Barbara Duffield,
SchoolHouse Connection

Kate Miller: Welcome to the Project HOPE Virginia podcast, Empowering Voices in Homeless Education and McKinney-Vento. I’m Kate Miller, Training and Communications Specialist with Project HOPE Virginia, Virginia’s program for the education of homeless children and youth.

As we continue to highlight the amazing work of our liaisons, community partners, and advocates, I am thrilled to have with us today Barbara Duffield. Barbara is the executive director of Schoolhouse Connection, a national nonprofit dedicated to overcoming homelessness through early care and education. For more than 30 years, Barbara has been a leading voice in shaping policy and practice to support children and youth experiencing homelessness.

Today we’ll hear about Barbara’s journey from grassroots advocacy to national leadership, what inspired her to co-found Schoolhouse Connection, and how we can all be a part of building a better future for all students, no matter what their housing situation is. Thank you for joining us today, Barbara.

Barbara Duffield: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Barbara Duffield: I grew up in Michigan. I grew up in a rural part of Kalamazoo County, Michigan. My father was the first person in his family to complete a college education. His grandfather, my grandfather, his father worked in Pennsylvania in coal mines there. My mother also was the first person in her family to go to college. Her father was a butcher in a very small town in Ohio. So both of them as first generation college students really impressed upon all of us, all four of us in our family, the importance of education. And in addition to that, I just love school. I love being there. I love participating in all of the events. So both sort of seeing my own family’s trajectory through the power of education, both high school and college, and then just my own passion for learning and education and the role of schools, I think were some of the formative experiences that led me to really see education as this engine of opportunity.

Kate Miller: Right. You’ve definitely carried that with you throughout everything you’ve done since.

Barbara Duffield: I moved to Washington, D.C. from Michigan with my then-fiance, now husband of 30 plus years. And at the time, I had an internship with Foreign Policy Magazine. And I was an editorial assistant. And the other students who were there, the other interns, really very focused on Ivy League experiences and foreign policy. But there was a copy editor there who took me under her wing. And she was a volunteer at a tutorial program for children experiencing homelessness in Washington, D.C. called the Homeless Children’s Tutorial Project, Project North Star. And that was my first introduction. I didn’t know children were experiencing homelessness. It never crossed my mind, you know, in a rural area, it’s not something that you see growing up. I mean, even in college in Ann Arbor, you didn’t see homelessness, at least not then. So that was the first experience working with those children, seeing the challenges that they faced, but also seeing just their incredible potential and just, with opportunity and assistance, what they could do and how they could achieve. So that was really the first experience and the most lasting one, because I was working directly with school-age children and helping them with their schoolwork and seeing how all of this came together in their lives.

Barbara Duffield: Yes, so at the National Coalition for the Homeless when I first started working on policy issues, again, my background, my degree was foreign policy. It wasn’t domestic policy. So I really relief on people who were there to tell me, again, basics of how laws in the US are made and how Appropriations Committee work and all of those pieces. So I was fortunate to have people there to support me in that real-time learning. My first day on the job there was the day that then-Congressman Newt Gingrich announced that there was going to be a recissions act to potentially eliminate the McKinney-Vento program. So it was truly baptism by fire. Like the first task was “save this program from being eliminated.” And that immediately meant that I needed to find out who worked with the program, who were the state coordinators, who were the liaisons, who was doing the work, to really understand more about it and to really make the case for the program. So that was really the start there. And then over time I worked on other policy areas. I worked on housing, I worked on income, a little bit on healthcare, but it was always education that was my passion, in part because, again, of the role it plays, but also because I really fell in love with the people doing the work. I really fell in love with the state coordinators, the local liaisons, and just how creative they are, were and are, about ensuring equal access to education for children who are experiencing homelessness. Worked then again at NAEHCY as you mentioned, for 13 years across a lot of program areas, including then starting to work a little bit on early childhood and higher education. And, you know, with this mantra of like, “can we McKinney-Vento-ize across the full continuum of learning from early childhood to higher education?” And again, seeing many, many changes happen there, from changes in special education law to higher education, et cetera. And then, of course, that SchoolHouse Connection. We really have grown even broader and deeper to connect across the continuum of learning and to connect with those key partners in the housing space, in the healthcare space. 

Kate Miller: Right. I love how you turn McKinney-Vento into a verb. I think that really lends to just how important it is to connect all those different groups and partners to give our students that full wraparound support.

Barbara Duffield: First thing is making sure McKinney-Vento stays intact. I think also very proud of and continue to be proud of our ability to work across the aisle in a bipartisan fashion. This program and issue has long had bipartisan support and that’s so important for so many different reasons. So, also proud that that has continued. Certainly the amendments to Head Start, for example, to make sure that young children are prioritized for Head Start, are able to participate, are something I feel great about because again, we’re making connections and we understand that children need to come to school ready to learn. They have many comprehensive needs and having partners like Head Start that see families who are homeless, that are identifying them, are just an incredible resource and a great complement to the K-12 work. And I would also say too, the work within higher education to make sure that our youth who are homeless and unaccompanied are able to be considered independent students. And we continue to support that policy and have strengthened that policy today, but really looking back at how important that was. 

Kate Miller: I think I’m just gonna jump into the SchoolHouse Connection piece, and you’ve done so much since you started SchoolHouse Connection and I wanna take a lot of time to unpack all of that.

Barbara Duffield: SchoolHouse Connection really was born out of a need that we saw in the field of homeless education and beyond, to be very nimble across issues as they came up. Obviously, Mckinney-Vento and K-12 is a cornerstone of our work, but issues come up around natural disasters, issues come up around immigration for example, issues come up around helping students with disabilities. So to think about all the needs of children, youth and families who are experiencing homelessness and to create an organization that could really wrap itself around all of them. And also, and this is very critical to SchoolHouse Connection’s vision and how we carry out our work, is that practice and policy cannot be separated. We need to work equally hard on implementing laws that are actually enacted as we do for strengthening those laws and new laws. So most of our team at SchoolHouse Connection is engaged in what we call practical assistance. So, some of that’s training and tools and tip sheets. A lot of it is answering questions about real-life situations that come up. We have a Q&A from the field where we put out the questions that we get, and again, real life questions that come up, convening. People identifying best practices. So really that passion for understanding that creating opportunities for children and youth experiencing homelessness means not just the policy piece, but also then working diligently to make sure that children and youth benefit from those policies across, again, the full spectrum of learning.

Barbara Duffield: I think creating a new organization from scratch is daunting in and of itself. But I think part of our challenge was an identity, to create an identity that was broader than just me and my co-founder, Patricia Julianelle. We’ve been working in this field for decades and our names were out there. But SchoolHouse Connection is much more than Patricia and Barbara. So creating a brand identity and having team members who understood the vision, executed it passionately so that the field would understand that SchoolHouse Connection is SchoolHouse Connection, not just Barbara and Patricia, and that the same level of dedication and passion for practice and policy would continue in an organization that was dedicated to that. So I think that’s one piece. We’ve also, if you look at what’s happened over the course of our history, everything from what we launched in the beginning of 2017. So that was the first Trump administration coming in. So a lot of changes happening there, went from there to the pandemic, from the pandemic into American Rescue Plan, Homeless Children and Youth. And now again, into an era of considerable political instability. So external events also have been challenging, and I should add many disruptive natural disasters occuring at the same time. To be responsive tothose and to meet the needs of the field for each of those moments and as they continue to affect, that has also been challenging as well. But our greatest asset are the relationships that we have with people, particularly with educators; again, early childhood, K-12 and higher education, and those relationships and what we learn, as well as our scholarship program. So directly working with young people experiencing homelessness, those really help us weather all of those fluctuations and understand what we need to do better to help meet the need.

Barbara Duffield: I think, by far, the biggest tangible achievement is the successful advocacy for the $800 million that came through the American Rescue Plan, Homeless Children and Youth Act. That was at a time when Congress was providing money for pandemic relief, but it wasn’t focused on students experiencing homelessness. We were able to document the decline in enrollment. We were able to document that the monkey wasn’t being targeted. And then to have that, you know, eight times the typical funding allocated. And yes, it was one time. And yes, it was a ridiculous timeline to spend it. And yes, there were challenges in terms of getting clarity about how the funds were used. But we continue to hear to this day about practices in school districts that are different. And even for programs that couldn’t continue, we know that lives were changed at that time. And now we have data to prove it. We have data from the first year and a half of ARPHCY that shows that districts that got that funding identified more students, decreased chronic absence, they increased high school graduation and proficiency in reading, math, and science. That was just for the first year and a half. So I think that both the accomplishment, securing the resources, and working hand in hand with educators to make sure that they were invested well, despite all the challenges they encountered. And then seeing how some of those initiatives continue today remains at the very top of the list. The second thing I definitely want to talk about is the strengthening of the FAFSA for the unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness and our legislative advocacy there, which again has led to far fewer barriers for young people who want to pursue post-secondary education, that remains the best way out of poverty is to have some education beyond high school, so very proud about that. And then also, not in any order here, is the work on infant and toddler homelessness to really shine a light on the very youngest children experiencing homelessness and how we can wrap around them to make sure that they have a better opportunity at success in life. 

Kate Miller: Well, you’ve teed it up nicely because I have a few questions just to unpack for our listeners a little bit of those points you just reflected on. Just talking a little bit more about COVID-19 and all of the school closures that accompanied the pandemic, both here and abroad and how detrimental that was to so many students’ education, especially students who are facing housing instability.

Barbara Duffield: One of the developments or results, I guess, of the additional flexibility of McKinney-Vento was our funding and now we see the flexibility continue. Some of it was around the smaller things, like being able to use the funds for gas cards or car repairs or even auto insurance. And we continue to hear how that flexibility, like a store card that’s more than a store card, is re-engaging parents who’ve lost trust in the education system by helping them meet their children’s need in a very tangible way. So understanding how something from that or a gas card could really solve a chronic absence problem. I think the second piece that we hope will continue is understanding the role of navigators. And again, there’s a sense in which McKinney-Vento liaisons are navigators. But to the extent that navigators can be in place to help navigate some of the housing challenges, the housing partnerships that were built during the pandemic because of the flexibility of the ARPHCY funds are also so important. We heard from a district just a couple of weeks ago who had an ARPHCY housing navigator and the county mental health board said, “you do this, we’ll continue it.” And that position has continued and she said it’s transformed her office. They’re now actually now able to house families and keep them housed. So I think those two pieces in particular are some of what we hope will be the legacy moving forward. 

Kate Miller: It’s great to hear, even though the funding is ending or has ended, that the lessons and also the activities and programs that were built from that funding can still continue.

Barbara Duffield: We know and have learned just how critical those early years are for child development. The brain is developing faster between zero and three than at any other time in life. It’s a critical opportunity to make sure that families and children have the supports that they need. So it’s one thing to know that and it’s another thing then to meet those early childhood partners, hear about the work that they’re doing and really know that we need to reflect that. And if they see overcoming homelessness through education, they’re thinking K-12, but it has to be early care and education. So we wanted to validate what we’ve learned about child development. We wanted to validate what we’ve learned about the role of our early childhood partners. And we wanted them to be able to see that in our mission and to see how that way we are embracing that full prenatal through post-secondary continuum.

Barbara Duffield: The scholarship program, I think anybody at SchoolHouse would tell you, that the Youth Leadership and Scholarship Program is truly our pride and joy, the apple of our eye. For me, I started working with scholarship programs actually back in 1999 at the National Coalition and then through NAEHCY and then now at SchoolHouse Connection. So, working directly to support young people to and through higher education keeps us very motivated, keeps me very motivated. So within our staff meetings, for example, at Schoolhouse Connection, we can zoom out to some big federal policy, but then we can also talk about how a young person needs a bed or a younger person, you know, was able to get a computer or get another scholarship. So that keep us very, very grounded. The Youth Leadership and Scholarship Program is a very comprehensive program. So it’s a scholarship, but it also involves wraparound supports. We have two full-time staff who are dedicated to supporting young people. They have three in-person trips, so they meet, you know, after we award the scholarship, they meet again in a year and a half later in DC, an opportunity for them to educate policymakers, and then they meet a third time for really sort of a life transition into the workforce. And that strengthens the cohort and really keeps them connected to us. So the students were just here a couple weeks ago, so very fresh, you know, in my mind, to hear directly from them how, a couple things, one, how homelessness and childhood and high school carries with them into post-secondary, even if they have stable housing, how that lasting impact of trauma needs to be addressed in a real way. You can have students who are doing well in school, very high achieving, but still have a lot of needs and a lot of help. And this particular group that was here talked a lot about that, about being overlooked because they were high-achieving. So that’s a lesson we all need to learn and we need to learn that that continues into post-secondary. So that for sure. And then also, there’s no way for people who are working on bigger policy issues to truly understand the issue than directly from young people themselves. So it’s one thing, for example, for us to talk about how lack of transportation is a barrier. It’s another thing to hear 10 out of 12 young people at a congressional briefing say it was the biggest issue that they faced and what it meant for them not to have it. So, both the direct witnessing of how they persist and stay successful and navigate their past issues of trauma with support from us, but also from each other. And also, just the excitement that they have about the advocacy once they see people do want their feedback and that it can have such a big impact.

Barbara Duffield: The first piece to say is that 99.9% of policymakers have never heard of McKinney-Vento before and they’ve never heard of student homelessness before. It’s a very invisible population and so when we are engaging in policy work with policymakers or their staff, first thing we do is ask: are you familiar? And nine times out of ten, they’re going to say no. So just, I think that, you might think that the policymakers, of course they know all federal programs, but they truly don’t and the first time they’re hearing about it is from us. So there’s that piece of it. The numbers are always surprising. So again, not understand that children who are moving from place to place, living in doubled-up situations are experiencing homelessness and then understanding what the role of school is. If you think that homelessness is a housing issue, you’re not going to consider the educational implications, both in the short term, the immediate help that schools provide, but also that long-term big picture in terms of the ladder up and out of homelessness. The fact that the lack of a high school degree is the number one risk factor for continuing to be homeless. So there’s often surprise that homelessness exists in their communities, how many, and the role that it plays in the long term. In terms of what’s been successful, by far and away, the number one thing is directly connecting people in communities who work with students who are homeless to their congressional offices. You know, I can go in there and TJ, our senior federal program, we can go in there and it’s just another group talking about another issue. But when we say, do you want to meet with this person from these three school districts who are in your congressional district and they’re hearing about it locally and they’re hearing names of schools they went to and they’re hearing names of community partners and they’re looking at the data, immediately it brings it home. So, the single most important thing that’s the most effective is that connection to people back home who are working with these children, youth and families.

Barbara Duffield: If McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth is no longer funded, very simply, children and youth who are homeless will struggle to attend any school at all. It would remove basic access to education. There is a notion of returning education to the states. If McKinney-Vento is defunded, it will be returning children and youth who are homeless to shelters, to the streets, to couches. It’ll take us back more than 30 years, to when children who were homeless couldn’t even get into school, moved around because they didn’t have the right and the ability to stay in the same school, and there were not dedicated professionals to help them connect to other sources. So it would be a catastrophic loss, not just for students who are some of the most vulnerable students, but for some of the most resilient, amazing, accomplished students in our nation. So without sugarcoating it whatsoever, this would be a catastrophic loss that would essentially mean that many children and youth, maybe even most children and youth who are experiencing homelessness, would lack very basic access to education and therefore would be more likely to continue to experience homelessness as adults.

Kate Miller: Thank you for articulating so well, just how much is at stake for those students and their families.

Barbara Duffield: If listeners are working with their McKinney-Vento programs in any capacity, whether it’s a liaison, a shelter partner, early childhood partner, higher education partner, there truly is no substitute for directly communicating with policymakers the importance of this program. That can seem very daunting, especially right now in a time when lots of houses are on fire and there’s a lot of advocacy happening, but I would offer that SchoolHouse Connection can help. We are regularly doing, we making appointments, we are training people, we are setting up meetings, we’re even facilitating them. So if the longer term investment is keeping this program alive, if it’s getting involved in that, I would say don’t be shy about trying to find a way to communicate and educate, because we’re educators. We need to educate policymakers and if you can’t do it because of your position, then think about your Rotary, your Kiwanis, your faith-based partners, others who are in a position to do that. So advocacy is number one. Again, the point about educating, there are just so many people who still don’t know that children and youth are experiencing homelessness and the role of schools. So in whatever way that takes shape, it could be school boards, could be city councils, again, other partners. But I find when McKinney-Vento professionals tell their stories and describe the program across the political spectrum, it’s pretty eye-opening and there’s nobody who wants to see kids out of school. There’s nobody who wants to see kids continue to experience homelessness. So telling those stories to as many people as possible and if you’re not connected to a McKinney-Vento program, if you’re a community partner listening to this, reach out and ask what they need. You know, what do they need? You know, they may have all the coats they need for winter but they don’t have anything for summer. So don’t make assumptions. They may have everything they need for high school kids, but nothing for the younger kids that they’re working with. It may be the opposite. They may have strollers, but they don’t have materials to help students who are going off to college. So, if you’re a community partner, really reach out to ask your school district, people who work in school division, we’re in Virginia, school division, what it is that they need and how you can best partner to support their work.

Kate Miller: Barbara, thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights and experience with us today. To our listeners, if you’d like to learn more about Barbara’s work and about SchoolHouse Connection, you can visit schoolhouseconnection.org. You can also visit projecthopevirginia.org to learn more about what’s happening right here in Virginia or to find your local division’s McKinney-Vento liaison here in Virginia.

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