Research has long shown that strong family engagement at schools can improve student achievement and help combat chronic absence, but for the more than 1.5 million students experiencing homelessness, it’s even more crucial to helping children reach graduation.
On Sept. 30, SchoolHouse Connection hosted a webinar — “Showing Up, Staying Connected: Family Engagement Strategies to Support Student Attendance” — offering practical strategies for building relationships with families and reducing attendance barriers.
The number of students that were identified as experiencing homelessness during the 2023–24 school year was the highest number on record and represented a 28.5 percent increase over just two years, said Anasofia Trelles, senior manager of K-12 at SchoolHouse Connection.
She emphasized the need to reframe what homelessness looks like to avoid misconceptions that allow children to fall through the cracks.
“Often, there is an assumption that homelessness only happens in specific communities, or it only looks a particular way. And so, we do our best to remind folks that homelessness can happen to anyone at any time,” Trelles explained. “As we’re having conversations around how to tackle chronic absence in a districtwide or schoolwide approach, it’s really important to think about our students experiencing homelessness … and be mindful of what strategies we have specifically to support those students.”
Common factors that lead to homeless youth experiencing high rates of chronic absenteeism include the obvious, like housing and food insecurity, as well as a lack of meaningful relationships with adults or peers in school that lead to disengagement. However, Trelles offered another common reason these students miss numerous school days, particularly older youth.
In her experience working with shelter-based attendance teams in New York, “our high school students who were just struggling to be able to stay in school, they didn’t see school as the means to be able to get out of their situation,” Trelles said. “They wanted to work. They wanted to make income, which absolutely made sense.”
That’s one situation in which family engagement becomes critical. She described co-creating individualized plans that work for each family and student so that their needs can be met while also prioritizing education.
“In those conversations, we would follow up with the students and with their parents and talk about what alternatives could we come to together,” Trelles said. “Maybe that was an alternative placement. Maybe it was a technical and career placement. There were other ways that we could try to incorporate what that student actually cared about to get them to that finish line. And we needed buy-in from the parent to support us there, too. And so, that co-creation is really the piece that we want to focus on, especially for our students experiencing homelessness.”
During the webinar, additional recommendations, resources and more were provided.
Best practices related to establishing and improving collaboration and engagement with families and students experiencing homelessness include:
- Building trust and maintaining consistent communication by referring families to community resources or providing school devices to ensure regular communication by phone, text or email even when families don’t request help, and following up on needs and sharing updates, even if solutions are still in progress.
- Meeting families where they are by conducting home visits or meeting in shelters, motels, libraries, community centers or parks; maintaining a presence in shelter or motel offices to increase accessibility; and providing confidential, welcoming spaces for conversations.
- Removing barriers to participation through offering transportation (e.g. rideshares, bus passes, gas cards) and childcare through partnerships with student groups or community volunteers, providing flexible meeting options — such as virtual, phone or in-person — at varied times, and ensuring translation and interpretation services are consistently available.
- Supporting attendance through engagement by replacing generic attendance letters with personalized, supportive communication; tracking attendance with sensitivity via use of identifiers in student information systems that help to ensure that absences related to homelessness are not counted against students; and training staff to raise awareness of housing situations during school events and check-ins.
Additional best practices detailed include providing clear information to students and families on their rights and resources, collaborating with community partners, empowering families as decisionmakers and effectively leveraging funding and resources.
