Education Project for Homeless Youth

The Education Project for Homeless Youth, a project of the Washtenaw Intermediate School District, works to ensure students experiencing homelessness enroll, regularly attend and succeed in school.

Each year, more than 600 children and youth are homeless in Washtenaw County and we directly serve 250-300 students, ages 0-21, from the 10 school districts and nine public school academies in the county.

We are funded primarily through the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, reauthorized in January of 2002. The Act guarantees that students who are homeless have equal access to the same free and appropriate public education provided to others.

Service Eligibility

EPHY primarily serves homeless, school-age students. But children ages 0-5 and youth ages 18 and older who do not yet have a high school diploma or GED are also eligible for some support services.

The federal McKinney-Vento Act defines homeless as individuals who lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence. This includes students living in the following situations:

• Emergency shelter or transitional housing
• Motel/hotel
• Campground
• Public or private place not designed for or ordinarily used as regular sleeping accommodation for humans, including cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, and bus or train stations.
• Abandoned in hospital
• Awaiting foster care placement but not yet in foster care
• Shared housing with others due to loss of housing, economic hardship or another, similar reason.

Available Services

• Assist with school enrollment or transportation difficulties.
• Offer advocacy, technical support and guidance in matters involving special education, school discipline and academic difficulties.
• Promote needs and rights of students experiencing homelessness within community.

• Coordinate school transportation and provide funding for stop-gap transportation.
• Offer creative solutions to transportation challenges such as rides to and from after-school tutoring and parent-teacher conferences.

• Distribute school supplies, including backpacks, binders, notebooks, folders, pens, pencils and calculators.
• Provide books through donated materials and gift certificates.

• Provide clothing through referrals such as Warm the Children and gift cards.

• Assist students with emergency school-related financial needs that cannot be met in other ways, such as fees for graduation, field trips and summer school courses.

• EPHY partners with 826michigan to offer free tutoring.

• EPHY works with the Washtenaw Mentoring Coalition to connect youth to mentors.

• EPHY partners with Neutral Zone, a youth-driven teen center, to provide free access to a wide variety of services.
• EPHY also partners with Ozone House, which has a drop-in center in Ypsilanti.

• EPHY coordinates and monitors multiple services to meet the complex needs of unaccompanied youth and students experiencing chronic truancy or homelessness.

• EPHY partners with the Child Care Network to connect families with quality, licensed childcare.
• Connect families to parenting classes and other early childhood resources.

• Work to prevent homelessness by connecting families to community resources.
• Help families access emergency assistance.
• Provide listings of housing options.

• EPHY makes referrals to meet an array of associated needs, including medical, counseling, emergency food and personal items.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Can a student who is homeless be enrolled without records?
A. Yes. In fact, the law requires IMMEDIATE enrollment. Schools CANNOT require proof of residency, immunization or student records for enrollment of students who are homeless.

Q. When a family moves to a homeless situation out of district must they change schools?
A. No. Individual determinations are made based on parents' wishes, length of commute and student's age. Students have the right to receive transportation to the school they last attended if it is determined this is where they should attend.

Q. Does a public school academy have to provide transportation to eligible students who are homeless, even if they do not provide such services to other students?
A. Yes.

Please see www.serve.org/nche for more assistance.

Information on Homelessness and Children

• Families with children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population and more than 1 million children are homeless each year in this country (The National Center for Family Homelessness).In Washtenaw County more than 600 children were estimated to be homeless in a year (Washtenaw County HMIS).
  
  
• Within a single year, 97% of homeless children move, many up to three times (National Center for Family Homelessness). With each change in schools, a student is set back academically by an average of four to six months (Rogers 1991).
  
  
• 75% of runaway and homeless youth have dropped out or will drop out of school (National Network for Runaway and Homeless Youth).
  
  
• Across the country, one in five homeless school-aged children repeats a grade in school, twice the national rate for all children (Homes for the Homeless and The Institute for Children and Poverty).
  
  
• Compared with housed children, children who are homeless experience more developmental delays, anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems, and lower academic achievement (Shinn and Weitzmann 1996).
  
  
• Children without a home are in fair or poor health twice as often as other children, and have higher rates of asthma, ear infections, stomach problems, and speech problems (Better Homes Fund 1999).
  
  

Program Wish List

• Backpacks for all ages
• Scientific calculators
• Binders
• Notebooks, folders
• Pens, pencils, crayons, markers
• Protractors, compasses
• Glue, scissors

• Ann Arbor Transportation Authority student bus passes or tokens

• For any other type of donation, please call first: (734) 994-8100, x 1518.

Donations can be mailed or dropped off at EPHY's office at
Washtenaw Intermediate School District:
1819 S. Wagner Road
P.O. Box 1406
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1406.