism; its only funds come through highly competitive grants for administrative positions, such as homeless liaisons, but does require that every district have a designated homeless liaison, even if it’s not a full-time position. (The Monterey County Office of Education has such a grant, ending in 2021, to fund its current McKinney-Vento coordinator position.)

Title I requires set-aside funding for homeless students, but the amount is unspecified and varies annually. Then there is California’s Local Control Funding Formula, the state’s funding mechanism meant to provide extra aid to districts with more disadvantaged students. The formula takes into account the concentration of foster youth, English learners and low-income students. But there’s a catch. If a student qualifies for multiple categories – for example, a homeless student who is also an English learner – they’re counted for just one category, not both. In other words, the most underprivileged students, aren’t funded for all of their needs.

According to Pivot Learning, a nonprofit that identifies endemic problems in education, Monterey County’s homeless students aren’t just homeless. Crisis on the Coast, a report completed by the nonprofit in 2018, shows 64 percent are English-language learners. (In addition, according to the study, 90 percent are Latino.)

The finding that students face layers of challenges doesn’t surprise MPUSD Superintendent PK Diffenbaugh: “We’re working across barriers whether that’s access to education, health care, transportation or what have you,” he says. “And you have this incongruent funding system and unfortunately, it makes really difficult to fund the level of intervention needed.”