How does unstable housing affect student success? And how can schools identify students in unstable housing and partner with community organizations to support them?

On this episode of School’s In, hosts Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope welcome Amy Gerstein, executive director of Stanford’s John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities, to discuss how unstable housing affects educational outcomes and why it’s imperative that schools look to the larger community for help. Gerstein talks about several topics, including:

• The effects of unstable housing on students’ academic performance, attendance, and high school completion
• Underreporting of unstable housing by students and families due to stigma, fear of repercussions, and lack of awareness of resources and support 
• How different definitions of homelessness complicate identification and resource allocation
• What kinds of resources schools, districts, and community organizations should provide to have the most impact
• How the community school model can be effective in integrating services like healthcare and housing support
• Training to ensure school staff can identify and sensitively support at-risk youth.

Amy Gerstein is the executive director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities, which conducts research in partnership with school districts, nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies to advance equity for young people and the people around them. In her role, she provides strategic direction and works with community members across sectors. To learn more about her work, visit her profile.

School’s In is your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and enlightening conversations in education. 

Presented by the Graduate School of Education (GSE), School’s In is hosted by GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope. 

They invite you to join them as they navigate the complexities of post-pandemic education and discuss the latest research in teaching and learning.

Stanford GSE is a leader in education research and teaching, known for its commitment to pursuing equitable, accessible, and effective learning for all. 

To keep up with our research, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Threads.

I think there's a very large stigma associated with this. So who wants to declare that they're struggling in this way? No one.

Today we're diving into a topic that's often overlooked but has a huge impact on student success, how schools can support students facing unstable housing. These are challenges that go far beyond the classroom, but they have a huge effect on educational outcomes.

That's right. There are a lot of things that happen outside of school that impact students' performance in school, but this has to be one of the biggest, and schools can't handle this alone. It really takes a whole community effort.

That's right. And that's why we're really excited to bring in an expert who's leading the way on how schools and communities can work together to help these students in need. It's going to be a really important conversation. Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights in learning. Each episode, we dive into the latest trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners. I'm Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success. And I'm with my co-host, Dan Schwartz, Dean of Stanford GSE and Faculty Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

We brought a foremost expert who's going to explain why it is imperative for schools of education to take a look at communities.

Yes, I'm excited for this conversation. So we have Amy Gerstein here who is the Executive Director of Stanford's, John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. It's built right into the name.

Right into the School of Education.

Right into the School of Education, and the Gardner Center has a rich history of partnering with schools to understand the factors that inhibit growth in students and communities, and the center uses research-based insights to advance equitable opportunities for youth. So Amy, thank you so much for being on the show and welcome.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

We're excited to have you here. And obviously you are someone who thinks that schools of education should study communities, and I know that one of the things that you've been doing among many studies is a recent study on youth who are either unhoused or in unstable housing, and to me that's very much looking at the community, right? So tell us how that came about and a little bit about the study.

Sure. So I think it is imperative for schools of education to be doing research on communities. And I want to say just as a word of background, that my whole career prior to coming to the Gardner Center was really squarely focused in education, in schools, in districts, and with foundations who were working with schools and districts, maybe institutions of higher ed, but I had not, until I came to the Gardner Center, really turned my lens outward to, oh, where school situated and why does that matter?

And a really important part of the whole founding of the Gardner Center was this notion that our work needs to be multi-sector, that schools don't do it alone, they never have, and we need to be more strategic and intentional about breaking down silos and making connections all for the same goals of improving the lives of youth and trying to really address and equitable outcomes for youth. So for us, that's a big grounding of who we are. So the study that we conducted was a county-wide study in San Mateo County to really look at the educational outcomes of youth who were experiencing homelessness or unstable housing. And there isn't a lot known about that. We had done a similar study in San Francisco a few years prior, but in this case we were looking to understand what are the educational outcomes of students who are in unstable housing.

Amy, is there any model in which their educational outcomes are better than students who have housing?

No.

I hate to say duh, but it can't be good, can it?

It's not only not good, it's the worst. We're always studying youth who are in dependent care, foster youth, or youth who have had challenges with discipline or with their health or who are in need of special education services or who are multilingual learners. All of those groups of young people tend to perform poorly, have lower educational outcomes in that they are less likely to graduate from high school, they're less likely to be prepared to go to college, and less likely to have strong attendance and so on.

And then when we looked at this population of youth who are in unstable housing, it's really dramatically worse. So for example, students who are experiencing unstable housing, and it's important that I kind of come back and define that, but students who are in that kind of situation are four times as likely as students who are in stable housing, they are four times as likely not to complete high school. That's a lot. They're five times as likely, all through, yeah, it's a lot, and five times as likely, elementary, middle, and high school, they're five times as likely as those peers who are in stable housing to be chronically absent. They're five times as likely to have out of school suspensions. So there's sort of a number of ways we can cut the data and also just their educational outcomes in terms of achievement are also much lower.

In other studies we have at times measured some of the social and emotional development issues, so we know there's potentially higher resilience among this population of students, which I think is a really exciting outcome. We were not able to do that, we did that in San Francisco, we were not able to do that in San Mateo County, mostly because the school districts don't collect those data. In San Francisco, they were collecting those data, so we could look at that, and we did that with Jelena Oberdovich. So we were able to talk about a few positive assets.

So just one more word on the unstable housing or the instability. So one of the challenges facing this population and facing communities writ large are different definitions of homelessness. So for example, from the federal level, that means what they call literally homeless, maybe sleeping in a car or being on the streets. In education, we use a different definition. This is federal as well, and it's the McKinney-Vento definition which means anyone in essentially unstable housing. So if you are, and that is defined as families that are doubled up. So we know around here, that was a very, it's a prominent way, very common for families to address this really crazy region that we're in terms of housing. And so that means 2, 3, 4 families in one unit. So that's considered unstable housing. If you're in a garage. There are any number of arrangements that are considered unstable.

And why that's important is because then they have access to resources if it's declared. So if we know that about young people, we can lean in with some resources. And when we did this study, 100% of the school districts, which was all the districts in the county, said, "We'll happily share these data, and you should know 100% these are an under count." So they said, "However bad it looks to you, it's really worse because we know there are more students experiencing unstable housing than have declared it on our books."

Is that because of shame? What causes someone to not declare it, especially this is preventing them from getting resources?

So this was a mixed method study. And so one of the reasons that we did qualitative research was to dig into this question because when every district is reporting this, we need to understand this. So I think there's a very large stigma associated with this. So who wants to declare that they're struggling in this way? No one. And a lot of the families are mixed status. They may be undocumented or may have members of the family that are undocumented. That's what I mean by mixed status. They're afraid. They're afraid to tell an official person at a school, even though their schools are sensitive places. They are protected, but they're afraid of that. So they're also afraid of having any, what is considered a public charge, so if you get some public services, if you get help from a community-based organization, a nonprofit, will that count against families who are trying to become legal residents in the country?

And for many years it was not considered a public charge to get these kinds of resources, but it became that way in 2016, actually 2017, and so that actually was really bad for this population. It's also who's watching? So this is again about breaking down the boundaries and the silos. Often, we've learned that it was the people in the front office, the school secretary, who was the first person likely to identify, "I've seen this kid wear the same clothes for six days." And so some districts were really thoughtful and trained the front office staff to first know how to identify but also think about how to approach them and do it in a way that was respectful and so on.

And often those folks in the front office actually live in the community. They speak the language of people who are living in the community, so they're actually great people to be able to do that if they're trained appropriately. And so that was one of the areas we learned from school districts that they just weren't attending to it because in many ways it just hadn't occurred to them that they need to.

I love that the front office staff can play that role and can be a force for good.

So we're a school of education. We need to decide the scope of our work. So where do we do research? What do we hire faculty in? What do we offer programs in for students? So this is a tough problem because education shapes all of life. You're a parent, you're a kid, you're in school all the time, and then you're a parent, and your kids are in school all the time. So education's shaping all that. At the same time, everything around life shapes education like where you live. So what should be the scope of the research of a school of education? Should it just be K-12 classrooms? Should it be teacher unions? Should it be early childhood? Should it be workforce development? Should it be communities and families? Should the GSE do work with communities like research and intervention? Or should schools of education just say, "Look, you deal with schools?"

It's actually a really interesting question. I know it's a bit facetious because I think my answer is going to be yes. Okay. Well-

Sorry. Sorry. The general question is quite interesting. The question of whether we should do research on communities, given that we have one of the foremost community researchers with us, is a little facetious. Yes.

Okay. But no, I think that first of all, I think it's a really important question because as you said, schools don't happen in a vacuum, and yet there's this phrase, we don't want to boil the ocean. Does that make sense to you?

You like that phrase?

This is why I like the phrase. I never heard the phrase before until, I don't know, about 15 years ago. And it just makes sense because you can't do everything. I feel like because of the way we know how schools operate and how people learn and that education happens over the course of a lifetime, it puts a really tough burden on schools of education and also kind of thinking like, well, what makes us different then from a school of social work who would also allegedly study communities and organizations? And where do those lines stop? And is it okay to blur it?

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah. And at some point you have to make a decision.

So Amy, quick question. I'm a school, and I discover my students in unstable housing. What kind of resources do I provide?

So that's a terrific question. So first of all, this is again about the importance of breaking down silos. It's critical for the schools and the district to have partnerships with community-based organizations that work with families like this. So that's one of the first things that'll happen is trying to connect the family with an organization like Life Moves that works to help folks in this kind of situation get into stable and what they consider permanent housing, which means not a shelter. So they really work at that. So immediately hooking them up with a community-based organization.

It also means making sure that transportation is not an issue. So oftentimes when a family is experiencing unstable housing that might go move in with a cousin who lives in a different town who lives in a different school district. Well, when the family is having so much instability, it really helps to keep the child in the same school district, same school. So assuring the child that that's going to happen and giving them support with transportation. Sometimes that literally means paying for taxis, it means bus passes, it means lots of different things, but a lot of the resources were around transportation.

It also means making sure they have the basics. Like do they need a school uniform? Do they need a backpack? Do they need notebooks? What kind of equipment do they need? And getting it to them with very little fanfare. And I think also making sure there are all these ways in which making sure they're on free and reduced, probably free lunch and other free meals, but also making sure that these little things that come up, field trips, yearbooks, that these young people are on a list that is known to just a few people because of the privacy issues, but that list makes sure that all these young people get what they like everyone else, they get a yearbook, they get tickets to the prom, they get to go on the field trip, and it's handled with respect. I think that one of the areas that we learned is that you can imagine schools and districts vary in their ability to carry out sharing of those resources.

You also mentioned earlier the front office would see the kid come to school in the same clothes. And I, a friend of mine, ran a study where Whirlpool donated washers and dryers to the school site, and it was done very respectfully that it was open to these families to have laundry facilities. It's like all of those things, you don't even think about, tickets to the prom and laundry. And I think it's all the more reason why we want these people to admit the situation so that they can get the resources. Right, Amy?

Right. That's exactly right. And one of the challenges with the front office staff in terms of training is making sure that they know a simple attestation is enough.

What does that mean? Walk us through that.

In other words, if a family is experiencing these kinds of challenges, all they have to do is let anyone in the building know, any school personnel like the school secretary and say, "We lost our apartment." And they don't need to bring an eviction notice. They don't need to bring proof of anything. But until and unless those school personnel are trained, they might ask for more. And we have heard that. That's one of the reasons there's an under count, or there's just the fear that they will have to provide proof, but all they have to do is say, "We lost our housing." That's it. And sign something saying this happened.

So I can see why training the school personnel is so important. All the resources are waiting. You have some beliefs that make it so you're not getting access to that. School personnel could help a lot.

They can help a lot. And often it's also the people who are providing the free lunch that are monitoring those lists. Those are the people who in some ways are really all knowing. They're the ones who know, who's experiencing unstable housing, who might be in dependent care, at foster youth, and there was real variability as to how much the people in those roles were actually communicating openly about this. We got to make sure this family is taken care of.

So it's a little tangential, but I would imagine the paraprofessionals in classrooms basically aids from the community know a lot if the kid says, "I'm homeless," is that enough to trigger or it has to come from the parent?

Oh, good question, Dan.

It is actually. That's considered a disclosure to a teacher or an aid, and that is also enough to start some of the resources flowing, and it has to be done really sensitively. I think the example of the washers and dryers is actually terrific. There's a local school district that they have 50%, 50, of their students are considered an unstable housing, and so the school district installed washers and dryers in every school.

Amazing.

There's also, again, a community-based organization that has what they call dignity wagons, that they're like trailers that pull up, and you can take a shower.

Wow. I mean, that's huge. That's amazing. I can imagine there'd be some issues though about who's going to the dignity? You have to be careful there too.

Right. Again, that's another community-based organization, and they do a terrific job of figuring out how to do that and how to, again, be respectful, give people clean clothing, just try to help them and make sure that no stigma, no shame is being communicated, and that's really hard and really profound if we can do that.

Why aren't these things being offered just as part of the deal, right? In communities where you know that there's going to be large populations in need, why do we have to fight for all this? What's an answer here, Amy, if you have one?

Well, I have some insights from, I think some really strong practices that a few districts were doing. In a few districts, if a student was ever considered in unstable housing, they kept that flag on the student's file forever because they said, okay, so maybe Amy's family is struggling and needs a lift this year, this academic year. Chances are, even if Amy's family gets into stable housing, it's probably not all that stable. The chances are they're still, they may be scraping by, so we'll keep a flag that says this is a family that might need a little extra. So I think that's a very good action that school districts can take. There's no need to, once you're identified, let's just keep you identified as someone in need of extra support.

Where does the school district get the money to do this?

So there are federal and state resources. I will say I thought that the resources were meager, not in terms of dollars, but that these families needed more. And it was really hard on the schools and districts to be the providers. So where they had strong partnerships with community organizations, it was much better for the family.

A show a while back on, I forget what the actual phrase is, but community schools where all of the resources are kind of there or the community's all working together with them. Is that a potential, it's like how much can the school take on is a question?

Say more about the model, Amy.

So the community schools are an area that we've been doing research for over 20 years, and it's getting increasing attention. The state just passed a bill that is providing some funding for statewide community schools, and what it is it's a model, and it's a strategy that is intended to help remove barriers to learning. That's the way I like to talk about it. So if you're hungry, if you're unhoused, if you have concerns about your immigration status, if you need a job, if you need to learn English, all of these kinds of services can be, and issues, can be identified and addressed by the school, by the school having formal partnerships with community-based organizations that provide it.

So in these community schools, there's generally a full-time person who could be called a community school manager or community school coordinator whose job is to work with teachers and with the community-based organizations to be able to say, "Teachers, you might pick this up in your classroom. You might have a student that divulges something. You might notice that this is a child that keeps falling asleep in class. Maybe they're hungry, maybe they're sick. Maybe there's something going on. You need to let the community school manager know so that they can identify appropriate resources." Those are some of the best models. And I can say Redwood City as a school district has addressed that district-wide. Oakland has been trying to do that district-wide as well. It's great for making sure that the whole child and the whole family is being helped. There are mental health services. Sometimes there are school clinics, sometimes there are dental services, the dignity wagons, all of that. And there's one person for sure at the school site that is handling all this discreetly.

And that just makes so much sense to me, and it doesn't seem like it's that hard. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but gosh.

Well, it's sort of surprising that the main problem is a lack of information, that parents don't know where to go, and the school can't tell.

Or are afraid.

Or they're resistant, and the school doesn't quite know who. And maybe without a community organization, the school doesn't have a triage model for helping them find the right resource.

I could also just see as someone who knows something, maybe in the lunchroom or whatever, there's all these privacy rules, so it's not surprising to me that the person at this end of the school doesn't talk to the person at this end of the school because of the privacy rules. And there's privacy rules about everything. I mean, what you can and can't divulge.

There are, and HIPAA also comes into play, which is a privacy role that's related to which for sure show up around mental health or even physical health because a lot of these community schools have clinics, or they have vans that visit and do confidential medical care for both students and sometimes families. What I would say about the sharing of information is a lot of these privacy laws are poorly understood, so people tend to err on the side of keeping things private, and they may not always have to. One of the colleagues we work with the most is a child psychiatrist in the medical school here at Stanford, and he always calls it the Great Wall of HIPAA, and he thinks it's just overly worried about, that we can honor privacy, and we can make sure people are getting the help they need.

Especially when the well-being of the child is at stake, you would think that that would be, but I get it, it's hard. But it does bring us back to the very beginning of this conversation, which is why schools of education should absolutely have centers like the Gardner Center that studies communities, because you can't learn, as you said. This is the worst thing that can happen, and we know there's so many other things that affect kids in learning. It's sad that we need to do these kinds of studies, that these issues even exist at the extent that they do. And yet, I'm so glad that you and your team are doing this and doing this really, really important work, Amy, so thank you. Thank you for being here, but also thank you for the work.

I agree. Thank you, Amy. It's been a great conversation and very informative in an area where I think a lot of people don't have a chance to see what's happening and how we can do things outside of school or in school that support these children.

For sure. I really think we're just starting to scratch the surface of how much these partnerships can actually help. Dan, I'm curious, do you think schools are ready to navigate the creation of these triage models?

I think it's going to be a challenge. Schools need to stay up to date on the laws and work within the system to support the students more effectively, but it is going to be finding that balance between respecting privacy and getting students the help they need.

And that's where the research really comes in, giving schools the knowledge they need to make smarter and more informed decisions. So thank you to Amy once again for sharing all these insights, and thank all of you for joining us on this episode of School's In. Remember to subscribe to our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

And I'm Dan Schwartz.