Jennifer Erb-Downward, posted on August 6, 2025
A proposed FY 2026 budget proposal for the Education Department from the Trump administration would dramatically cut education protections and services offered by the McKinney-Vento Act for the more than 1.4 million students experiencing homelessness. Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, recently co-authored an analysis of the impact of the proposal. Spotlight recently spoke with Erb-Downward; the transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why don’t we start by explaining what the McKinney-Vento Act is and what it does and then we can go from there.
The McKinney-Vento Act basically provides protection for children who are experiencing homelessness in the education system. It looks at whether or not children have fixed, adequate and regular nighttime residences, and if they do not, they’re eligible for certain educational protections. It’s been in place since 1987, when there was a recognition that homelessness creates unique barriers to children in terms of their ability to access their education. Some of these protections include the ability to enroll in school immediately, even without the typically required documents, because sometimes in losing your housing, you might not be able to have some of those documents, like vaccination records, birth certificate, proof of address.
Another right is to be able to stay in the same school despite residential instability. Children could stay in their school of origin, the school where they had enrolled previously, after becoming homeless, or they could enroll in in a new school that’s closer to where they live. It’s just recognizing the importance of schools as a point of stability in a situation where children really are lacking stability in their life. Another right that is included in the McKinney-Vento Act is to receive transportation assistance to maintain school attendance. That’s a really important one because often getting to school can be incredibly challenging, if you have moved away from the school of origin.
And then there also is access to support from school district homelessness liaisons. These are people who are trained in the law around McKinney-Vento and work in every school district to provide connections to different support services—to identify students who are experiencing homelessness, to identify what barriers they might be experiencing, and to make sure that they have the supports that they need to actually be able to fully participate in school. They’re really the linchpins in the system.
And do most districts have those coordinators?
Under the current law, every school district is required to have someone who is designated as a McKinney-Vento liaison. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a paid position. It often is on top of another role that people might be doing. But fundamentally, every school district is supposed to assign someone who is a McKinney-Vento liaison who is trained and provides these supports to the school district and to students.
So, the Act is both establishing these policies and also providing resources to implement them?
That’s right. Now the funding is a fairly small amount of funding, but it is one of those small but really, really powerful amounts of funding. You can see in the research that the funding that is there really has had an impact and even more so during the pandemic, when there was an expansion of funding. And what we saw was that school districts that had previously not had funding before that received funding and reported that they were better able to identify and serve students experiencing homelessness. In another study, they saw that chronic absenteeism went down among students who were experiencing homelessness in these districts that received additional funding. There were improvements in graduation and test scores. Funding really does have an impact, but in terms of overall funding, it’s about 1% of the overall federal education budget.
Roughly, what’s the dollar figure for McKinney-Vento?
It’s $129 million annually.
And is that still reflecting the pandemic increase or has that been scaled back?
The pandemic increase, which was $800 million, is now gone. That was a one-time thing.
So, fast forward to what the administration is proposing or not proposing vis-à-vis McKinney-Vento.
The administration has proposed to roll the McKinney-Vento funding into state block grants which, just to be clear, eliminates the McKinney-Vento funding. You basically have 18 different programs that they’re putting into a state block grant that you could use, but that block grant is being cut by 70%. The reality is that the program will disappear because you are creating a situation where there’s going to be competition among all these different, needed programs for a much smaller pool of funding. This proposal would also basically eliminate most of the legal protections, because at the state level, there are only three states that have all of the core protections that are guaranteed under the federal law right now in their state laws. The funding is important to guarantee that you have this basic structure of supports—and if the funding isn’t guaranteed to be there, you’re really leaving it to state laws that don’t exist.
So, the legal protections from the act would still exist. There would just not be funding to implement them?
That is a good question because if you’re rolling this into a state block grant, it really becomes something where you’re then relying on state laws. And again, if you map out all of the different states, there are only three states that have all of the McKinney-Vento protections covered by state laws. That really creates a huge, huge problem. One very true thing about experiencing homelessness is that children are moving a lot, families are moving a lot. And without having this sort of consistent federal system of regulation, you would be having rules that are changing or being implemented differently in different places, creating a lot of confusion and challenges as children are trying to navigate systems that might be implemented differently in different places.
And you said the block grant itself is being reduced by about 70%?
Yes. All 18 of these programs are being rolled into a single block grant of $2 billion. Those programs used to be funded at $6.5 billion.
And what is the outlook for this budget passing?
A great resource to track that debate that I would recommend is Schoolhouse Connection, a national organization that provides technical assistance, advocacy, and all sorts of different information on student homelessness and the critical role that education plays in terms of stabilizing children who are experiencing homelessness. And they’re really very actively following this legislative process right now.
The most recent update is the Senate Appropriations Committee last week passed their FY2026 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education budget and it actually included the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program with its own independent line item. They’re recognizing the importance of this funding continuing to exist independently, not as a part of the block grant that was proposed.
This will have to be voted on by the entire Senate and we still really don’t know what the House education budget bill will end up looking like. They’re supposed to be moving forward with marking up the proposed bill in September. So, I would say that this is something that’s continuing to evolve.