The week had barely begun, and already Cynthia Lucero-Chavez, the McKinney-Vento liaison for Stafford County Public Schools, was attempting to navigate the families she works with through a new crisis.

 

“We just understood today that one of our hotels on [U.S.] 17 is not allowing microwaves anymore,” Lucero-Chavez told the Advance on a recent Tuesday. “So, the families living there are now without any capacity to prepare any sort of nutritious meal for their children. How will they manage to prepare food without the ability to cook? That’s today’s crisis.”

But in Lucero-Chavez’s world, there is a crisis every day. The day before, Lucero-Chavez said, she’d used donated funds that she luckily had on hand to help a family that became suddenly homeless and didn’t even have a car to sleep in.

“The children were going to be coming off the bus to find the family sitting on the curb with their gear,” Lucero-Chavez said.

Across the Fredericksburg region, McKinney-Vento coordinators for local school divisions say families have more needs—and more complex needs—than ever before.

Right now, there are children attending Spotsylvania County Public Schools who are living out of their family car— “a new situation” this year, said Michelle Swisher, the division’s McKinney-Vento liaison.

Last year was the first year that Jennifer Bunn noticed this occurring in Fredericksburg City Schools.

In Stafford, Lucero-Chavez said she is finding that she has to prioritize between a homeless family with a car and one that is literally without shelter of any kind.

“Now what I see happening, that is alarming to me, is that we have a family living in a shed,” she said. “We have families living in closets or living in very inadequate commercial spaces.”

“This is probably the most dire I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve been doing this for eight years,” Lucero-Chavez continued.

As of mid-November, there were 757 identified homeless students in Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, and Stafford County schools—385 in Spotsylvania, 214 in Stafford, and 158 in Fredericksburg.

The numbers fluctuate every day, but they are either in line with or poised to surpass last year’s numbers.

“We ended last year with 630, and we’re right about where we were at this point last year, maybe five or six more kids,” Swisher said.

In Fredericksburg, Bunn said, “We ended last year with 190, for comparison.”

“So, we’re only 30 off from that” at not even halfway through the school year, she said.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act

The work Lucero-Chavez, Bunn, and Swisher do as McKinney-Vento liaisons is mandated by the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act—a federal law, included in the Every Student Succeeds Act, that ensures that homeless children “receive equal access to the same free, appropriate public education, including a public preschool education, as other children and youths,” according to a U.S. Department of Education fact sheet.

The law guarantees transportation to the students’ home school in the case of sudden displacement and ensures that there are no barriers to enrollment or to accessing academic and extracurricular activities.

The law requires state education departments to designate a statewide coordinator of McKinney-Vento services, including the administration of grant funding as authorized by the law. The statewide coordinator in Virginia is Project Hope, which is housed at the College of William and Mary.

The federal law also mandates that each local school division identify a liaison for homeless students. The liaison—according to a fact sheet published by SchoolHouse Connection, a national organization that advocates for homeless children and youth—is responsible for ensuring transportation; referring families to health, dental, mental health, housing, substance abuse, and other appropriate services; participating in statewide professional development; and providing professional development on homeless students to school building staff.

Students are eligible for services under McKinney-Vento if they “lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” according to the law. This definition includes “those who are sharing the housing of others due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason; staying in motels, trailer parks, or campgrounds due to the lack of an adequate alternative; staying in shelters or transitional housing; or sleeping in cars, parks, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, or similar settings.”

This definition is broader than the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of homelessness, which does not include people who are “doubled up,” or sharing someone else’s house.

The HUD definition is used to determine eligibility for services through local Continuums of Care, which can include housing assistance. But families that are “doubled up” are not eligible for this assistance.

Emergency shelter options

That leaves emergency shelters as the main option for McKinney-Vento families, the liaisons said—but emergency shelter options for Fredericksburg-area families with children are limited.

Loisann’s Hope House is the region’s only family homeless shelter. The Brisben Center is another emergency shelter but can only accommodate up to eight families.

“Even for the families who truly want and need to escape the subsistence lifestyle of hotels, overcrowded homes, or hiding out of sight, there is not enough capacity or funding so designated to serving them,” Brisben Center executive director David Cooper told attendees at the annual Brisben Breakfast on November 7.

Swisher, who has been at her job for 16 years, said she is noticing that families stay eligible for McKinney-Vento services for longer periods of time. She said more families are living in hotels now than previously, because they have been homeless for so long that doubling up with another family became unsustainable.

“If you were to think about it, that is attributable to the cost of housing,” she said. “Having to have that first month and last month’s rent—how do you come up with almost $4,000?”

Families that do stay doubled up are now bouncing frequently from one house to another, Swisher said.

“There’s a lot more movement, you know, ‘I can stay here for a couple of nights, and then I have to go here,’” she said.

In Stafford, the number of families who are doubled up and the number living in hotels or motels is about equal, where previously there were always more living doubled up than in hotels, Lucero-Chavez said. Currently, 95 of the 214 identified students are doubled up.

Lucero-Chavez said she is seeing families with evictions on their records from when the COVID-19 emergency rental assistance programs ended. The eviction’s effect on their credit combined with the cost of living makes it extremely difficult to obtain another lease, so they are bouncing around from motels to friends’ houses and even to sheds and closets.

“There have been so many changes of address for our families this year,” Lucero-Chavez said. “They are moving so much.”

Bunn delivered the keynote address at the Brisben Breakfast and stressed “what a relief it is for families when they do get in shelter.”

“It’s really hard for families when they are living in the motel or hotel situations to be able to save up any money,” she said. “It does seem that the shelter placements tend to be the best bridge to permanent housing.”

“For sure, more shelter space would be helpful,” Bunn continued. “The shelters are amazing and doing what they can, but the need is surpassing [what they can do.]”