EdSource
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.
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.
“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.”
