There are more homeless infants and toddlers in California. What does this mean for early learning programs and schools?

Nearly 86,000 of California’s children ages 0 to 3 — more than 5% of the state’s infants and toddlers — are estimated to have experienced homelessness in 2023-24, according to new data analysis by SchoolHouse Connection and Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.

This is a 15% jump from about 74,000 young children in the year prior.
Only about 12,000 of those children in 2023-24 were enrolled in early learning programs. It is often in early learning programs where staff members are able to identify children experiencing homelessness and provide critical services for their development.
That just 14% of the youngest children experiencing homelessness are in these programs is potentially a troubling sign, experts say. It may indicate the state is not set up to accurately identify and reach most of these children.

“We just don’t have the full picture,” said Erin Patterson, a senior director at SchoolHouse Connection. “Data reporting infrastructure everywhere is lacking when it comes to infants and toddlers experiencing homelessness. There is no singular federal agency or program that captures everything.”

This is after years of sustained efforts by child homelessness experts that have led to heightened attention and short-term funding for students experiencing homelessness and the significant barriers K-12 schools face in identifying them. That focus has not always included the youngest Californians — infants and toddlers — in part because the state’s early learning system is far more fragmented.

This data from SchoolHouse Connection, an organization that advocates for homeless students, and Poverty Solutions, a University of Michigan initiative to prevent and alleviate poverty, was shared with EdSource ahead of the Sept. 23 release of their third annual report on the prevalence of homelessness among children 0 to 3 nationwide.

The nearly 86,000 homeless infants and toddlers were 5.19% of about 1.6 million children ages 0 to 3 in 2023-24. The number is an estimate, taken by looking at the percentage of first grade students who were identified as homeless during the 2023-24 year and applying it to the census age group percentages for children ages 0 to 3. 

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To get to the number of children accessing early childhood programs, the researchers looked at enrollment data from Early Head Start, home visiting programs and local educational agencies, which are required to identify younger children experiencing homelessness if they receive federal funding.

Some children might have been identified and are simply not reflected in the estimate, in part because data access is extremely limited and fragmented across multiple public agencies, say the researchers. 

Student homelessness across the K-12 system has risen 4% in the most recent data available. In years prior, it rose by up to 15%, according to state data. 

Child homelessness experts contend the rise in student homelessness reflects several factors, including California’s skyrocketing cost of living and the end of pandemic-era housing protections. 

At the same time, they point to short-term infusions of funding that have helped schools improve data collection systems and identification practices that allowed them to begin supporting more students. 

Homeless liaisons have attributed many of those gains to a 2021 historic federal allocation of $800 million for schools nationwide, of which California received $98.76 million. The one-time pandemic-era funding was dedicated entirely to identifying and supporting students experiencing homelessness. 

Child homelessness experts say data shows the funding worked: after what appeared as a significant dip in student homelessness rates at the peak of the pandemic, there was a sharp increase once schools reopened. They attribute this dramatic shift to the identification efforts by liaisons, who by then had the funding to hire staff to make phone calls to families they knew were struggling, distribute gas cards to help families get their children to school, pay for emergency temporary housing for evicted families and more.  

The closest California has come to matching those pandemic-era dollars is a one-time $116 million grant approved by the state Legislature this year. It will support identification efforts, though it remains unclear how the state will distribute the funding.

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“The state’s really going to have to be targeted about where this money goes, and I think a set-aside amount for identifying our youngest learners makes a ton of sense because that $116 million is not going to reach everybody,” said Joseph Bishop, executive director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools. 

But experts warn that without long-term funding to maintain those efforts in the TK-12 system, it will be even more difficult to build similar identification capacity in the early learning space to ensure children 0-3 can also be connected to services they need as their families find permanent housing. At the same time, they foresee that more children are likely to be in need in coming years.

“Given what we know about worsening economic conditions, we can certainly surmise that families with children, in particular, have been impacted by housing instability and homelessness,” said Patterson. “The tricky part, though, is pandemic funds are gone, and that means the capacity to identify has dwindled in many places, so we might be entering a phase where we see homelessness increasing, but identification is scaling back because of limited capacity, both in early childhood programs and among local educational agencies.”

Why counting homeless infants and toddlers is tough — and why it matters

Not only is the data from SchoolHouse Connection and Poverty Solutions likely an undercount, but there are other factors that affect the ability to identify students. The early childhood services system in the state is more fractured than K-12, say researchers. And, there may be limited knowledge of the responsibility of local education agencies to identify and support homeless students.

Knowledge of how the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act applies to early learning programs is also less widespread. The law requires local education agencies, such as school districts and certain preschools, to identify and support homeless students, including those younger than 4, which is the age for entering transitional kindergarten.

How does the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act help?

When McKinney-Vento was enacted decades ago, it established a broader definition of homelessness for students. For example, the law considers a student homeless if they are staying with relatives or in temporary housing due to economic hardship, loss of housing or a similar reason. 

The law can apply to preschools under specific circumstances, including when a program is funded by a local education agency, like a school district. This flowchart provides some detail into whether an early learning program might be a McKinney-Vento preschool. 

And if a homeless liaison identifies a homeless student with an infant or toddler sibling, the federal act requires them to refer the young child to early learning programs.

Even when McKinney-Vento does not directly apply, many early learning programs have adopted its broader definition of homelessness and require certain exceptions be made for homeless families. This could include allowing a child to begin attending the program while providing a grace period for families to produce enrollment documentation or giving priority enrollment to homeless families.

An apparent disconnect between early learning and the TK-12 school system

Child education experts have noted a disconnect between early learning programs and the TK-12 school system, where homeless liaisons are already stretched thin. 

“There’s a major flaw in not having those systems in place, and I think it can make the work of districts potentially more effective if we had earlier identification,” said Bishop of UCLA. “We don’t know or have the continuity across systems to know where kids are coming from, even sometimes within districts, let alone before TK.”

Bishop’s team published a report last week finding that nearly 300,000 homeless students were enrolled in California’s TK-12 public school system in the 2024-25 school year. This is an additional nearly 30,000 more students than what they estimated prior to the pandemic in 2018-19. 

While the report did not include children experiencing homelessness who were enrolled in early learning programs — Bishop said his team wanted to include them but faced challenges obtaining the data — it found that many of the highest counts of homeless students were in elementary school districts. 

Anticipating “where the need is coming from” via better identification and data collection could help districts better support their students. 

“We’re sometimes shocked when students are struggling academically” once they reach elementary school, said Bishop. “That’s the ripple effect of not having the early warning systems.”

This story was originally published by EdSource.