Lisa Ann Abernathey,
Henrico County Public Schools

Kate: Welcome to the Project Hope Virginia Podcast. Empowering Voices in Homeless Education in McKinney-Vento.

Homelessness for children and youth in the U.S. can often look very different than the stereotypical image that comes to mind. These students are rarely sleeping on the streets. In fact, students experiencing homelessness may go unnoticed if teachers and other school staff don’t know which signs to look for. Identifying students experiencing homelessness is a critical process because they have certain educational rights. The Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program, part of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, was originally passed in 1987 and ensures these students are identified and connected to the supports they need to succeed in school.

The McKinney-Vento definition of homelessness extends beyond students who are sleeping on the streets or in shelters. This federal law’s education definition of homelessness also includes students and families who are staying in motels due to the lack of other options and those who are staying with family or friends due to loss of housing or economic hardship. This broader definition of homelessness guarantees that students living in these situations can experience educational stability despite their high mobility.

McKinney-Vento requires that students experiencing homelessness are given certain educational rights, such as the right to remain enrolled at their school of origin or to immediately enroll in their local school, even without required forms and medical records. They’re also given the right to transportation, even across division lines, and the right to access free school meals and other needed resources. Every school district across the country is required to appoint a liaison to ensure that these requirements are upheld.

I’m Kate Miller, training and communication specialist with Project Hope, Virginia, the office of the State Coordinator for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. Our office assists liaisons across the Commonwealth in the work they do to support students experiencing homelessness. We want to share their work and perspectives to promote a better understanding of homelessness in Virginia. We’re grateful to have our Hope hero for this edition of the podcast. Joining us today, Lisa Ann Abernathey is the educational specialist for McKinney-Vento from Henrico County Public Schools in Virginia. And she’ll be sharing her experience as a liaison with us.

Kate: Thanks for joining us, Lisa Ann.

Lisa: Thank you, my pleasure.

Kate: Let me jump into it. First question for you—and that’s if you could please tell us how long you’ve been a liaison, as well as the number of McKinney-Vento students that you serve in Henrico County.

Lisa: So I started with the McKinney-Vento team, actually in 2017, had been with Henrico County seven years at that point serving at-risk populations. Joined the team in 2017 and then in January of 2021, was named liaison. Last school year, we served just over 1300 students under the McKinney-Vento program.

Kate: How do you think that comes as a surprise to a lot of people who might be listening, that you have 1300 students?

Lisa: I think it indeed does, yes. Even if they’re not just from folks who are outside of Henrico County. I think it shocks more so the folks who are within Henrico County because we are an outwardly affluent county. And so often, people will say when they ask me, what do you do for a living? And I tell them, and I say, you know, this is how many students we share, they’re very surprised. “Oh, I had no idea that we had homelessness in Henrico County.” So it does come as a shock.

Kate: Right. It’s right in their backyard, essentially.

Lisa: Right. Yes.

Kate: And I know that many of the barriers that those students face are varied because all of their experiences are so unique. But can you share some of the more significant challenges that you’ve seen these students facing in your work?

Lisa: What we’re seeing right now is a really big challenge for our students, in terms of their educational stability, is the degree of mobility that they are experiencing, right? There is a really high degree of mobility. In Henrico County, we do have a lot of hotels where our families stay, but we also have an ordinance in Henrico County that pretty much forces them to move every 29 days. There are some hotels that kind of want to stay even a little more under that ordinance requirement. So we have families that will move every two or three weeks, which makes it very difficult for our students to stay stable.

There’s a lack of shelter space in the greater Richmond area, like there is everywhere. That’s not a problem that’s unique to us. But everywhere there’s a lack of shelter space. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen an increase in the identification of unaccompanied homeless youth. And what we really find is that for our youth who are under age 18, there aren’t supports, there aren’t places for these students who are basically on their own. There’s really not anything that the community can offer or that social services can offer. So that’s been a real challenge for us over the last couple of years.

Kate: So I know that because of all those barriers that you just listed, the high mobility, especially with your older youth, one of the essential things that you need to do first is identify them. And so I know with the back-to-school season, your program has a lot of different programming and activities going on in the summer to make sure that those students get identified and are enrolled in school. Can you talk a little bit about what you all have been up to this summer?

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. So we really wanted to get ahead of that identification piece before last school year even ended. So we started by creating letters that we sent out to all of our families. Every student who was identified received a letter that talked about what next year, the upcoming 24/25 school year, might look like for them. Like if you secured stable housing, we are celebrating with you and this is what you can do to make sure you enroll in school, right? If you’re heading to sixth grade or ninth grade, this is where we’re going to need you to go to talk to school personnel, and this is how we’re going to support you. If you still think you’re experiencing homelessness, this is what we need you to do by this date.

So we started early on, and that was mid-April when we started sending those letters out to our families. Then as we started getting those letters back, we started making phone calls like, “Oh, it was returned to me, hey, where are you at? What’s going on and how can we come to you? How can we find you? What you got going on?”

But also in those letters, wasn’t just the information about what they could do to prepare for the upcoming school year. There was a flier for our big summer events, and so we call them our summer pop-ups. Basically, it’s kind of like a backyard family barbecue event, just in the parking lot of area hotels. And we do three of those in July, three consecutive Thursdays, where we pop up at a local hotel, and we have, we’ve got food on the grill, we’ve got a DJ, we do dancing, we’ve got games. But we also have a table set up where we do eligibility and identification right on the spot.

So we talked to our families right there who were in the hotels at the moment. Get them to complete their McKinney-Vento eligibility, have our conversation, understand their needs about transportation, have them fill out forms or cards like, “Do you need clothing? Do you need shoes? What can we do to support you to make sure your kids are ready for day one?” All of that takes place right there in the parking lot.

We invite our sister divisions, surrounding divisions to come out and join us because we share students across these county lines all of the time. We have students living in hotels in their area and vice versa. So come join us. Sit right here with us, and you can talk to your students and get them set up and ready. And then we have community partners. We had over 20 vendors that showed up every week to serve our families. So we had the Department of Social Services, we had 4-H extension, we had faith-based community partners, we had community-based counseling partners, and we also had a lot of our division in-division partners. So student support and wellness, family and community engagement, student health services, all there to wrap around our students and our families to identify those needs early. Help them identify resources so that they can be ready to go.

Kate: That’s a lot to unpack because you all are just doing so much to make sure these students are ready for school. And I just love how proactive you’re being and sending out those eligibility letters early on so that you can identify those families who may have moved and may not have notified you about it. And also just, it’s so heartening to see that you’re involving families and parents and meeting them where they’re at, where they’re living, and also inviting your neighboring divisions who might be a part of that student’s journey, as well as all of your community partners and other staff in your own division. Just really making it so that the student is set up as best that they can be to have a successful year.

Lisa: Absolutely. And I’ll go back a little bit. I hesitate to call them pop-ups. Right. Because that gives the idea that, oh, we just show up, and it magically happens, right? That’s what we want it to look like. Right? And that’s certainly the vibe and the feel because we want, we want our students and our families in that moment to connect authentically to the people who are here to serve them. So we want it to be casual and fun and, a moment where they can kind of, you know, just exhale a moment and have a little sense of normality and some fun. But to get to that kind of vibe takes months of planning. Right? And so, we start in January, securing our locations, talking to our vendors, making sure we’ve got the grant funding necessary to purchase all the things to have a great event. And then the weeks up to that, not just the letter that goes out to our families, but then we also have staff who go out to these hotels, and as the hotels will let us, we knock on the doors, we invite people to come join us. So every week, the Tuesday before that Thursday event, we’re out there, we’ve got fliers in hand. We’re knocking on doors. “Hey, come see us! Come join us. Come party with us and hang out for the morning.”

So, while it’s a pop-up, we show up and take over the parking lot for a few hours. The planning that goes into it is not at all a pop-up kind of thing. It takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of determination, and it takes a lot of purpose to go ahead and have an event that will really pull it all together that way to properly serve.

Kate: Right. Well, it’s clear you have a vision for your event. And it’s also thank you for pointing out the logistics involved because I think for other liaisons listening, it’s a great illustration of the work that needs to go into events like this, but also the payoff at the end, too. So I think that’s really great.

Beyond getting McKinney-Vento students enrolled in school, can you talk about some of the programming that you and your team do throughout the whole school year to make sure that students are supported throughout the year after they’ve been enrolled and after they start school?

Lisa: Sure. So, of course, we want to make sure the basics are taken care of, right. And certainly, munity partner and make sure that they’re not going hungry in the evenings or on the weekend.the basics that are required under federal law. So we’ve got our transportation to and from their schools of origin. We do that with our, you know, partnering with our pupil transportation department in Henrico. We do contract transportation. We also have gas card support that we provide. We’ve got backpacks and supplies. We’ve got hygiene kits that are donated by faith-based community partners. We work with Backpacks of Love so that all of our students can have weekly deliveries of nonperishable items. Because they get breakfast and lunch at school, but they get hungry at night too, and on the weekend. So, we’re able to work with that community partner and make sure that they’re not going hungry in the evenings or on the weekend.

We do have our clothing closet where we provide brand-new clothing and shoes, and it’s like the stuff that students want to wear, right? Mr. Green, who’s on our team, has a wonderful sense of style. He’s very connected to our youth, so he has a great vision for what would make them feel confident and comfortable walking in the doors to the school and standing up in front of their peers, right where they feel like they belong, where they know they belong. Brand new shoes that go to our students. We just did an event Wednesday where we had a local Foot Locker open their store to our families beforehand, like early in the morning, and we had 59 students come in who got to just check out the walls and Foot Locker and pick the shoe they wanted off the shelf and go up to the register. And we checked them out and they went on their merry way. Really happy, really excited to go to school.

Kate: That’s so awesome.

Lisa: So, love what our clothing closet is able to do. We do a lot of advocating for our students. We actually have t-shirts as a team that says McKinney-Vento. It says “MV Team: The loudest voice in the room,” because our students and our families are in survival mode, right, there in crisis. So when you ask them, you talk, especially when you talk about chronic absenteeism, “Don’t you know how important it is to come to school?” Yeah. Somewhere in their soul they know. But that’s not what they’re dealing with right now. That’s not the most important piece in their life, right? They’re trying to survive. They’re trying to make it.

So we come in and kind of advocate both in terms of, you know, this is a trauma-informed approach to serving students in crisis. But also let’s talk about accommodations. Let’s talk about flexible ways to completion. Let’s talk about different ways that we can support. How can we modify assignments, how can we make a safe place in the school for them? How can we talk about restorative justice when there’s behavior that’s associated? Because trauma, behavior, it all kind of goes together, right? So we do a lot of advocating on behalf of our students as well.

But we also do a lot of home visits. There are some families that we just want to check in with all the time, and there are some students that we want to check in with on a weekly basis. So there’s a whole lot of connecting to support chronic absenteeism, we did some challenges this year. We did one winter attendance challenge because we know that attendance somewhere around winter break it kind of falls off just before and falls off just after. Right? So we took a subset of students who were trending toward chronic absenteeism, and we just put out messages using our district-wide communications piece. And we said, “Hey, look, you matter. We miss you when you’re not here. Let’s do a little challenge. Let’s have a little fun.” And we ran it for three weeks, and all we asked our students was, “I just want you to show up four out of five days,” because, for some of these students who are identified, that was tough, right? Right. “Just show up four out of five days,” and at the end of the week, we’re going to put everybody who met that goal, we’re just going to put you in a hat, per se, right? And we’re going to draw names, and we’re going to bring you dinner. The choice, the student’s choice. You tell us what you want. And we were thrilled to see how that impacted, we saw… Now, when you say 1 or 2%, right, you’re like, “Oh, that’s such a tiny percentage.” But when you’re talking chronic absenteeism, that’s huge. And we saw their attendance increase. The coolest part about it, though, is the attendance maintained after those three weeks were over.

So we do kinda try to make things kind of fun for them. And then when they do hit those goals, we celebrate them, right? We will go to the students. We had little packets of candy. Now, our high school students are very particular about the candy that they like, so what we thought was cool was okay, but we’ve gotten some great feedback to understand what they would prefer. Their changing needs. Yes, yes, we understand completely, but we made packets, and we wrote notes to them, and we said, “I see you, you did great and I’m so proud of you. Let’s do it again.” And we go to them and meet them right there at school one-on-one. Or if we’ve got other students who need some mentoring, right, we’ve got homeroom, we’ve got their study halls, we’ve got lunch. We’ll actually go to school and just sit with them. And so we’re kind of, it’s all about connecting. It’s all about being with them. It’s all about seeing them. It’s all about just letting them know that they’ve got, you’ve got somebody in your corner who understands, who’s working to understand, and who just wants to see you reach every potential that you’ve got because we believe in you.

Kate: That’s awesome. I love that you are aware, first of all, that so many of these students and their families are in survival mode. And so coming to school may not be the priority, and you’re making sure that those basic needs are met, that they get to do basic, normal things that students are doing as well, and getting to pick out a favorite pair of shoes before they go back to school. But also really going so much more above and beyond that and with activities you’re doing to address absenteeism and making sure that students know that they’re wanted at school and that it’s a safe place for them and that you want them to be there. And then beyond that, not just for academic support, but offering them mentoring. All of these things are keeping our McKinney-Vento students coming back to school. And I think it’s just so exciting to hear about all the programming that you and your staff are putting together. And I know how much hard work that you all are putting into it. So, that’s very clear.

I want to ask next, what’s your approach to raising awareness among school staff and administrators about the needs of your McKinney-Vento students and how they can help these students from the positions that they hold?

Lisa: So we are really fortunate to serve as part of the Department of Federal Programs and Foundational Learning. And our director is really committed to making sure that we are invited to tables where discussions are happening surrounding policy and procedure, culture, and school climate. So we’re very engaged, very involved that way. We are very deliberate about doing professional development for our staff overall. We meet with our enrollment staff several times a year, actually. We meet with them, we meet with our school psychologists, our social workers, our nurses, our family advocates. We’re out in front talking about what does homelessness look like, you know, how does it affect a student’s ability to do school. What can you do to make that easier and help us break down the barriers that our students are facing because of homelessness?

We also had the opportunity this summer to be in front of our administrators, our principals, and our admin assistants, and our leadership in the school teams. We were able to sit there and talk to them about decreasing chronic absenteeism and increasing student engagement. So, we did professional development there at our Summer Leadership Academy this July. And from that, we were then actually invited now to join, when school gets started up next week, we’re invited to join some faculty member meetings to talk to teachers. Like, what does homelessness look like in the classroom? How does it affect a student’s ability to do work, to complete work, to finish assignments? How do we modify language, especially if we are looking at our littles, like, what do we do? How do we say in the classroom when we know that we have a student who’s experiencing homelessness? How can we make sure they feel seen and heard? So we’re going to do some professional development that way with our teachers.

The other piece that we do is we really try to get in front of the school teams that, as a whole, who are directly serving our students. So last fall, we looked at our top 16 schools who had the most students identified. So, we have 72 sites in Henrico County. 16 of our schools held over 50% of our students who were identified as eligible under McKinney-Vento. That’s huge. And so, we decided to invite anyone in the school who wanted to be part of the meeting come in and talk to us. We’re going to put a whole morning aside. And so we typically at the table, we have, of course, the school admin. We had counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, family advocates, anybody who wanted to talk about supporting these students, welcome to join us, and our team went student by student down the list of who they had in their school. We talked about, here’s some of the challenges. Not sharing the whole story. Nobody needs to know the whole story, but because of the story, here are some of the things they’re facing. And here’s some of the things that we’re doing to help support that. And here’s what we see as their strengths as well.

Now tell us, what do you see as their strengths? What are you concerned about, and how can we partner together to wrap around these students? And we went student by student in their school. That was so incredibly impactful because it really built a sense of unity as a division around these students and really helped everybody in that room and around that table understand that it’s going to take all of us to make this happen for these kiddos. And the other piece that it did was we kept promoting to them, they call us, just call me, call me early, call me often. Right. And in your 25 students who are here, I may only be looking at the top five for attendance or whatever. But if you have a concern, if it’s important to you because you think it’s important to this student, then it’s important to me. And you just need to call us early. Call us often so we can meet together and kind of resolve that problem. So we’re going to absolutely carry that on this school year.

Kate: I love that. I love how you’re involving all school staff because it does take a village, and these students are not just interacting with you and people in your program, but with teachers, with counselors, and so going through each student on your list one by one and making sure that each of their individual needs are being met and talked about, and just sure that those students feel that and feel that whole group of staff behind them when they go to school every day. So it’s so exciting to hear all the work that you’re putting into training staff and also making sure that you’re at the right table and that your administrators really understand our students and the barriers that they face as well so that they then do have this full support of the staff in your division. So that’s really wonderful to hear.

For anyone new to their role as a liaison, what advice would you give them as they begin this significant role?

Lisa: Practically, be very deliberate about tracking your data. Track everything. Numbers don’t lie. And you can use those numbers not just to evaluate what your program is doing and if you’re doing it effectively, but you can change course if you need to in the middle, you know, especially as you’re trying to innovate and do new things. And if the data shows you that it’s not necessarily working or could work better, do not be afraid to change course. Right? Just move. Move in the direction that the data shows you to go. Data is also invaluable when it comes to re-educating surrounding misconceptions because we do run across a lot of that, right? I think everybody does in education. And when you start to show the data in response to some of those misconceptions, then you can start to have productive conversations. So, track your data. It’s critically important. So that’s kind of practically, right?

Ideologically, understand that a program will not change your life, but a relationship will. So you need to be very deliberate about meeting people where they are. And that’s not just the people whom you are serving, but the people with whom you are serving. Right, so meet people in their space with respect, with empathy, with compassion, and work to develop those relationships because it’s the authentic relationships that will change everything for the people with whom you’re in contact. I would say be loud. Be the loudest voice in the room for your students. Be bold. Think big, dream big. Right, make the asks. Build the partnerships. Find your like-minded allies. Recognize that there is absolutely no way in the world you can do this alone. You really have to have your community, your village around you. So work to find the partnerships, and build those up, and allow people to come in and serve your students with the gifts that they have, right? And then never doubt the potential of your students. And when somebody does, whether it’s the student who’s doubting, the family who’s doubting, or division partners who are doubting, just remind them. No, there is potential in this student because there’s potential in every single student. And every student is gifted and every student is purposed, not for all the same things. They just need the avenue and the support to shine. So just be bold, be loud, and surround yourself with people who have that same vision and that same purpose.

Kate: All great pieces of advice that you’re obviously implementing so well in Henrico.

I thought it would be really nice to end with asking you to share a story, a success story of one of your students, if you don’t mind?

Lisa: Not at all. We are incredibly proud of our class of 2024. Of the seniors that we had identified, 90% of them graduated.

That’s crazy. That’s huge.

Kate: Amazing.

Lisa: With everything they were facing. That is amazing, and we were thrilled. And as soon as I saw the question, right, when I thought, I know exactly… One student immediately came to mind. She was identified at the beginning of the school year as an unaccompanied homeless youth, 17 years old, living with an aunt, and there was a lot of turmoil in her life. And she was moving constantly. And because of that turmoil and because of moving and all that stress, then she started experiencing a lot of health concerns as well. And it was hard for us at first to keep up with her. And when we would find her, like she moved so often, we would find her, and we would set up transportation. And by the time that transportation would be in place, she had had to have moved again. And we’re like, okay, we’ve really got to connect to this student. And then the other thing that we knew is we knew that she turned 18 in February, and we were afraid with everything else that she had going on at that point, she would give up on her high school education, and we didn’t want that to happen. So our McKinney-Vento social worker was very deliberate about connecting to her, and she went to the school and met with her several times and started building that trust relationship. Right? Not even talking about attendance. “I want to talk to you about attendance, and I want to talk to you about graduation, and we’ll talk about you. What do you need? How can I support you? How can I help you move forward for what you want?” And it was really beautiful to watch that relationship grow. And as it did then, the student began to reach out to the social worker. So they had a lot of text conversations, whether it was, “Hey, Mrs. Rockwell, I need some more supplies,” or “Mrs. Rockwell, I’m hungry,” or “Mrs. Rockwell, do you have 5 minutes for me to talk to you about what just happened?” right? Or “Hey, Mrs. Rockwell, I moved. I need my car to come here now.” Right. So they had this wonderful relationship. The other thing that our social worker did was go into the school and say, “The traditional thing is not going to work for this student. We’ve got to be really creative to get her to completion.”

The team heard, agreed, was on board, and so the student got enrolled in a program where she could do her courses online at her own pace so she could still work, because that was a reality for her. She had to be able to support herself at 17, right? So we were able to get the school team on board with their full support, get her in that program. And the student started working, right? And Ms. Rockwell would check in with her and say, “I see you. I see what you did yesterday. Way to go. What’s the plan for today?” And then that led to the student going, “Hey, Mrs. Rockwell, did you see I completed this? Did you see I got this much done in my class? Did you see I made this grade on this test?” So it was this great back and forth, full of support. She didn’t graduate in May, but that’s okay. She didn’t quit. She didn’t quit. And we were able then to help her complete the paperwork she needed to get done to be able to do a summer school session, to finish what was left of her online courses. And she was going to graduate in July. And the invitation to join her graduation went to our social worker. “I really want you there because if it hadn’t been for you and hadn’t been for McKinney-Vento, I’d have quit as soon as I turned 18.” And now she’s a high school graduate. And for me, like, I know what that means for her as she tries to break out of the cycle of homelessness. I know the importance of that. But even more important is she knows she’s got people in her corner, right? That relationship will still be there, but she also now knows what she’s capable of. And I hope she never forgets that. So that, it makes my hair stand up. It’s just, it’s such a cool story. She did so much and came so far and we’re so proud of her.

Kate: That’s an amazing story. And it’s all because of the work of that social worker and you and your team and just that, all of those wraparound services that that student was able to have because of it. And I know that there are many, many other stories like that in your division because of all of the hard work that you do as the McKinney-Vento Liaison.

So, thank you for giving us your time today. It gave me so much hope to listen to all of the activities that you’re doing in your division. And I know it was helpful for everyone else listening as well. So thank you so much.

Lisa: Thank you so much. What an honor to join you. I really appreciate it.