Fresno Unified saw a 30% jump in its homeless student population this school year, according to the California Department of Education’s 2022-23 enrollment data.

The district reported 496 homeless students, up from 377 last year. This year’s count exceeds the pre-pandemic count of 425 homeless students in 2019 for a four-year high.

Clovis and Central Unified, the county’s second and third-largest districts behind FUSD, also saw growth in their population of homeless students. So did the county as a whole, where the overall count increased from 1,647 in 2021-22 to 1,984 in 2022-23.

This trend is worrying for experts in the city.

“It’s not to say that one person’s homelessness is any worse than another person’s because I don’t think anybody should be homeless, right?” said Laura Moreno, chair of the Fresno Madera Continuum of Care. “It’s difficult no matter what.”

“But when you are lugging kids around, it’s dangerous to be homeless. You’ve got kids that you’re trying to manage and get to school and protect and feed,” she added, “and that just becomes very, very difficult.”

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Experts still worry this year’s data is an undercount, however. Anything from the stigma of being homeless to the transience of the population hinders districts from identifying all its homeless students.

“Undercount with homeless students is always a concern,” said Angela James, research director at UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools.

The stakes of a miscount are high, experts say.

“The thing is,” said Pamela Hancock, director of Foster & Homeless Youth Education Services with the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, “if we under-identify, then we’re not providing the services that those students” might be entitled to.

Studies show that homelessness puts students at several distinct disadvantages. Fewer homeless students finish high school in four years, for example. More of them are chronically absent. And they tend to score lower than their peers on math assessments.

On the other hand, some research has indicated that homeless students’ attendance and academic performance become more stable after they’ve been identified by their district as homeless and connected with proper resources.

“We have legislation which helps us to grapple with this issue and guides us,” James said. “But it starts with identification.”

How are homeless students counted?

A student in California is considered homeless if they lack a “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” according to the CDE.

That can include anything from a student temporarily staying with a friend after losing their housing to one living out of their car.

Districts have struggled to locate all the students living under these circumstances, and the state legislature has had to step in.

Assembly Bill 27, which Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signed into law in September 2021, requires school districts to provide a housing questionnaire to all district families every year and report the results to the California Department of Education. Before, the questionnaires weren’t required statewide.

The mandate is already helping in a district like Fresno Unified, which has had to make multiple changes to its identification processes over the years, according to the district’s homeless and foster care liaison Tumani Heights.

“It’s been significant,” she said, “in helping us identify some families that potentially would fall through the cracks.”

In addition to the questionnaire which goes out to all families in packets at the beginning of the year, Heights’ office and the district’s clinical social workers will also contact families of students each August who had been identified as homeless the previous school year and verify whether their housing situation has changed.

Fresno Unified started doing this in 2019 when Heights joined the district and realized “a significant amount” of students were miscategorized as homeless because FUSD hadn’t followed up with their families after they initially reported homelessness.

This helps explain what otherwise looks like a staggering decline in the number of homeless students between 2018-19 and 2019-20: from 1,670 to 425, according to CDE data.

“We contacted those families, and a lot of them had found stable housing,” she said.

Experts say the pandemic also made it more difficult for districts to count their homeless student population accurately.

Some left the state, becoming untraceable through CDE’s database. Others may not have re-enrolled in school, she added.

In FUSD, the homeless student count fell from 425 in 2019-20 to a five-year low of 267 in 2020-21, the first fully-online academic year after the onset of the pandemic. The number climbed by 110 students the following year and by another 119 students this year.

James said other pandemic-era policies, such as eviction moratoriums, likely reduced homeless populations in districts, but she fears that progress, like the moratoriums, probably has an expiration date.

Fresno’s moratorium expired in June 2022, although some additional protections for renters remained in place.

What alarms does this trend sound?

James worries this year’s increase in the homeless student population was only “the tip of the iceberg,” and more students will start to experience homelessness as pandemic-related protections for renters wane.

“I think the problem,” she said, “is much greater than what we see in the numbers.”

Moreno shares related concerns about the homelessness data her team collects for both Fresno and Madera counties.

They produce an annual Point in Time Count, which serves as a snapshot of the homeless population across the country on a night selected by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The most recent one from 2022 showed a 15% increase in the homeless population since before the pandemic.

“Several years ago, I would’ve told you that families don’t present on the street. They present homelessness differently, but we did not find a lot of people on the streets. And I think that absolutely has changed,” she said. “We’re seeing many more families that are literally on the street homeless, in their cars, in places not meant for human habitation.

“Everything is just getting more expensive,” she added. “Everything is getting harder.”

Not all of these problems can be solved by school districts alone. The current bargaining cycle between teachers and Fresno Unified has raised the question of just how much schools can and should do.

The Fresno Teachers Association has proposed several multi-million dollar investments in support for homeless students, such as devoting $500,000 to opening up school parking lots at night and providing paid security for homeless families to park their cars safely and putting $1 million into providing free laundry service for students who need of it by 2026.

Although negotiations are still in progress, the district announced in March that laundry machines would be “baseline equipment” for its middle schools moving forward — which the union claimed as proof their proposals are what the district needs.

While it will take much more to address the affordable housing crisis at its core, James said it’s important to “think outside the box” with how districts can support homeless students.

“We can help them … or,” she said, “we could deal with the enormous problems that result when we don’t.”

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