How Can We Support Unaccompanied Migrant Youth? Recognition, Reunification, and Resources

Nikevia Thomas:

Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for joining us. We’re getting started soon. Thank you for joining the third session for our Are ALL the Children Well? 2.0 series for family engagement and homeless education. The session is titled, How can we support unaccompanied migrant youth? Recognition, Reunification and Resources. As you join us, would you please share in the chat your name, where you are from, and what agency that you are representing? My name is Nikevia Thomas. I’m a Senior Specialist at MAEC. Hello, Sarah from Oregon. Nice to meet you. Dr. Thar, nice to meet you, from Montana, wow.

We have someone from… Oh, I see a couple of people from Ohio, Montana, Boston, nice to meet you all. Thank you for joining us today. Oh, Maine, welcome. Thank you for joining our session today. Ohio. A lot of Ohio. Wow, there’s a lot of people from Ohio today. Welcome, thank you for coming. All right. I invite you all to continue to share in the chat your name, what agency or entity you are representing, and the location. I invite you to continue to do that. In the interests of time and to make sure that you have the most… Maximize the time today, we will move forward.

So we are MAEC. We are champions of innovation, collaboration, and equity. Let’s see. To get us started, here are some webinar etiquette that I want to share with you all. Please use the chat box, as you have been doing, to engage with other participants. We recommend that you click on the chat icon on the bottom or top toolbar of your screen. We will not be using the raise hand function, so please don’t use that for the purposes of our webinar. There will be a Q and A towards the end of the webinar today, and if you have questions for our panelists, you can put them in the Q and A box and we will get to them, okay? Closed caption is automatically enabled on the screen. To turn it off, you can use the webinar controls at the bottom of your Zoom window, and select live caption or closed caption button, and then select hide subtitles. If you want to view them again, repeat step two and select show subtitle.

It takes many hands behind the scenes to put on a webinar, and I would like to introduce you to our webinar support team today. We have Allegra, who is a Communications Associate at MAEC, and Allegra is working social media and the post webinar supports alert where we’ll be live tweeting nuggets of today’s conversation. And we have Rita. Rita is a Senior Educational Equity Specialist and the CAFE Program Director. Rita is supporting us with the chat box. Then there’s me. My name is Nikevia, I’m a Senior Specialist and I also serve as the Virtual Event Planner, and today I’m also the Operations and Tech support.

Now I would like to introduce you and put you in great hands of Kailanya and Jessica. Kailanya is a Senior Educational Equity Specialist for CEE, and then Jessica is the Senior Family Engagement specialist for CAFE, and I leave you in their great care.

Kailanya Brailey:

Thank you, Nikevia. Hello again everyone. We are so excited to have you all join us today. Again, our webinar topic is how can we support unaccompanied migrant youth? Recognition Reunification and Resources, and we’re so excited to get started. Here’s our agenda for today. We will have our welcome and introduction, which you have experienced. The unique needs of unaccompanied children. We will then have the overview of unaccompanied migrant youth. We will spotlight Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, and then we’ll move into our Q and A and our closing, so really excited for the learning that we will be able to participate in with our presenters for today.

I would like to give you some background information about who we are and what we do, which will help us understand why we strive to connect and support all communities. MAEC was founded in 1992 as an education nonprofit, dedicated to increasing access to a high quality education for culturally diverse, linguistically and economically diverse learners. MAEC envisions a day when all students have equitable opportunities to learn and achieve at high levels. Our mission is to promote excellence and equity in education, to achieve social justice. We believe that all students deserve to feel welcomed, respected, and safe at school, and provided with the opportunities to thrive. We can go to the next slide.

This webinar is brought to you through both CEE and CAFE. CEE, which is our Center for Education Equity, and Region I Equity Assistance Center, operates in 15 states and territories through support from the Department of Education. And CAFE, our Collaborative Action for Family Engagement is the statewide family engagement center for Pennsylvania and Maryland. If you look at that image, you will see that our Center for Education Equity actually serves states from Maine down to Kentucky, and we also include Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. I’ll now pass it on to my wonderful co-facilitator, Jessica Webster.

Jessica Webster:

Thank you, Kailanya. In the 2023 fiscal year, there were nearly 50,000 unaccompanied migrant youth who were released to sponsors while they were waiting their immigration proceedings, and that data comes from the Migration Policy Institute. With that in mind, we wanted to make sure that we stick to the following objectives for the day. The first is to learn to identify signs that a youth is unaccompanied, to explore effective strategies and approaches for reunification, and to identify supportive organizations and resources that are available for unaccompanied youth. We know that while you may be interested in more specific data around migrant youth, we want to make sure that you understand that we will not be sharing information that could be used as identifying information, which would include specific stats by region or location around demographics. This is really in an attempt to safeguard these students and their families as we move forward. So we wanted to make sure that you all understood that as we move through these presentations today, and the rationale behind that, for students. Next slide please.

In this whole… Oh, I’m sorry, I’m skipping ahead here. We are joined today by three presenters who are going to help us meet our objectives for the day. The first is Karen Rice, and she comes to us from Schoolhouse Connection. Then we are so privileged to have some amazing school district staff who are going to share with us the programming that they do to support students, they’re from Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, Kathi Sheffel and Kerri Hutchinson. Thank you all for joining us today.

Each time that we have started this series, we’ve been committed to sharing voices of those who have experienced homelessness so that you’re able to hear firsthand from their lived experiences. In our first webinar, you may remember that we had a panel of young adults who had experienced homelessness themselves, to situate us in their experiences. In our second panel we saw a video from Christina, who was a young adult in New York City, who was aged out of the foster care system. And we got to hear firsthand about her experiences navigating homelessness, and the shelter situation in New York City.

Today we have a very brief video from practitioners in Maryland who are describing the experiences of their students that they serve, and they talk a little bit about how their district developed a toolkit to support migrant youth. Our challenge to you today is that we ask that as we navigate through our presenters and our question and answer period, that you take some time to consider and reflect upon the contributions that you, as staff who support students, can add to your own toolkits throughout the presentation today. With that, I’ll turn it over to the video.

Speaker 1:

The unaccompanied minors, they come to us with a big word that’s a very painful word to hear, is trauma. They come to us with trauma usually, and they’re reuniting with family that they haven’t seen for a long time, or not reuniting with anyone at all, so very alone. One of my colleagues created this beautiful program, a toolkit, of course, with all the staff around her, so many names to share. But I just want to say that if you can get a group of colleagues around you, really think about these kids, these undocumented or unaccompanied minors, really understand what they’re going through and how that plays out in school and in the classroom, or whether or not they come to school at all, it’s important to gather all those minds around, critically think about it, and help others learn what you learn.

That’s exactly what they did in Montgomery County, and they created a toolkit for working with students, unaccompanied minors. And I would stretch that to say students who are surviving trauma. You can replicate that in other jurisdictions. You can find out what it is, what are the mental health issues? What are the social emotional issues that are impacting your students? And create the same kind of toolkit. What is this district going to do to support its teachers who are supporting these students? Because the teachers otherwise don’t have that community around them, and when you’re dealing with such difficult issues, you need that community around you.

Kailanya Brailey:

Thank you for that video and for the setup, Jessica. Again we just want to remind you all of the very powerful opportunity that you have, to consider the specific needs of the students and the families that you serve, and consider those contributions that you can be making to your own toolkit as we go through our learning today. Which brings us to our first presenter, who is Karen Rice, the senior program manager of Education Initiatives at Schoolhouse Connections.

Karen has a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and education from the University of Northwestern – St. Paul, previously Northwestern College, and a master’s degree in education and professional counseling from Concordia University in Wisconsin. Karen brings 10 years of experience at the school district level, serving in a variety of roles including district translator and interpreter, transitional education coordinator, bilingual family outreach coordinator, and bilingual family liaison. During these years, Karen focused on family engagement and professional development to serve both students experiencing homelessness, and the Latinx community.

Prior to joining Schoolhouse Connection, Karen spent five years at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction as a state coordinator for the education of homeless children and youth, and a coordinator of the migrant education program. Together with colleagues, Karen supported district and regional staff by providing extensive training and capacity building opportunities. In 2021, Karen joined the Schoolhouse Connection team as the senior program manager of Education Initiatives. Karen focuses on supporting K-12 local liaisons and state coordinators by providing professional development on the McKinney-Vento Act, best practices for supporting students experiencing homelessness, and implementing American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth funds. Karen, we’re excited to have you with us today and we’ll turn it over to you.

Karen Rice:

Thank you so much. It is wonderful to be here with you all and I will share my slides with you, just give me one quick second to get that set up. All right. Well thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I always like to begin by just letting you know a little bit about Schoolhouse Connection. As Kailanya mentioned, I’m the senior program manager of Education Initiatives at Schoolhouse Connection, and Schoolhouse really does a variety of different things and we work across a lot of different spaces, so I like to offer that as an opportunity to get to know us. We work from early education through the K-12 space and into higher education, providing support to school districts for implementing McKinney-Vento, and serving children and youth experiencing homelessness. We also do state and federal policy advocacy.

The highlight of the work that we do at Schoolhouse Connection is really our scholarship program. I think that’s especially important to mention today because our scholarship application is open and undocumented youth are eligible to apply for it, so I wanted to make sure to mention that. Our scholarship program is more than just a financial scholarship. We provide case management through the transition from high school into higher education, whatever that looks like, and then beyond, so it’s really a unique opportunity to connect students not only to a financial scholarship, but also to that case management support. So if you’re working with youth who are experiencing homelessness or who are undocumented and are migrant youth, please share information about our scholarship. Now is the time to apply and we would love to have as many applicants as we can. Just wanted to mention that before I jump right in.

Before I begin, I want to just do some level setting and give you the vocabulary that we use at Schoolhouse Connection to talk about our students. Throughout the media you’re going to hear a lot of different terms with migrant youth, immigrant youth and what that means, so I like to just start out that, when I talk about our population of students who are immigrants, these are the vocabulary words that I’m going to use.

I did include English Learner on here, and I want to say that we certainly understand that not all immigrant or migrant students are English Learners, but I think it’s important to know that many are, and many come from different countries where their families and their communities speak other languages. So I like to just leave that in, just for some kind of general information. But when we talk about immigrant and migrant students at Schoolhouse, what we talk about is an immigrant is a person who moves to a country, with plans to stay permanently. A migrant student is someone who is moving due to seasonal agricultural work, they or their family are engaged in that agricultural work. Those are the vocabulary words that you’re going to hear me use today when I talk about our students. You can go on to the next slide please.

Just to level set a little bit more, when we talk about the students that we have coming into our school districts right now, we are hearing a lot about refugees coming from other countries, and asylees, and I like to just provide some context to that because a lot of times those terms are used interchangeably. And they’re not, they mean different things, so I like to just present that information to you. I apologize for the amount of text on this slide, but I wanted you to have access to these definitions.

The biggest difference between a refugee and an asylee is where they are when they’re going through that initial immigration process. A refugee is not in the U.S. when they begin that immigration process, and an asylee is in the U.S. when they begin that process, so just a little bit of a note to distinguish those two terms. The other two terms that I’d like to distinguish is when we talk about unaccompanied minors, and this is a little bit tricky because we use these terms, unaccompanied minor for both purposes, so today in my presentation I’m going to really clarify the difference for you. There is the unaccompanied minor who is coming here to the U.S., that is not with a parent or legal guardian, and we also have an unaccompanied youth or what we call an unaccompanied youth under McKinney-Vento. I’m going to distinguish the difference and then give you some information about that overlap, because many of our unaccompanied minors who are coming to the U.S., are also unaccompanied homeless youth.

But before we begin, I want to talk about the educational rights of undocumented children and youth, because I think this is really important for us to know what our students have access to. Children and youth who are living in the U.S. have a right to enroll and attend in school regardless of their immigration status. Schools that have LEA or district administered preschool programs cannot ask about a student or family’s immigration status. When a student comes in to enroll, that’s not a question that we want to include. We don’t want to discourage our students from coming to school.

So because schools can’t ask this information, schools aren’t keeping records or keeping data on which of their students are immigrant or migrant students, for immigration purposes. Now migrant education is a different thing that I’m not going to talk about today, but when we enroll our students and we identify them under McKinney-Vento or as experiencing homelessness, we’re not keeping track of that immigration data. Families may volunteer that. Students may volunteer that information, but we can’t ask, and we don’t want to discourage our students from attending school by putting into them a fear of sharing that, or of needing to share that to be participating in school. Just wanted to clarify that point.

In addition, besides not being able to ask about an immigration status, schools and district administered preschool programs can’t require social security numbers. They can’t ask for immigration paperwork or citizenship paperwork. In addition, they can’t contact ICE, which is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or other law enforcement officials about a student or family’s immigration status. That information is really protected and we want to make sure that we’re protecting our students so that they have the right to participate fully in their education. On that same note, we want to say that they have the right to participate fully in school, regardless of that status, but to participate in all aspects of their education, so we want to work hard to remove those barriers in order for that to happen.

For all McKinney-Vento eligible students, regardless of their immigration status, we’re going to address those barriers through a number of things. Now, I said before that we can’t ask about immigration status or citizenship status, but there may be times when those are factors to a student’s participation in school, and so it’s important to know what those are. Particularly with instances of career and technical education programs, they may require a social security number or employment authorization for a student to participate.

I worked with a student once who was going through a CNA class that we offered in our school district, and when it got time for her to do her clinical hours, the program and the licensing part of that program required her to provide a social security number or a work authorization number. We did our best to protect her from needing to share that information, and we found a workaround for her to do that. But we were able to then take that learning experience of having the student that had to go through some of these additional obstacles and not be able to complete that program, and we learned from that so we could be better prepared, moving forward with our students. So just know that there may be times when that’s an important part of a class, and that conversation does need to be had so we’re not putting our students at risk. Or we’re not sending them into an environment to do something like those clinical hours, that they won’t actually be able to get credit for.

I do also want to mention briefly that sometimes there are opportunities for students to do some traveling through their classes, and right now what we are hearing is that foreign travel as part of a class for an undocumented student is not advised. It may affect their ability to reenter the U.S., it’s not guaranteed. So something else to keep in mind as you’re working with students, that they may not be able to access all of the opportunities. But some of those unique circumstances aside, we want to make sure that our students have the opportunity to participate fully in school.

I mentioned that we were going to talk about the intersection between our unaccompanied youth who are coming to the U.S. without their parent or a legal guardian, and our unaccompanied homeless youth under McKinney-Vento. So I want to just provide a few minutes of context of McKinney-Vento as a refresher of what that covers. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act covers children and youth who lack fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence. We know that the majority of our students are in that doubled up situation or that sharing housing situation, and they do lack a fixed, regular and adequate situation because they are under someone else’s roof.

So sharing the housing of others, again due to that loss of housing, economic hardship or similar reason, those are our doubled up families, and that really makes up about 77% roughly, of our students that are identified under McKinney-Vento, according to our 2020-2021 data. In addition, students who are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks or campgrounds due to a lack of adequate accommodations also are students who are eligible under McKinney-Vento, and they make up approximately 8% of our student population. Unfortunately, the data that we have is a little bit old at this point. It’s the 2020-2021 school year data, so hopefully we’ll be able to update this information soon with some more recent data that we have.

The McKinney-Vento Act also covers children who are living in emergency or transitional shelters, and when we think about our students coming to the U.S., we know that a large number of students are in these situations as well. Roughly, nationally, this makes up about 11% of our students. The data that I’m supplying you with today is our total population of students who are identified under McKinney-Vento, not specific to our immigrant or migrant students. In addition, McKinney-Vento covers students who are living in a place that’s not actually designed to be an accommodation, that might be in their car or in a train station, or bus station, abandoned housing, substandard housing, things like that, that are not really made for a person to be living in. It’s not that adequate space for a child or youth to have their needs met.

When we think about substandard, that really means a lot of different things, and I know that that can spark a lot of conversations, but we really want to think through utilities, infestations, mold, what other dangers exist that’s not meeting the needs of students? Of course this includes unaccompanied youth, and unaccompanied immigrant and migrant students who are living in these situations.

I want to just give an example. Recently I had an opportunity to talk with someone in Massachusetts who shared that they have a very large population of immigrant families coming into their community, and one of the things that’s happening right now is that they’re sharing closet space. So families are renting out literal closets within different buildings and within different residence, and they stay there for… They get 12 hours when they rent that space, and that’s where they’re sleeping and that’s where they’re taking care of things. Then when their 12 hours is up, another family is moving into that closet space. Obviously that’s not an adequate, it’s not fixed, it’s not regular, it’s not a safe space for those children and youth to be. And so we want to make sure that when we hear about situations like that, we’re thinking through are we connecting with these students and families in order to identify them under McKinney-Vento?

I want to start talking about unaccompanied youth, and so I’m going to start out by sharing a little bit about unaccompanied youth under McKinney-Vento. Again, we’re thinking about a child or youth without fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence, and also a youth who is not under the physical custody of a parent or legal guardian. We know that youth leave home for a number of reasons, and particularly our students who are coming to the U.S., they may be fleeing violence, unsafe living situations, poverty. It’s just a number of different things that’s bringing our students to this country, that are finding themselves in these situations. We know that a lot of these students are coming alone to the U.S. without a parent or guardian. They might be living with a sponsor, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

But I want to specify and clarify that an unaccompanied youth under McKinney-Vento can be a child or youth of any age. Typically when we think about unaccompanied youth, what pops into our mind first is those older, high school age youth that might choose to leave home or that might be coming to the U.S. by themselves. But an unaccompanied youth can be a child or youth of any age, and so we want to make sure that any time we’re meeting a student, if a student comes in to register for school and they’re with an aunt or a family friend, or whoever that is, that that child is also being identified as an unaccompanied youth under McKinney-Vento, when eligible.

Thinking about unaccompanied youth as an immigration status, this is a situation of course, when a child or youth comes to the United States alone and they’re living with friends, relatives, sponsors, whoever that may be. We know that some youth stay with sponsors or are released to sponsors, but sponsors don’t have any kind of legal guardianship or any kind of legal requirement as far as that guardianship piece goes. In addition, I do want to say that living with a sponsor does not automatically mean that a child or youth is in a fixed, regular or adequate nighttime residence. In fact, sometimes youth find themselves in situations that are actually really not that safe.

We know that trafficking is a risk that some of our students face when they’re in these situations, and that the sponsors have really agreed for that child or youth to live there, but it’s not a permanent situation. Some may get kicked out, some may have certain conditions of being able to stay there, like contributing financially to the household, or paying back immigration expenses, or other financial obligations that really make it difficult to engage in school.

In addition, we know that many youth who come to the U.S., who are undocumented or who are in these immigration situations, may not see school as a first priority, especially if they have some of those financial obligations to meet. So it’s really important to be connecting with our students and making sure that we’re talking with them about their options and their supports that are available to school, but also accommodating these unique circumstances that they have, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in another slide.

Just want to share, again, I have mentioned this a number of times, but a visual for you. We talk about unaccompanied youth under McKinney-Vento and as an immigration status, and there really is a significant overlap between those two populations. We know that so many of our unaccompanied youth who are coming to the U.S. as immigrant students or as migrant students, also are eligible under McKinney-Vento, so it’s critical that our programs are working together to provide support for students.

I want to talk a little bit more about that support and how we can best support students. Immediate enrollment is required under McKinney-Vento, for unaccompanied youth, so unlike most laws, McKinney-Vento really gives that right directly to the youth, above the right of their parent or guardian. So if you have an unaccompanied youth who has just arrived to the U.S. and comes to enroll themself in school, that youth does have the right to enroll. They can enroll in school, make decisions, participate in activities. They can choose between a school of origin or their school of residence, which is their local neighborhood school. And of course, depending on age, it’s always a good idea to think through, is there someone who’s willing to take responsibility for the student in terms of maybe attendance or as a caregiver, or an emergency contact, something like that?

But I worked with a student once who came and enrolled in school and listed his older brother as his emergency contact, and he was very hesitant to share any information about his situation. We didn’t know initially that he was in a doubled up situation, living with his brother. We knew that he was unaccompanied from an immigration perspective because he shared that at the time of enrollment, but was hesitant to share his housing information. And eventually, once we connected a little bit more, the student shared with me that he was bouncing around between his brother’s apartments and staying in different places every night. So we were able to identify him under McKinney-Vento, and really begin to provide those supports to him.

But one thing I will say is that it’s so important that, if you don’t have a connection with that student or they don’t necessarily feel comfortable sharing that information with you, it’s okay to call in back up. That maybe we need to think through are their community resources, or are there others in our school district or even our state coordinator that might be able to connect differently with that student? One of the things that I would say is language is always important. If you don’t have the language skills to communicate with that student in their native language, it’s always a good idea to bring in someone else who can help do that and make sure that they understand what their rights are under McKinney-Vento. In some cases, a sponsor may be an appropriate caregiver or emergency contact for a student, and in some cases not, so it’s really important to listen to what the student shares about their situation, and who they would want to have listed as that emergency contact.

Some strategies and best practices that I like to share when we talk about really supporting our immigrant and migrant youth. First and foremost, identifying students. It is absolutely critical to identify our students who come in and who are unaccompanied youth under McKinney-Vento, because we can begin supporting them immediately. This might look really different in a number of different places, but posting and publishing information in multiple languages is going to be really key to make sure that children and youth, who are coming in from other countries, who are speakers of other languages, know what their rights are under McKinney-Vento, and they know what to do if they are in these living situations.

It’s important to consider what the best way to talk about homelessness is in other languages, or what that concept means. I’ve talked with a number of school districts recently who have had large numbers of families coming from the Ukraine, and they’ve talked about the terminology that they’re using and the words that they’re saying. And how it really has mattered for them to think through it in a really culturally sensitive way in how they talk about it, so that families do feel comfortable sharing what their situations are. But above all, it’s really important to build trust and to be discreet, and let our families know that when they come in to enroll in school and we’re identifying them under McKinney-Vento, that that information is confidential, and that they can trust school to provide that support because it’s confidential.

We want to make sure that we’re also collaborating across programs to provide wraparound services. One of the best examples that I have ever heard is there’s a school district that is partnering with a local community organization who serves and supports immigrant families in the community. And families have been hesitant to connect to school, but because the district has partnered with this community organization who is very well known, the organization has really been able to encourage families to connect with school. They’ve been able to be a part of that and a part of those conversations, and really bridge that gap between families and the school district. So the district has been able to serve the families and to identify them under McKinney-Vento due to the partnership of this organization, who coincidentally also helps provide transportation services to the students, once they’re identified under McKinney-Vento.

Also, collaborating with other programs within the school district is going to be really important. There is a district in Tennessee that they have a really close collaborative relationship with their Title III department, so working with their English learners. And the offices are so closely connected that 30% of the students that they identify under McKinney-Vento come from referrals from their Title III or their English learner staff team. So staff know and understand McKinney-Vento and they can refer families right away to the McKinney-Vento homeless liaison in the district, and they’re really able to quickly bridge that gap. The referral process goes the other way as well, that when the liaison is meeting with new families, she’s able to quickly get that information to the right people, to make sure that the students also have the language support that they need.

We want to make sure that we’re removing as many barriers as we can. As I mentioned, sometimes there are unique circumstances that put up barriers for students to participate, but in general, we want to make sure that we’re breaking down those barriers as much as we can. One example I like to give is one of the school districts that I have worked with recently in Ohio. They were noticing a challenge with a number of their families as they were coming in to enroll, particularly that their students and families were speaking Spanish as a second language, and speaking an indigenous language as their first language. So handing them an enrollment form and information about school was just not an effective way to get students and families enrolled.

So they specifically hired a bilingual enrollment office staff person who could sit down with families, and who could really go through the enrollment process verbally with families so that they were able to really understand and access the information, in order to make sure that that enrollment process wasn’t a barrier. They do provide translated copies of things, but they also wanted to make sure that language wasn’t a barrier and also literacy wasn’t a barrier, and they weren’t relying on families to have to do their own translating and things.

We also know that many of our students, as was mentioned in the video, come to us with significant trauma and significant mental health concerns because of the trauma that they’ve either experienced in the country that they left, or the trauma that they’ve experienced during their immigration journey. So one really great example of a way to meet this need, there is a school district in Minnesota that had a recent, pretty significant influx of students, of unaccompanied youth under McKinney-Vento as well as unaccompanied youth from an immigration perspective. And they had this particular group of students that they were finding they were really struggling to engage in class.

So through a process that they had, they hired a bilingual bicultural therapist from the community, who comes into their school building and meets regularly with a group of students, providing small group counseling to really process and navigate that immigration trauma that they experienced. They’ve had great success with these students who are then able to go back to class, and to engage better and differently in class because they’ve had this mental health support from someone who understands and can talk with them in their native language. So when we’re thinking about building relationships with community partners, we want to really think about some of those unique needs as well. Maybe that’s mental health support or other kinds of wraparound services that our community partners can come into our schools, or we can refer to, to provide support to students.

All right, a couple of other points. Again, relationships are absolutely critical. We want to make sure that our families know that we are not about reporting to Child Protective Services if there’s not a safety concern, or we’re not about reporting to immigration and customs enforcement, excuse me. We want our families to feel safe and comfortable, and connected to us in our schools. We want to provide an environment that’s really welcoming to them and that really celebrates the contributions that they’re bringing to school.

One of my students that I worked with once shared with me that he had the opportunity to work with a teacher who said, “We want to celebrate and learn with you and acknowledge the journey that you’ve come on with your language skills, and coming to the U.S., and the culture that you bring with you.” And this teacher really worked hard to find different ways to celebrate the student’s strengths and this student’s background. And it was a really successful situation for this student who really felt welcomed into this teacher’s classroom and into the school environment.

So looking for ways to do that is a really great idea to support our students. Again, building trust is going to be really important. I know I keep saying that, but that’s the key to all of this. We want to make sure that our children and youth really know that we’re here to support them and that they can come to us and they can share with us, and we can do what we need to do to help them to be successful.

Finally, I want to talk briefly about accommodating unique circumstances of students. Like I said before, we know that many of our unaccompanied youth who are staying with sponsors or who are staying with other family members, may have some financial obligations that they have to meet. They may need to work to pay back costs from their immigration experience. They may have financial obligations to contribute to the household, different obligations like that, and that can really affect their engagement in school.

There is a district in Ohio that has really acknowledged and worked with their students to figure out a way to both honor what those obligations are, as well as connect them with school so that they’re also engaged in their education. They work with students to arrange their schedules in such a way that if the student commits to regular attendance, they can end their school day early to go to work. So they set up a contract with students and an agreement between the student, that they’re going to work towards attendance and consistent regular attendance in their classes, so that then they have this opportunity to leave school a little bit early to go to work and to meet those financial obligations, so that that’s not getting in the way of their engagement in school. I think any way that we can really think through what do our students need? How can we help them? How can we accommodate those circumstances? That’s really going to give us an opportunity to serve our students in the best way possible.

That is what I’ve got for you right now. I can see there are a couple of questions in the chat, but we’ll save those to the end. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share this information with you. I look forward to hearing what’s next and hearing the questions that you have, so thank you very much.

Jessica Webster:

Wow, thank you so much, Karen. That was wonderful information to get us started, and really leads us into our next presenters. We are so honored to have Kathi Sheffel and Kerri Hutchinson here with us from Fairfax County. Kathi is the homeless liaison for the Fairfax County Public Schools, and has been in this role for 23 years. She received her undergraduate training at the University of Pacific in California, and was trained as a behaviorist. She received her M.A. in educational counseling from the University of San Francisco, and has been involved with child advocacy work for over 30 years. Kathi has coordinated the homeless education program at Fairfax County Public Schools for the last 18 years, providing educational support services to homeless families.

The Homeless Office seeks to coordinate community and school resources in a collaborative effort to ensure success for homeless children and families. Fairfax County Public Schools is the 10th largest school district in the United States, and approximately 2,900 homeless students are enrolled in the school system each year. Kathi has presented extensive trainings locally and regionally and nationally, on issues that involve homeless children and youth, and she is also the recipient of the 2007 National Outstanding Administrator Award from NAEHCY, which is the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.

Kerri is the school social worker at Fairfax County Public Schools, and has been for over 20 years. She received her bachelor of social work degree from James Madison University and then went on to earn her master’s of social work degree from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Ms. Hutchins worked for 11 years as a social worker at the Fairfax County Department of Family Services, and for the past 12 years she’s worked at Fairfax County Public Schools as a school social worker.

Ladies, we’re so excited to have you here today to talk about your programs. Before we begin I just wanted to mention to everyone that when Kailanya and Nikevia and I were putting together this series, we were speaking to a couple of experts, and Fairfax County came up as a best practice school that we ought to look at, and so we’re so privileged to have you here with us. With that, I’ll turn it over to you all.

Kathi Sheffel:

Thank you, thanks for having us. We are a very large school system, we have about 180,000 students and 222 schools, so just to put that in perspective. I can give you an overview of one part of our program, which has to do with our unaccompanied homeless youth. We also have a comprehensive homeless education program for our homeless students that are not unaccompanied, but are with their parents or legal guardians. But for our unaccompanied students, part of our goal is to make sure that we’re providing training to any school staff member that may come in contact with a student that may be unaccompanied. So we annually train all of our school front office staff, we train our social workers, we have family liaisons in all of our schools, our attendance officers and specialists, our school registrars and our school administrators.

We also extend our training to our community because sometimes we get referrals about a student that might be unaccompanied, from someone out in the community. It could just be a parent calling, saying that their child has a friend that they think doesn’t have somewhere to stay, or that they’d heard about a kid that was in the community somewhere, that looks like they need some help. So we make sure that our community members are aware of who might be unaccompanied and then how to get ahold of us.

Our training really emphasizes who are unaccompanied homeless youth, and in our office we refer to these students as HUY, with the H being first, a homeless, unaccompanied youth. There are other conditions that children may not be with their parent or guardian, but they have to meet the homeless definition first, and then of course, we go ahead and complete our homeless assessment. We make sure that everyone knows these students can go to school. As mentioned in the previous presentation, anybody living in our community, any student, any child can go to school. They may not have the documents they need, they may not have a legal parent or guardian, they may not have proof of residency, but we make sure that it is known that every student can go to school, every child. And then we help with immediate enrollment and then support once they get to school.

How do we do school enrollment and placement? In our district, if you are a newcomer and English is not your primary language, you go to one of our three central registration sites. When you get there, any documents that you do have, you can present. ESOL testing is done. Academic advising is done. And even with missing documents, there are folks there that speak many, many, many languages, that can help our newcomers communicate well with the school registrars there, to figure out where should they be going? What was their previous educational life like? So that we can get them in the right school. If the housing is unstable during that conversation, then our office is consulted. We flag the student as a McKinney-Vento student. We make sure that the school knows that that is an approved homeless registration, even if documents are missing, we remind everyone what we don’t need to know about.

We don’t need a lot more information than what we’ve already had, the student can immediately start school, and then we provide school supplies and transportation so that the kids can get immediately to school. This is usually done within a day or two. Once the student is enrolled, we’ve identified a school, this is when we get into the needs assessment, and we have found our students have many, many needs. Not all students have all these needs, but all these needs are things that we see on a regular basis. School supplies for every student, lots of unmet medical and dental needs with our unaccompanied students, so we try to be sure that we can get them connected to a medical home with our community partners. If they have mental health needs, which a lot of our students do if they’ve come through a traumatic experience to get here, we make sure that they have access to that.

Clothing, shoes, childcare, which has been recently one of our bigger challenges, is to help our parenting young people get childcare so they can go to school, so we’ve been working with our childcare partners to get that done. Any housing program that we have for any other youth, we make sure our unaccompanied youth can get their applications in and can be assessed for those. If they need legal aid, we have legal aid partners we use. Definitely technology, we make sure they have computers and we try very hard to get phones for them or help them get phones. And then transportation, not just to school but transportation around so that they can get to work, they can get back and forth to other places, the grocery store and all of that, so we work with them on the transportation access.

Part of our community collaboration has to do with making sure that we are connecting our students to trauma-informed services. We have agencies in our community that specialize in this, with helping them with reunification, helping them deal with trauma, gang intervention and prevention, any human trafficking concerns. Helping the students get employed, helping them with substance abuse treatment and counseling if they need that, connecting them with prenatal care and parenting. We have a lot of newcomers that have babies, so we make sure that they get what they need for themselves and for their babies. And that might be early Head Start, or medical, or just having some resource parents to help them as they’re parenting their little ones. The housing, any other basic needs, we have a lot of community partners that we work with to make sure that they are shored up a little bit with their housing stability.

Then the last thing I put on here was consultation with Child Protective Services, and I know it was mentioned in the previous presentation. If we need help from them, we consider them to be a partner in resources. So if we have a 14 or 15 year old that is in need of medical care and doesn’t have a parent or guardian to sign for that care, or in need of mental health supports and we can’t get that to them for various reasons, Child Protective Services will assist us with some of these cases, and they’ve become a partner to us in those extreme cases of need.

We have a staff member on our team that works with all of our unaccompanied youth, newcomers and not newcomers, on their higher education, post high school planning. We arrange tutoring for them to make sure that they have access to tutors during their coursework if they need it. We do college and career planning, make sure we’re looking at financial aid, looking at scholarship opportunities, helping them with the timelines and the deadlines and all the things that go along with applying to college. We make sure they’re getting academic advising, not just at the school level, but from our office as well, with regular check-ins from our staff just to see how they’re doing.

We usually do it by text, that seems to be the best way to get ahold of our students, just to see how they’re doing. And they let us know when they’re working on something and they’ve hit a barrier, or if they just need some more help, or if they don’t understand something. And then we collaborate back with our school teams, the counseling centers, the social workers, psychologists, whoever at the school is working with the student, to make sure that everything is being wrapped around the student so they’re getting everything that they need.

We do encourage, of course, any natural support with family, family friends. Reunification is a big effort for a lot of our students, so we make sure that we collaborate with our family liaisons to connect our students with reunification programs. We have a number of those in our community for kids, so if they are in the reunification process or they’re interested in becoming reunified with a family member, we make sure they’re connected to do that. Any of their friends or sometimes they have mentors in the community, sometimes they have a faith-based agency that’s helping them, we make sure that we connect with them as well, let them know about our office. If they need any help from us or if we can do anything to support them, we make sure that that goes on.

We’ve realized through our work, through the many years, that every one of our kids has a different, unique experience. Their needs are different, and we try very hard to listen, build a relationship with them, find out what their needs are, and help them get to where they want to be.

Kailanya Brailey:

We really just want to take a moment to give a huge thank you to our presenters, such a wealth of information shared with us today. We appreciate you providing us with proper context and terminology, and all of these sources of support for unaccompanied migrant youth. Karen, of course, always a pleasure. Kerri and Kathi, you just confirmed all the great things we heard about your work in Fairfax County Public Schools, so thank you again. I guess now we’ll move into the Q and A portion of the webinar. If you have a question and you have not done so yet, please be sure to type it in the Q and A box at this time and we’ll make sure we make every effort to get to it. Jessica, perhaps we’ll just popcorn back and forth?

Jessica Webster:

Yeah, sounds good. How about we start, I think this is a great question from Yesenia. If a youth enters the United States as an unaccompanied minor, but makes it into the foster care system, are they then ineligible for McKinney-Vento?

Kathi Sheffel:

I think we might be able to answer this, I’m not sure. Karen, you might have to pipe in here. Sometimes a student starts out as McKinney-Vento and ends up going into foster care. In Virginia there are two separate laws that protect those two groups of children. I don’t think there’s anything that McKinney-Vento would give the student that they wouldn’t be able to access in the foster care system, if that makes sense?

Jessica Webster:

But they would move into the foster care realm, not stay under McKinney-Vento protections?

Kathi Sheffel:

For that one school year, their McKinney-Vento protection would last the entire year, so they might be flagged for both in that one given year. And then the next school year, if they are in the care of the Department of Family Services, they would be a foster care student, not a homeless student. But for that one year when all that’s going on, I think they would probably be flagged as both in our system.

Kerri Hutchins:

Correct.

Jessica Webster:

Wonderful, thank you for that.

Karen Rice:

I can chime in just from my own perspective. I am joining you all from Wisconsin, and so my background is working in Wisconsin. When we had students who would be in situations where they were identified under McKinney-Vento and they would move into foster care, our foster care point of contact at that point would take over for that student. Then all of the provisions, like Kathi mentioned, there are all of the provisions under the SF foster care provisions that took over to support that student. And many of them were very similar, and of course, we continued to work together to support that student. So there might be different things that come up in different states with how exactly that works, so check, if you have questions, with your state coordinator as well, to see if there’s anything that’s state-specific in that process.

Jessica Webster:

Excellent, thank you for that.

Kailanya Brailey:

All right. I’ll ask the next. Just a point of clarity, if an unaccompanied youth runs to an aunt or a grandparent and they have a roof over their heads, some adequate, some not, are they still McKinney-Vento eligible?

Kathi Sheffel:

I would say yes. What do you say, Karen?

Karen Rice:

I would also say yes, and I think, Kathi, you might agree with me that we’re not so concerned about the reasons why a youth leaves home, because we may never know what the actual reason is. So unless there’s some sort of preplanned agreement of this student is going to live here with this person for a specific amount of time, they’ve got their own, adequate space in that living situation, unless there’s some kind of an arrangement like that, the student would be eligible under McKinney-Vento. I will say that those living arrangements, when it’s that clear, planned out, intentional arrangement, that’s very rare. It doesn’t happen a lot. So when in doubt, I would say err on the side of identifying that student, because we want to make sure… We know that student left home for some reason, whether we ever find out that exact reason or not, it doesn’t matter. That student felt like they couldn’t be in that home for safety or other reasons, and so we want to make sure we’re providing as much support as we can.

Kathi Sheffel:

And I want to add, we get this question regularly, and just a reminder that being McKinney-Vento eligible is allowing them to go to school. So I think everybody agrees that it’s a good thing for the child to continue school, not have a disruption in their education while all this is going on with the family situation. So just a reminder that the eligibility is to go to school.

Jessica Webster:

Just to expand on that a little bit, is there a timeframe on that? So in other words, if a child moves in with an aunt or uncle, it’s an informal arrangement, there’s no guardianship paperwork or power for education to make educational decisions with that person, but they’ve been there for two years versus six months, three years. Is there a time when that becomes a stable situation and they would no longer be eligible for McKinney-Vento? Or is time not really the factor there?

Kathi Sheffel:

Well, for our office, we see every case on a case by case basis, and every situation is different. So when we’re talking to the student and talking to the people that are hosting the student, we can get a lot of information that will lend us to make a decision whether it looks stable forever, or if it looks temporary. And most of the time it is temporary. It may look stable to an outsider looking in, because they’re not involved in the ins and outs of what’s going on in the family. But most of the time we find that there is a very temporary nature to the arrangement. But it’s case by case.

Jessica Webster:

Okay, thank you for that.

Kathi Sheffel:

Karen, do you have more on that?

Karen Rice:

I completely agree, and I would say the other thing that we’re seeing just from a national perspective, is students in situations where they’re experiencing homelessness, homelessness is lasting so much longer than it ever used to for a number of different reasons. Lack of housing, of course, which is a whole ‘nother can of worms that we don’t want to open today, but lack of housing or just lack of opportunity to work backwards and go back to families, and to work out some of those issues. It’s just, homelessness is so much more long-term scale than it used to be. So even from when I was a liaison seven or eight years ago, we’re seeing families now that are just in chronic situations where they’re not able to go back or they’re not able to gain a stable living situation. So we don’t want to look at the length of time, we really want to look at, like Kathi said, that case by case, what’s going on in that particular student’s situation at that particular moment?

Jessica Webster:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for that.

Kailanya Brailey:

I’m going through, because several of our questions relate to if students would remain eligible for McKinney-Vento, and I feel like you all clarified that. Participants, if you feel like your McKinney-Vento specific question was not answered through that exchange, please just resubmit it and we’ll be sure to get back to that. But we do have a question about how could one or an organization, or a district go about funding sources, looking at providing phones or phone distribution, or different resources of that matter? Could you speak to that?

Kathi Sheffel:

It’s a constant search for funding and for resources. It never ends, but there always seems to be resources. We’re always looking for new programs or nonprofits, or volunteers, or government programs that will help with any of these things, including phones. We’ve been able to find various sources to get phones to our students. Not every student has a phone, but a lot of our students do have phones, and we continue to search for that, ongoing. But there is a challenge with funding for these basic needs for our kids, always, and we rely heavily on the generosity of our community to help out our students, and they do a wonderful job with that.

Karen Rice:

I would say in the short term, using ARP-HCY funds is a great way to meet those needs. For those not familiar, that’s the American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth funds that were part of the Covid relief package of funds that came from the federal government, but specifically earmarked to support our students experiencing homelessness. We have roughly 14 months left to use those funds before we will no longer have those available, and phones are a great way to do that. There’s so many different things that are allowed under these funds, much more flexible than other funding sources. So if you’re not familiar with the funds or what your LEA has with those funds, please, please check into that because in the short term, that’s a really great way to meet some of those immediate needs.

Jessica Webster:

Thank you for that. This is a great question. If you have a family that’s serving as a host family to an unaccompanied youth, are the host able to do things like sign the student out from school? Is there any check-in with parents on that? What do those permissions look like, I guess? What privileges do they have as a host?

Kerri Hutchins:

Yes, in Fairfax we do allow the sponsor or the host family to sign students in and out of school, and to act as parent.

Karen Rice:

I would say anytime you can use some caregiver form or documentation to have that on record. When I was a liaison, we had, I call it a packet, but it was really a front page, one front and back, that we had caregivers sign and we had students sign too, that was acknowledging that the student felt comfortable with that person to be their caregiver. Then also the caregiver was signing that as saying that they were taking on that educational guardianship of the student, whether that was attendance or signing field trip forms, or serving as an emergency contact if the student got hurt. So we made sure that we had that just in some kinda written form and in a file, so that we knew that the caregiver had accepted that responsibility. But also with our unaccompanied youth, that they had felt okay with that person having access to that information.

Kathi Sheffel:

There are some limitations to it, I just want to add that we run into. I mean there are some things that it’s very helpful to have the grownup you’re living with, verify things for you, that you were home sick or something like that. But there’s some things they can’t do and that has to do with signing for medical care and some educational parts. So it’s very helpful, and we do have lots of our caregivers that are willing to help the student, and we have many that don’t have that.

Jessica Webster:

Thank you for that.

Kailanya Brailey:

We do have a new question. It is a McKinney-Vento related question. We have a participant asking, does McKinney-Vento cover emancipated minors?

Kerri Hutchins:

Sometimes.

Kathi Sheffel:

I think we’ve had one in 20 years. We don’t have a lot of emancipated minors in Virginia, so I don’t think I can answer that very well, but maybe Karen can.

Karen Rice:

I don’t have a lot of experience working with emancipated minors either, but I would say, as per usual with McKinney-Vento, we want to really look at that living situation. We have students who are 18 and seniors in high school, are still eligible under McKinney-Vento, regardless of the fact that they’re adult age, if they’re still students. So even if we have an emancipated minor, I would say it’s important to look at does that student have fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence? So really to be looking at the housing situation more than that guardianship. I mean that would come into play with things like attendance and being able to sign themselves out of school, or signing forms, or things like that. But above all, looking at the living situation.

Jessica Webster:

A question for clarification. This attendee said, from what I understand, McKinney-Vento makes it clear that students experiencing homelessness must be enrolled even if they are missing documentation such as proof of residency. But does this apply to other English learner or immigrant populations who may not be experiencing homelessness?

Kathi Sheffel:

I don’t think that we can answer that. If they’re not homeless, they wouldn’t fall under our program. I think districts have all kinds of ways to register students in school, and at least in Fairfax, we have a really very wonderful central registration office that helps families who need to enroll their children.

Jessica Webster:

I think-

Karen Rice:

[inaudible].

Jessica Webster:

Oh, go ahead, Karen.

Karen Rice:

No, I was just going to say I agree that we want to make sure that we’re helping those families to get what they need to enroll. And that’s not necessarily the role of the liaison, that’s the role of maybe a social worker in the school or the enrollment office person, or whoever it is designated in that school to really support our students who are enrolling but are not falling under the McKinney-Vento designation, where our homeless liaison would be working with them.

Jessica Webster:

I was just going to add to that, to piggyback off that, I think one of the things that we want to make sure of as we’re building out our welcoming schools, is that we understand all of the protections that our students have, under multiple ways, foster care, homelessness, migrant education. All of those pieces, and that we’re making sure that the people who are doing the enrollment, they’re the front line, that they have the correct information and know what the policies and procedures are so they’re not inadvertently turning someone away who doesn’t have the right paperwork. Which would be inadvertent, but also, I mean, causes a lot of delays that would be unnecessary.

Also that we know that those individuals know who to ask for help within the district. So as we think about that as supporting students, it really then goes back to supporting our staff, to make sure that they have the right protocol and procedures and feel confident in the work that they’re doing, because that’s how we build welcoming schools. I think that was a great question and really highlights the need for that to happen at the school and the district level.

Kailanya Brailey:

Absolutely, I agree with that, Jessica. I’m looking at our questions, I do want to make sure we add… Just to refer back to some information that Jessica shared at the beginning, and I think Karen touched on it a bit during her presentation. We want to make sure that you know that we do see your questions, however, if your question related to identifying any nationalities or school districts, that’s not information that we would be able to share out, as a safeguard for students. So we don’t want you to feel like we didn’t see your question, it’s just not an answer that we can provide, so we won’t read that aloud to our participants. But we do thank you for engaging with us.

Jessica Webster:

Right. And then Karen, this one is specific for you. It piqued my interest as well, but when you mentioned that there was a school district in Ohio, can you tell us more about that and where they are located? And anything you want to expand on on that? People were very curious.

Karen Rice:

I will say I have had the opportunity to talk with this district a number of times. It’s New Philadelphia City Schools in Ohio, and I don’t actually know where in Ohio they’re located, but the liaison that I spoke with has shared a number of just really creative things that they’re doing with their students. I mentioned a couple of them, but also one of the things that they’re doing that… I really love to share this idea, so I’m just going to be very brief. But they have purchased bikes for their students within their walk zone. They had a number of their immigrant students who are identified under McKinney-Vento, live within their walk zone and so transportation is not typically provided. There’s no exceptional circumstance that would make them need to have special transportation within that walk zone.

But they were learning that a number of students, based on their cultural background and the countries they were coming from, didn’t go to school, depending on certain weather situations. So they were finding that their students were missing a lot of school and they were looking for creative transportation options, so they used their ARP-HCY funds to purchase bikes for these students. They have quite a few students in their district who use bikes, so it was fitting them into what’s already happening within the school community. And saw a significant uptick in their attendance for these students, who had an easy way to get to school that didn’t involve walking and being outdoors a little bit more than they were used to. That was another really creative thing that they did. We actually have spotlighted their district and their work with Schoolhouse Connection, with our ARP-HCY spotlights that we’ve done, so there’s more information on our website if you want to read that.

Jessica Webster:

Amazing, thank you so much for that. That’s always exciting when you hear about a unique idea that really is impactful. Yeah. All right, a next question is, it says here in Maine, host homes can obtain forms that allow the homes to get medical and dental care. McKinney-Vento in Maine has the options on the forms and it has been working. Is that something that is pretty similar, that host families can obtain the forms that they need to make sure that the students are getting the medical and dental care that they need? Is that something you all do in Fairfax County?

Kathi Sheffel:

It’s a state by state situation. We do not have that in Virginia right now.

Jessica Webster:

Okay.

Karen Rice:

There are a number of states that have passed laws and legislation to help students to access medical and dental care, and mental health care. But not all states have that and it doesn’t look the same in all states either, so that is definitely a Maine specific.

Jessica Webster:

Excellent. All right, there’s still a little bit of extra time if you have a couple questions to pop in.

Kailanya Brailey:

A question. But we have made it through the Q and A box so far, so again, there is some more time if you have additional questions.

Jessica Webster:

Any last thoughts that you have for our groups today? Any burning information that you think would be helpful, or that you would like audience to know today?

Kathi Sheffel:

I just want to add, if anybody out there wants to help unaccompanied youth, call your local homeless liaison and just say, “I want to help.” And they will find a way for you to help. We’ve had lots of people that just call our office and say, “We’ve heard there are students that are homeless. What can we do?” And we have a very quick list that we can give them right away on how they can help, if interested. If they want to do a project or if they want to do a donation, or whatever they may want to do. So call your local liaison.

Jessica Webster:

So I hear keep a list of things that you need, so when people ask, you know how to use them, and getting that word out. And another thing that’s-

Kailanya Brailey:

That’s a toolkit addition.

Jessica Webster:

That’s a toolkit addition, I was just going to say that. And another thing I was thinking of when you were speaking, in Fairfax County, was that you really emphasize that communication piece, to make sure that both students and families understood that everyone is entitled to an education and what that looks like for enrollment, and encouraging people to come into that school. I think when we, again, think about welcoming schools and setting it up from the beginning, that we have these systems in place, that that communication is really essential to making sure that we’re supporting our families. That really stood out for me as a thing for my toolkit, to think about how we’re assessing that and supporting that work, as we move forward.

Karen Rice:

I would say just providing that training. I know Kathi and Kerri mentioned that, but training just everybody and anybody. It’s required under McKinney-Vento to do that, but thinking through training specific to our children and youth who are also immigrants or migrant students. I recently talked with a district who said that they take it all the way up to their school board to say, “You need to know that this is who our population of students is, and this is what’s happening, and this is the work that they’re doing. This is how we’re funding the work that we’re doing,” and so that awareness building is really, really important. Then when they run into people in the community, they can talk about it in the community and get the community involved. So having those conversations and providing that training and that awareness building is really, really important.

Jessica Webster:

It’s wonderful. All right, so with that, thank you so much. We, again, are so appreciative to the time that you all have taken to share your expertise with our audience. We want to make sure that everyone marks on their calendars our next session, which is going to be how can we support students experiencing homelessness in preparation for and the transition to postsecondary education? We know for all students, that college and career education looks a lot different than our K-12 world, and the supports look a lot different, so we want to make sure that we know what we need to do specifically for those students who are experiencing homelessness. We hope that you’ll join us for that.

Then we’d like to ask that you take a few minutes to complete our survey, which we use these to inform our work and to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of educators around the country in the work that we do. So we take that very seriously and ask that you please take a minute to complete our survey. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we hope to see you in September.

Kailanya Brailey:

Thank you everyone.