Rural students are about as likely to be homeless as urban students, but have fewer resources to keep them in school

A school bus in southern Ohio (Photo by Danna Slinger, NYT)

Limited resources and research have made student homelessness a hard-to-tackle issue in rural areas, writes Samantha M. Shapiro for The New York Times Magazine, with several examples of children uprooted and rootless in southern Ohio.

The funding, rules and priorities of America's "homeless industrial complex" does not generally focus on rural areas, often leaving public school districts as the only local resource for students and families in need, Shapiro writes: "The limited data that exists suggests that rural students face homelessness in roughly the same proportion as their urban counterparts — and with far less in the way of a support system."

The 1987 McKinney-Vento Act requires public schools to have a homeless liaison. Shapiro reports that iImperfect reporting from these liaisons often represents the only count of homeless students in rural counties. That data is aggregated by the Department of Education, which has a wider definition of homelessness than the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 2019, HUD counted 53,692 parents and children experiencing homelessness on a single night whereas the DOE counted 1.4 million children as homeless over the course of the school year. 

A national survey of McKinney-Vento liaisons conducted by School House Connection and the University of Michigan found that roughly 420,000 homeless students did not enroll in school during the first year of the pandemic. In response, the American Recovery Plan Act allocated $800 million to public school districts to help fund projects countering student homelessness.