The Midwest Newsroom and its partners found that homeless students in the Midwest eligible for enrollment, transportation, and academic support in most rural school districts are not getting these services because the districts are undercounting students without stable housing and not applying for available funds.

For students experiencing homelessness, the start of a new academic year can be fraught with anxiety. Unstable housing, food insecurity and lack of transportation to and from school are just a few of the challenges they and their families may face.

Federal law requires school districts to meet these challenges. But, as The Midwest Newsroom’s investigative series Unhoused/Unschooled found, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska school districts are undercounting students who are homeless, which means thousands are not getting the support they need. In many cases, school districts don’t even apply for available grants.

“The challenge is almost circular,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit advocacy organization for homeless education. “You don’t see the students, so you don’t think they’re there. Then you don’t set aside enough funding to have the capacity to go out and find the students.”

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act requires public school districts to enroll students experiencing homelessness, even when proof of residency is lacking. The law gives K-12 students the right to remain at the school they attended when they had permanent housing. It also obligates school districts to provide them with free transportation and academic support.

In 2022, the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity analyzed data and found some 300,000 students across the country are likely homeless and not receiving benefits they are legally entitled to receive.

Through data analysis, The Midwest Newsroom found that, in large rural swaths of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska, hundreds of school districts report they don’t enroll any homeless students, even though other measures of poverty indicate that’s likely not true.

Read the full article about homeless students in the Midwest by Kavahn Mansouri and Daniel Wheaton at KCUR.