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‘We have to still be here’: With McKinney-Vento at risk, what will happen to students facing homelessness?

Beth Schafers, director of development and community engagement at Family Promise, said reductions to a federal program called McKinney-Vento would affect her organization's ability to serve families experiencing homelessness.
Selena Favela
/
The Journal
Beth Schafers, director of development and community engagement at Family Promise, said reductions to a federal program called McKinney-Vento would affect her organization's ability to serve families experiencing homelessness.

With President Trump signing an executive order to close the U.S. Department of Education, educators fear they’ll also lose the McKinney-Vento program that protects the educational rights of homeless students along with it.

With President Trump signing an executive order to close the U.S. Department of Education, educators fear they’ll also lose a longstanding program that protects the educational rights of homeless students along with it.

Overseeing the McKinney-Vento program has been a small part of the education department’s diverse responsibilities. Named for an act signed into law in 1987, the program gives students who are homeless equal access to public education as students who are not homeless.

Should the program go away, educators said it will become more difficult to keep track and live up to their obligation to educate homeless students, including those who have been impacted by natural disasters. Some districts will be able to adapt, some may not and some non-profits may see their burdens increase.

Denise Fuoco, federal programs manager at Wichita Public Schools, says that the district has just under 2,000 families enrolled in the McKinney-Vento program. The district receives around $60,000 in funding for the program from the less than $1 million the state gets from the US Government.

In eliminating the education department and laying off more than 1,000 employees, the Trump administration argued the move would improve educational outcomes by empowering parents, states and communities by culling an “unaccountable bureaucracy.” The effort is continuing, despite litigation aimed at stopping it.

While McKinney-Vento is not mentioned in the order, the program is not being spared from changes. According to the Brookings Institution, Trump’s budget for Fiscal Year 2026 plans to eliminate funding dedicated to the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program. According to an NPR article, the cuts made to these education programs, including the Education for Homeless Children and Youth, would decrease funding by 70%, from $6.5 billion to $2 billion.

The impact of McKinney-Vento reductions would extend beyond school districts. The loss would also affect Family Promise, a non-profit that serves families experiencing homelessness and often coordinates its efforts with Fuoco’s program.

“ If we can’t identify those kids who are struggling with homelessness and housing insecurity, we have no way of really connecting with them as much as we can with the McKinney-Vento program,” said Beth Schafers, Family Promise Director of Development and Community Engagement.

Helping organizations accurately identify homeless students who need services is a crucial offering of the program.

“It’s like, who are they? Where are they in our community?” said Dawn Epp, Family Promise of Greater Wichita Executive Director. “Family homelessness is such a hidden sector; they’re not literally on the streets. Some of them are, but that’s a smaller percentage. So, not being able to identify without that McKinney-Vento program within our schools, those children are going to be missed.”

Schafers added that without the program’s support, it would add another barrier to families who are already overwhelmed.

“They provide the transportation that’s critically needed to what they need to stay in their same school, but they also do a lot of other things,” Epp added. “They’re supporting families in other ways with uniforms and supplies … so it would be a detrimental effect on families.”

Dawn Epp, executive director of Family Promise.
Jacinda Hall
/
The Journal
Dawn Epp, executive director of Family Promise.

“If there’s not somebody in that position and who is not paying attention…we could only speculate on how bad that could get,” Schafers said. “That would bring some really huge gaps in kids actually getting support that they need to have a really stable education process, which we know is key to them being able to even escape the cycle of poverty and homelessness.”

Family Promise’s connection with the program has led to an example of how a family can exit homelessness.

“We had a mom that was living in a hotel. She was working and she was paying for the hotel,” Epp said. “But, of course, her whole paycheck was going to just keeping that bill paid. So they kept trying.”

The McKinney-Vento program referred the family to Family Promise, but the organization was not able to fit them into their flagship program because of the size of the family.

“We decided, ‘you know what? We’re going to help this family right from where they’re at,” Epp said. “We helped this mom and her teenage kids, and right now, she’s in housing. She didn’t have to go through the shelter system at all; she went straight from the hotel to housing.”

Epp also said that the mom was able to keep her employment and is engaged in the Family Promise life skills curriculum.

“It’s just been a great partnership, and that was based on that referral,” Epp said.

Possibility of continued support

Despite the concerns, there is still a lack of clarity about what all the changes mean. And school officials and the nonprofit may be able to find ways to offer the services homeless students need, despite them.

Speaking with Schafers weeks after the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed into law on July 4, she said that while nothing had changed yet, the organization is still trying to stay ahead on information about what could be coming next.

Fuoco said that in addition to McKinney-Vento and Family Promise, the district is fortunate to have partners who donate and provide a lot of the supplies and clothing items for unhoused students.

“A lot of our school supplies, food, packs, socks, underwear, coats, hats, gloves, a lot of those things that we give to kids are donated to us because the community really does step up and help us with that stuff,” Fuoco said.

Fuoco says that the School District is fortunate to have funding set aside for kids experiencing homelessness if something were to happen to the funding for McKinney-Vento.

“One of the requirements is that we have to set some funding aside in Title I, the program here at USD 259,” Fuoco said. “We’re fortunate for that, but I feel for some of my counterparts in some of the smaller districts in the state, because the grant is, a lot of times, what does keep them afloat.”

Where the McKinney-Vento department is at right now, Fuoco said that it’ll all come down to how the government decides to grant the funding to the states and how the states disperse that funding.

Fuoco said that if the district did not have the funding set aside from Title I, the department would have to do some rearranging.

“We’d really need to sit down and think about what services we are providing and what we’re gonna continue with,” Fuoco said. “Like, can we mix services together, or whether other departments of things…it would just take a little work to figure some things out.”

In order to help keep the program afloat, Fuoco says that the funding they get from the state goes toward paying the staff and the software system that helps the department track these students.

“It’s important to have the staff there to go out and be able to see the kids and work with the kids directly,” Fuoco said. “That’s been a blessing.”

Fuoco said that while a cut in funding would still hurt, the support would still be there.

“Overall, I would feel that, unless there was a major cut, I feel the district would probably continue to support us with some other kind of funding,” Fuoco said.

Fuoco also said that no matter what happens to the McKinney-Vento program, it is a federal law that will be in place.

“Every single school district in the entire country has to follow these rules,” Fuoco said. “Every single school district has to have a district homeless liaison, whether that’s the specific duty of that one person or it is an additional duty added on somebody’s job.”

Trickle-down effects

What local officials are sure of is the importance of providing the support homeless students need.

A statistic from Homeless Youth Connection shows that 87% of students who are already homeless drop out of school and don’t earn their diploma at all, and data from SchoolHouse Connection shows that kids without a high school diploma or a GED are 4.5 times more likely to experience homelessness later in life.

“The whole purpose of the McKinney-Vento Act was to ensure that kids stay in their safe school, regardless of where they’re sleeping,” Epp said. “If you take that away, they don’t have that stable home, they’re missing school, their likelihood of not graduating skyrockets.”

Schafers explained that generational poverty and homelessness will continue to perpetuate cycles that families will be stuck in and will continue to pull them away from resources that can help them.

”If you’re just not getting those kids the support that they need, they can’t navigate the educational system the way that they need to,” Schafers said.

Amid the uncertainty, Epp said impacts are trickling down to employers and landlords, and with the economy as a whole, and they fear that more families will become homeless.

“The uncertainty of what’s coming and what’s going to pass is making everyone kind of have a scarcity mindset,” Epp said. “So they’re raising rent and they’re not hiring, and those have that trickle-down effect to our families.”

Epp says that this is more of a commitment to stay strong as an organization.

”We have to still be here,” Epp said. “We’re needed more than ever. The worry would be just the pressure of making sure that we’re still viable, that we’re still sustainable because families are going to need us.”

Jacinda Hall is a recent Wichita State University graduate and the summer 2025 intern with the Wichita Journalism Collaborative

This article was provided through the Wichita Journalism Collaborative, a partnership of 10 media and community partners, including KMUW.

Jacinda Hall was a News Lab intern for KMUW. She works for Wichita’s arts and culture news source, The SHOUT; Wichita’s LGBTQ news source, OUT in Wichita, and as a writing tutor at Wichita State University’s Writing Center.