California just made one of the country’s most significant public investments in addressing homelessness, including $116 million in its new budget to help identify and support students experiencing homelessness. It’s the first state in our nation’s history to invest resources on this scale to support this especially vulnerable population.

The striking part is that the funding is earmarked not for housing, but for schools, and specifically for the detailed work of finding and assisting the students whose families have nowhere stable to live.

Why is this such a big deal? Investing in a school system’s ability to identify and support students experiencing homelessness is one of the most effective long-term strategies for preventing chronic homelessness, and California’s historic investment should become a model for the rest of the country.

That work is harder than it sounds, because students’ experiences of homelessness are rarely immediately visible. It sometimes includes sleeping outside or in a shelter. It may include short stays in a motel room paid for one week at a time, then a week on a relative’s couch, the next in a car.

So these children — those in dire need of attention and support — go overlooked and uncounted. Last school year, California districts identified 298,254 students experiencing homelessness. The real number is almost certainly higher because identification depends on the very capacity most districts have never been funded to build.

The cost of failing to count these children is measurable. Students in California who experience homelessness graduate at a 76% rate against an 88% rate for their housed peers. Homeless students change schools more often, miss more days and often fall behind, because that instability taxes everything. It’s hard to study for a test when you don’t know where you’ll sleep. It’s hard to trust a teacher who you may not see next month.

This is why identification, as bureaucratic as the word sounds, has the potential to transform lives. Schools are the one public institution that almost every child touches consistently, even during periods of profound housing instability. If we’re serious about preventing homelessness across generations, schools are where we have the greatest opportunity to find children early and intervene in their lives before crisis becomes chronic.

A student who is identified as homeless can enroll immediately — either in their “school of origin” or in the district where they are temporarily residing — without needing documents a displaced family may not have. She can get transportation to stay in the same school after a move, instead of starting over each time her address changes. She can be connected to meals, counseling, academic support and an adult, such as a social worker or educational liaison, whose job is to help understand what’s happening at home.

For years, California asked schools to do this pivotal work with little or no dedicated money. The only allocated funding came from the federal government for a brief period in 2021, as a response to the COVID pandemic. That one-time funding reached just 97 of California’s 1,015 districts. The remaining districts were left to find these students on goodwill and spare time. For too long, whether a child experiencing homelessness was identified and helped depended less on how much they were struggling than on whether their district happened to have someone with the time to notice.

This isn’t a California peculiarity. It’s roughly how every state runs, which is why California’s budget decision matters beyond its borders.

Two of the strongest predictors of who becomes homeless as an adult include whether a person finished high school and whether they experienced homelessness as a child. Someone who carries both risks is on one of the steepest paths to chronic homelessness.

We know that increasing funding and investing in identification and support for this segment of students works. When federal pandemic relief briefly funded identification services in 2021, chronic absenteeism among students experiencing homelessness fell and graduation rates rose. When funding expired, the gains began to erode. Smaller efforts point in the same direction. During the National Center for Youth Law’s pilot program, which placed dedicated liaisons inside Monterey Peninsula Unified School District from 2018-2025, nearly all of the supported seniors graduated and went on to college or vocational training.

That’s what $116 million can begin to provide resources for: the standing capacity to find these children and keep them in school. Students and families experiencing homelessness will still face challenges, like food instability, substandard (or unaffordable) housing options, and lack of medical care. But schools staffed with compassionate and qualified adults tasked with seeing students who too often go unseen, can catch a child’s situation early and bolster the type of support they need and may even prevent future experiences with homelessness.

For decades, our country has failed to adequately support children experiencing homelessness. California has put money behind a bold idea that other states should follow: Invest in our children in schools where we are able to reach them, and support their education to enable them to thrive long term.

____

Margaret Olmos is Senior Director of Education Resource Opportunity and Equity at the National Center for Youth Law.

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.