Giving Compass' Take:

• John Bridgeland and Tricia Raikes outline how schools can support the 1.3 million homeless students in the United States. 

• How can philanthropy reinforce successful programs that are helping homeless students? Where are new programs needed to support homeless students? 

• Learn more about youth homelessness at the Raikes Foundation's magazine. 

There are more than 1.3 million students in our country’s public school system with no safe place to call home. These young people pursue their education while contending with the anxiety of homelessness and grinding poverty.

Our homeless students hold as much promise, and are as much a part of this country’s future, as every other student. And while that’s easy to say, the reality is we haven’t taken the steps to ensure homeless students get the support they need to succeed in school.

Students who experience homelessness are 87 percent more likely than their stably-housed peers to drop out of school—the highest dropout rates in the country. In turn, young people without a high school diploma or GED are 4.5 times more likely to experience homelessness, perpetuating the cycle of poverty and despair.

So what’s to be done? In an otherwise chaotic time of homelessness, schools can be pillars of stability. Students spend a significant portion of their day in school and, as a result, schools can help identify homeless students, provide a safe and consistent place to study, and connect them to caring adults and community resources. Encouragingly, under the federal McKinney-Vento law, all districts and states are required to have liaisons to provide such supports.

In the Tukwila School District in Washington State, nearly 12 percent of students have been identified as homeless. Tukwila embraced the challenge by training educators and school staff to identify early warning signs of homelessness, like low attendance and falling grades, and to provide transportation, counseling, tutoring, housing and other services they need to keep students on track.

Read the full article about helping homeless students by John Bridgeland and Tricia Raikes at PBS.