Mercer Island Bucks Trend, Sees Fewer Homeless Students

Editor’s Note: This is part of a special report about homeless students in the Mercer Island School District. Patch partnered with Investigate West for this report.

School districts around the state are grappling with how to help growing populations of homeless students, even as budget cuts further slash their ability to meet their federal obligation to do so.

Under the federal McKinney-Vento Act, school districts are required to identify and report homeless students and to guarantee those students transportation so they can stay at their original schools even if they have been forced to find emergency shelter outside the district.

At the Mercer Island School District, that responsibility falls to Jennifer Wright, executive director of learning and technology services. Wright and her counterparts in other districts around the state are required to track how many students are living in motels, doubled up with relatives, in cars or in shelters.

"Our mission is to identify and serve students that are living in temporary living situations, and all students who meet the criteria are considered homeless," she said. (Click here to see where Mercer Island homeless students were living in 2009-10.)

The MISD also provides support under the federal law to children relocated to temporary foster homes.

Mercer Island's homeless student population actually fell in the past five years from 14 to 7—a relatively low number compared to other school districts in the state—and they make up less than 0.2 percent of the MISD's current enrollment of 4,178 students.

Being homeless, however, can have an outsized impact on how children learn, can lead to depression, and can be misdiagnosed as learning disabilities—labels that stick with a child for years (See our related story, here).

The rationale for keeping kids in their original school is that it helps their learning.

A small 2006 pilot study by the Washington State Department of Transportation found that while homeless kids typically had lower grades and Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) scores than non-homeless students, the grades and scores were better among those homeless students who got to stay in their original schools.

“The main goal of identifying kids is so they can stay in their school of origin, so they have consistency with their peers, teachers and educational progress,” said Melinda Dyer, program supervisor for Education of Homeless Children and Youth for the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. That means providing cabs, bus passes, or other means of transportation for kids, even if it means they are commuting up to an hour and a half a day to school.

It’s up to individual school districts to squeeze that transportation money from their own budgets. “There is no pot of money for homeless students,” said Dyer. “It’s a big burden for districts.”

For Mercer Island, the cost of busing just the seven students identified is approximately $6,000 a year, according to Wright. The MISD usually transports students to neighboring Seattle and Bellevue, but in the past couple of years students have been bused as far away as Everett and Kent. The funds to pay for their transportation comes from a combination of federal and local dollars. But Mercer Island is bucking what appears to be a state and national trend in rapid increases in numbers of homeless students and the associated cost to districts.

A report released in December shows 21,826 homeless students statewide in the 2009-2010 school year, a 30 percent increase in three years. That reporting period compares the numbers of homeless students reported in the 2006-2007 school year, before the recession began in December of 2007, to the most current full year, 2009-2010.

Of the 10 districts with the highest numbers of homeless students in the state, eight reported increases from 2006-07 to 2009-10. Bellingham, for example, was up 80 percent, Tacoma up 17 percent, Seattle up 27 percent and Highline up 21 percent.