1 in 10 SLO County students are homeless. Now, resources they rely on are at risk

San Luis Obispo County has one of the highest rates of student homelessness in California, and to help those kids, local school districts have benefited from transportation assistance, hotel vouchers and district-appointed homelessness liaisons tasked with connecting unhoused families with community resources.

But now the Trump administration has signaled its intent to change how some of these key supports are funded, putting the future of programming for homeless students in question for local school districts.

Those threats come at a time when communities along the Central Coast struggle to keep families housed.

Last year, SLO County, Monterey County and Santa Barbara County each landed among the five counties with the highest percentages of enrolled homeless students, according to data reporting from education news outlet EdSource.

More than one in 10 SLO County kids qualified for that unwanted distinction.

Meanwhile, SLO County schools have also already been hit with other federal and state funding challenges, piling atop pre-existing budget concerns to create a local education arena that’s growing increasingly hard to navigate.

Educators and community advocates say they’re dedicated to ensuring that all students have equitable access to education regardless of their living situation — but lost funding, programming cuts and federal threats could make that promise harder to keep.

“Funding stability for California is unstable enough just year to year in general,” said San Luis Coastal homelessness liaison Chris Dowler, who is also principal at Pacific Beach, the district’s continuation high school. “But now with the … federal situation with the federal budget … I think that what gives school people so much anxiety right now, is what we don’t know.”

Mariana Gutierrez, who works with the San Luis Coastal district as part of her role as the family community support services manager at CAPSLO, continued Dowler’s thought.

“What we can do, though, is educate,” she said. “Educate our staff, educate our community regarding the barriers that our homeless population faces, and specifically our students that are facing homelessness.”

Reporting finds SLO County has high percentage of homeless students

It’s no secret that residents on the Central Coast bear a high cost of living, starting with housing.

In July, the median San Luis Obispo County homebuyer shelled out $940,000 for a single-family home, according to a monthly report from the California Association of Realtors. The median home price was over $1 million in both Santa Barbara and Monterey counties.

Meanwhile, SLO County renters were expected to see a median rental price of more than $2,400 per month in 2025, The Tribune reported in February.

Those high prices paired with other factors have contributed to the region’s chronic homelessness problem — and that risk is growing among local children.

Data reporting from EdSource found in May that more than 10% of students in SLO County were experiencing homelessness during the 2024-25 school year. That equated to around 3,231 public school children, the reporting showed.

That was the fifth-highest percentage by county across the state, according to the analysis. Statewide, homelessness appeared most prevalent in schools along the Central Coast.

Nearby Monterey County had the highest percentage, with 16% of its students experiencing homelessness, while Santa Barbara County was No. 2 at 12.1%, EdSource reported.

During the 2023-24 school year — the most recent year for which statistics has been made available on state data dashboard DataQuest — the majority of students who qualified as homeless in SLO County were “doubled up,” meaning they were sharing a home with another family due to financial hardship.

That was the case for just over 83% of locally enrolled homeless students, the dashboard showed.

But SLO County also had a significant share of students who were temporarily unsheltered, defined by the state as living in abandoned buildings, campgrounds, vehicles, trailer parks, bus and train stations or other similar circumstances.

Throughout the county, 8.3% of homeless students were living in those conditions during the 2023-24 school year, according to the dashboard. The Lucia Mar district had the highest percentage of temporarily unsheltered students at more than 12%, well above the state average of 3.6%.

County education program coordinator Jessica Thomas told The Tribune that one reason for the high level of temporarily unsheltered students is the demand for space in overnight facilities.

“When there’s a waiting list, families sometimes have to resort to staying in the car or camping,” she said.

Meanwhile, those with their boots on the ground are seeing a rise in demand for services among families with children.

Wendy Lewis, president and CEO of local homelessness organization ECHO, reported at the Aug. 19 Paso Robles City Council meeting that the organization has served more children so far this year compared to the same time last year.

“Unfortunately, families with children is the fastest-growing demographic of people who are needing our services,” she told the council.

Lewis reported that last year, ECHO’s two North County shelters served more than 200 children ranging from infants to 17-year-olds.

So far in 2025, ECHO has already served 193 children, she said.

“You can see that demographic is drastically changing and needing our support,” she said. “We’re averaging about 40 to 45 children nightly between our 130 beds with both campuses.”

How does being homeless affect learning?

Homelessness has measurable impacts on student learning.

County education data shows that students experiencing homelessness score lower on state achievement tests and are more likely to get suspended or be chronically absent from school.

Graduation and college-going rates also tend to be lower.

Mental health issues like anxiety and depression are also more common among homeless students, which can further impede social involvement and academic success, according to Thomas.

“Stressful home lives often make it difficult for students to concentrate at school, especially if they come to school hungry or tired,” she wrote to The Tribune in an email. “Toxic stress, which is a prolonged activation of the body’s stress response system, also impacts brain development and increases the risk of various health problems such as asthma, diabetes, and dental problems. Health issues increase student absences, which impacts student learning.”

In addition, students experiencing homelessness are more likely to be transient — moving from school to school or district to district, Thomas said. That impermanence can make it hard for students to maintain social ties and academic progress.

“School is often a safe and stable environment for students,” Thomas said. “When they are forced to change schools, they lose friendships and relationships with teachers and other school staff.”

The impacts of homelessness aren’t universal, often affecting kids differently depending on the severity and duration of their living situation, Dowler told The Tribune, and in many cases, some negative effects can be mitigated by the systems in place at the school level.

“For the most part, if you have enough structures and supports for kids … enough supports for their families and their families can get stabilized, you can re-engage with kids pretty quick,” Dowler said. “Kids are adaptable.”

Those structures and supports have proven their worth in SLO County schools.

In 2024, the San Miguel school district saw academic improvement among its students experiencing homelessness.

At Lillian Larsen Elementary School — which educates most of San Miguel’s homeless students — math test scores jumped by 13.3 percentage points, while English scores were steady and saw no major dips, according to district Superintendent Karen Grandoli.

The school also recorded chronic absenteeism rates among unhoused students that were far lower than the state average.

“It was just something we noticed,” she told The Tribune. “Our homeless kids were not struggling as much as some of our other subgroups.”

Grandoli credited that to the district’s efforts to provide home-to-school transportation and afterschool care. The district receives two different state grants to help fund those services, she told The Tribune.

San Miguel also works with the SLO County Office of Education to provide other forms of assistance to families, including gas cards and occasional hotel vouchers, she said.

Despite the success and evident need for structures and supports in local communities, the Trump administration has recently targeted dedicated funding for students experiencing homelessness.

In an environment where schools are already cutting back after the expiration of COVID-19 relief funding and local budget deficits, additional reductions could further erode the safety net for at-risk students.

Federal efforts threaten supports available to schools

Multiple laws are in effect to help school and community officials keep students experiencing homelessness from falling through the cracks.

Chiefly, there’s the McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act, a federal law that protects homeless students’ right to an education.

It requires that public schools immediately enroll homeless students without the records normally required for enrollment, guarantees that unhoused students can enroll in and be transported to the school they attended when permanently housed even if they’ve moved outside the boundaries, and requires districts to appoint homeless liaisons to help connect students with resources.

But the governing policy has recently been targeted by a federal effort to consolidate education spending.

Currently, California districts and county offices of education can receive federally issued McKinney-Vento funding through competitive Education for Homeless Children and Youth grants from the state.

Last year, the Lucia Mar and San Luis Coastal districts each received grants of more than $79,000, while the Paso Robles district received $54,059 and Coast Unified received more than $29,000, according to state data.

The San Luis Obispo County Office of Education received more than $129,000 in grant funding, the data showed.

Thomas told The Tribune the County Office of Education uses those dollars to co-fund staff positions and offer subgrants to other SLO County districts. Districts can use the money to pay for a slew of allowable expenses, including afterschool programs, counseling programs, transportation assistance, school supplies and new clothes for homeless children.

The money also helps pay for a contract with The Link Family Resource Center, a local nonprofit that helps connect families with housing and food assistance programs, mental health services and other resources, she said.

But the White House’s budget proposal for the 2026-27 fiscal year suggested overhauling McKinney-Vento by combining it into a block grant with 17 other education programs in an attempt to “reduce bureaucracy,” a White House memo said.

Doing so would eliminate the dedicated federal funding stream for homeless student services, and would cut the available funding for all the programs from $6.5 billion now to about $2 billion, Thomas told The Tribune.

“That’s a substantial reduction,” she added.

Thomas worried that the elimination of the dedicated funding stream would effectively void the law it’s attached to.

While California has state laws in place to protect homeless students, it doesn’t require districts to have homelessness liaisons, an analysis from national nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection found. That requirement comes from federal law.

Without liaisons, it’s likely fewer students would be served, Thomas said.

“Having that single point of contact within the district who is the expert on this law is really helpful in ensuring that the protections are in place for students,” she said. “My fear is that students who are highly vulnerable, highly mobile, won’t receive the protections without that liaison position in place.”

The proposed changes to McKinney-Vento were rejected by U.S. senators in July, marking the protections safe for the time being, Education Week reported — but the budget approval process isn’t over yet.

Plus — as evidenced by an unprecedented federal funding freeze that halted money for local programs over the summer — the Trump administration has already shown it isn’t afraid to withhold dollars from local schools regardless of what Congress says.

Meanwhile, as Congress deliberates the federal budget, another funding change is already hitting local schools.

For the last few years, the county Office of Education has used COVID relief money — allocated under the American Rescue Plan Act, also known as COVID relief funding — to help fund some services for students experiencing homelessness, Thomas told The Tribune.

These included professional development opportunities for staff, transportation assistance and clothing for students, improvements to facilities and added support from The Link Family Resource Center, she said.

But most of the remaining COVID dollars had to be allocated by September 2024, meaning the County Office of Education and local districts won’t have that chunk of money for this school year.

Additionally, other non-education spending cuts at the federal level will still have an impact on schools. Thomas said. Services like SNAP and Medicaid, both of which saw significant changes under the “Big Beautiful Bill” earlier this year, help assist students experiencing homelessness.

Both Dowler and Gutierrez agreed that cuts to other services were a big concern for local schools.

“Any type of supportive services that the school district and the community offers, if one is impacted, it’s a trickle effect,” Gutierrez said. “It is a lot of blending and braiding of funds to be able to … offer the supportive services that are in place.”

Specifically, Dowler said San Luis Coastal has struggled to fund mental health support due to various budget cuts.

“The federal money that we receive to support homeless students is not the only, you know, resource that we’ve tapped into to support homeless students,” he said. “In general, our programs that support at-risk students have definitely been impacted by, you know, financial instability at the federal and state level.”

The educators told The Tribune they’ll continue to serve homeless students to the best of their abilities, but they’re wary of changes that could prevent them from being able to help students in need.

“It’s been a struggle, and it’ll continue to be a struggle,” Dowler said. “I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

This story was originally published August 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.

Sadie Dittenber

The Tribune

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Sadie Dittenber writes about education for The Tribune and is a California Local News Fellow through the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. Dittenber graduated from The College of Idaho with a degree in international political economy.