MPUSD launches a website to teach other school districts how to support homeless students.

Schools are increasingly seen not just as places for learning, but hubs for needed resources.

To that end, in 2022, Monterey Peninsula Unified School District received a two-year, $500,000 homeless innovation grant from the California Department of Education to bolster efforts to support students with unstable housing.

As of June, about 22 percent of MPUSD’s student population, or 2,235 students, is experiencing homelessness as defined by the McKinney-Vento Act. That’s a 2-percent increase from the previous year.

Besides increasing personnel focused on identifying and referring unhoused students, MPUSD has successfully implemented some programs to help those students, including a partnership with Motel 6 to provide emergency temporary housing for unhoused students and their families, and a rental assistance program to help families with funds to pay for the first and last months of rent and deposit. MPUSD is working on a safe parking program at Monterey Adult School in Seaside so families who live in their cars can park there overnight. There’s also a Youth Advisory Board composed of students who have experiences homelessness.

Donnie Everett, MPUSD’s assistant superintendent of multi-tiered systems of support, says these interventions have helped increase impacted students’ GPA and graduation rates.

Part of the grant went to support the creation of a website (mpusdbests.org) that launched on July 5 and aims to share MPUSD’s programs with other schools and organizations across the country. The idea is to share successful models so others can possibly adopt them.