A child who doesn't know where they're sleeping tonight cannot be fully present in your classroom tomorrow. That is not a counseling referral. It is a leadership problem.
I have walked into schools where the climate survey data looked fine and the people looked exhausted. I taught in East LA and later served as principal in downtown Los Angeles. In both places, I watched schools absorb what every other institution had already handed off, hunger, housing, trauma, and the quiet chaos of a child who had nowhere stable to sleep. The school was the last bastion of constancy in those children's lives. And constancy, when it is done right, is how you build agency. What I carried out of those years shaped everything I believe about what this work actually asks of us.
Now, school districts in San Diego, Cincinnati, and beyond are converting their parking lots into temporary shelter for homeless families. The response from some quarters has been predictable. The Trump administration recently called safe parking programs "dystopian." What nobody seems willing to say plainly is this: districts did not choose this role. It was left to them.
Nearly 260,000 people in families with children experienced homelessness in January 2024, a jump of more than 50 percent since before the pandemic (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2024). In California, family homelessness has risen 14 percent over the same period. Experts consistently note these figures are undercounts, because HUD's methodology does not capture families couch-surfing, cycling through motels, or living in their vehicles. The real number is higher. It has been climbing for years. And for most of those children, the school building is the only address that doesn't change.
Instability Is an Instructional Problem
The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act requires districts to identify homeless students, provide immediate enrollment, and ensure access to services. That is the floor. Most districts treat it as the ceiling.
What the law cannot legislate is what happens inside a classroom when a child is running on three hours of sleep because the family car got towed, or when a third grader cannot focus on a reading passage because she doesn't know if dinner is coming.
Housing instability doesn't stay outside the school building. It walks in every morning, sits in the third row, and quietly pulls down every metric we track.
Ann Masten's research on resilience in children facing adversity found that stable, caring relationships with adults are among the most powerful protective factors available (Masten & Tellegen, 2012). The school can be that relationship. But only if the adults inside it understand what they are actually dealing with. Referring a family to a shelter waitlist is not leadership. Knowing what your homeless students need before they ask is.
No One Gave Districts a Playbook
San Diego Unified did not arrive at its safe parking model overnight. It took years of partnership between the district, the city, and Jewish Family Service. A 2024 study found that 53 percent of households in the program, and 76 percent at the Rose Canyon site, moved on to more stable housing. The national average for shelter-to-housing transition hovers below 34 percent (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2024). San Diego's model works. Almost no other district knows how to replicate it.
Cincinnati Public Schools is opening its first safe parking lot this spring. The district's head of homeless services traveled to San Diego and Long Beach to study the model before adapting it. That is one district doing what it takes. Across the country, most superintendents are not even having this conversation, not because they don't care, but because there is no national framework, no federal guidance, and no clear answer to the question of what a school district is legally permitted to do with its own property to shelter its own students.
That absence of a framework is itself a policy failure. It should not require a superintendent's personal initiative to determine whether sheltering a family on district property is viable. That answer should already exist.
The Data Already Knows These Kids
The families most likely to need a safe parking site are already in your data. They show up in your chronic absenteeism reports. They show up in your reading benchmark gaps. They show up in your referrals for special services and in the caseloads of your school counselors. The school already knows these children. It just hasn't always known where they sleep.
That is an equity issue dressed in logistics clothing. When we treat student homelessness as a referral problem, we make a choice about whose crisis belongs to us. For anyone who has spent time in a school serving a high-poverty community, the answer is already clear. These children are ours. Their stability is our problem.
Equity is not a program. It is a set of decisions made every day about who gets what, and why (Valentino, 2025). A district that knows a child is living in a car and responds with only a McKinney-Vento referral has made a decision. It just hasn't named it honestly.
What Needs to Change
The question is not whether districts should step up. Most already have, quietly, without credit, and without a playbook. The question is whether we are finally willing to give them the policy infrastructure, the funding, and the political cover to do this work with the intentionality it demands.
Education System: The education system needs to stop treating student homelessness as a compliance function and start treating it as a leadership responsibility. McKinney-Vento is a floor. Build above it.
Policy System: The policy system needs to connect the dots it has spent decades pretending aren't connected. Federal housing assistance gaps do not disappear when a subsidy expires. They land in school budgets, in teacher bandwidth, and in the developmental trajectories of children who deserved better. Fund the connection.
Political System The political system needs to stop calling parking lots dystopian while dismantling the long-term housing programs that would make parking lots unnecessary. Cutting rental assistance and criticizing the schools that step into the gap is not a housing policy. It is a cost-shift onto the one institution that cannot turn a child away.
Schools did not create this crisis. But they are living inside it, every morning, when the doors open.
Constancy without support is just endurance. These children deserve more than endurance. They deserve a system that builds their agency alongside their future.
REFERENCES
Lewis, L. R., Rabinowitz-Bussell, M., Livingstone, S., & Levinson, T. (2024). An analysis of safe parking programs: Identifying program features and outcomes of an emerging homelessness intervention. Housing Policy Debate, 34(5–6), 985–1012. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2024.2313511
Masten, A. S., & Tellegen, A. (2012). Resilience in developmental psychopathology: Contributions of the Project Competence Longitudinal Study. Development and Psychopathology, 24(2), 345–361.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (2024). The 2024 annual homeless assessment report to Congress. HUD.
Valentino, L. R. (2025). Thought leadership in education: A comprehensive exploration of transformative educational ideas. Valgar LLC.
Let's Talk
DISTRICT LEADER PODCAST | FROM THE ARCHIVES
My guest this week is Dr. Fred Navarro, whose career is a study in what it means to grow within a profession with intention. He began as a classroom teacher in Long Beach Unified and built his expertise one role at a time: activities director, assistant principal, human resources, superintendent of Lennox School District, and ultimately superintendent of Newport-Mesa Unified in Costa Mesa, California, where he served from 2012 to 2020. He earned his teaching credential at Cal State Dominguez Hills and holds two advanced degrees from UCLA. Since retiring from the superintendency, Fred has brought that depth of experience to his work as a Partner with The Cosca Group. This conversation reminds us that the best leaders are always students first. I think you'll find it worth your time.
I think that when the system provides support to staff members, and they feel they can take risks, they feel they can be rewarded for being creative and for helping one another, for stepping out of the box, and I see that happen at whatever level, it is just rewarding. - Fred Navarro, Ed.D.
Can’t see the Player? Listen here →
EDUPRENEURS NETWORK • DEEP DIVE
Fostering Innovation in Edupreneurship: A Blueprint for Transformative Learning.
As we consider the challenges and opportunities in education, innovation is the cornerstone of progress and transformation. For educational entrepreneurs, or "edupreneurs," the ability to foster creativity, embrace risk-taking, and drive innovative solutions is not just a competitive advantage—it's a necessity.
In this essay, I want to explore the critical role of innovation in education, strategies for cultivating a culture of experimentation, case studies of groundbreaking ventures, and practical tools for nurturing innovation within edupreneurial organizations.
This Week’s Spark Video
“Dealing with Disappointment”
"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope". Martin Luther King, Jr -
From the Bookshelf
Thought Leadership in Education: A Comprehensive Exploration of Transformative Educational Ideas
Chapter 4 sits at the center of this week's argument. Systems Thinking and Organizational Change argues that equity is not a standalone initiative. It is the lens that determines who the system is actually serving, and who it is quietly leaving behind. The chapter draws on Noguera's structural equity framework to challenge leaders to examine how their systems, from course tracking to funding formulas to discipline policies, either expand or restrict access to opportunity. The key insight maps directly onto this week's issue: when leaders treat McKinney-Vento compliance as the ceiling rather than the floor, they are making a systems decision. They just haven't named it. The chapter's core argument is precise: "Equity grounds structural change in justice." That sentence belongs on the wall of every district office in this country.
This week: Read the "Equity" and "Using Multiple Frameworks in Tandem" sections in Chapter 4. Then ask yourself: In my district, does equity function as a framework that shapes every structural decision, or does it function as a program with a budget line and a coordinator? The difference between those two answers is the difference between a system that builds agency and one that manages compliance.
Additional Resources
The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.