Identifying Doubled-Up Homelessness

• In Event: Bridging the Gap: Supporting Children Experiencing Homelessness Through Schools and Social Services

Abstract

The inclusion of students who live “doubled-up” (sharing the housing of others due to a loss of housing, economic hardship or another reason) as a federally recognized form of homelessness in the reauthorization of the McKinney-Vento Act in 2001 was a win for educational advocates (Pavlakis & Duffield, 2017; Edwards, 2020). This change made the largest group of students experiencing housing insecurity legible to educational policymakers and practitioners, and it afforded these students additional educational rights. Yet, fulfilling the promise of this expansive definition of homelessness requires fully identifying doubled-up students, and advocates and researchers believe that these students remain under-identified by their districts (Lenhoff et al. 2023).
This paper examines how New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) staff members understand what it means to be doubled-up and how they identify these students. We draw on two novel data sources. First, we collected survey data from 500 non-instructional school staff at K-12 NYCPS schools who self-identified as serving students experiencing homelessness. Second, we conducted focus groups with 26 school-level and 19 district-level staff members.
With these data, we show how the definition of “doubled-up” itself presents challenges as staff attempt to identify and serve these students. We argue that the definition gives staff substantial latitude in how they interpret the category. Although this flexibility may have benefits, it also places an additional burden on staff, who must interpret this category with limited time, resources, and an often unclear sense of what scenarios count as doubled-up homelessness. Moreover, staff are aware that their decisions impact who receives support in an environment of scarce resources. The vague and complex nature of the definition of “doubled-up” requires that staff work closely with families to determine their status. Assessing whether families are doubled-up requires open and regular communication with students and caregivers; staff may have to ask invasive questions about changes in families’ housing situations, as well as details about this housing and how they came to it. The labor-intensive work of identifying doubled-up students is made even more difficult by marginalized families’ distrust of schools. Staff report that families feel vulnerable due to factors such as immigration status or fears of child protective services and that families are often unaware of the benefits that sharing information about their housing status can garner.
Our findings suggest that although expansive definitions of homelessness can help more students in need access their educational rights, they can also introduce confusion and shift the burden of determining who should receive scarce resources onto staff and parents/caregivers. These processes have implications for inequality: students and families whose needs are read by staff as most urgent, as well as those who communicate regularly with staff, are most likely to be served; families whose needs are hidden may be left behind. For practitioners, our findings demonstrate the importance of fostering trust and communication between families and staff, and of communicating to families about their rights and the potential benefits of being identified as experiencing homelessness.

Authors

• Kathryn Bassett Hill, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Hope Harvey, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Zitsi Mirakhur, University of Kentucky
  Non-Presenting Co-Author