At the margins of every city and every town are people who do not know, or can not trust, where they will sleep. They live in tents and cars, on the couches of overstuffed apartments, or in shelters. These are places that do not, and can not, announce themselves, because homeless people are mistreated. Their tents and shelters are all too often driven out by neighbors who demand that homelessness stay out of sight and out of mind. Among this mistreated population are families with children – roughly 28% of homeless people at the last count – and unaccompanied youths – roughly 5%(NAEH, 2023). This kind of data, from the annual Point in Time Count, is often regarded as a gross undercount (KCHRA, 2023). For every counted homeless person, there are others who avoid social workers out of fear, and many more people at risk eviction or foreclosure(King County, 2023), or who couch-surf with family and friends without seeking social services. What homelessness reveals is the structure of poverty in the United States: it is a racialized phenomena, with groups like Pacific Islanders and African Americans experiencing drastically increased rates of homelessness (NAEH, 2023), and it affects vulnerable groups especially, like the elderly, the disabled, and the young (Meissner, 2023). If, as educators, we intend to address the harms of poverty, racism, and ableism, we would do well to focus on unsheltered students, changing education “from the margins to the center.” (hooks, 1984)

To understand how we can serve unhoused students, I have chosen to highlight and discuss the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, and in particular its programming related to unhoused students. This coalition formed in 1979, bringing together  “local shelter providers, city staff, advocates, and others who witnessed homelessness came together to advocate and direct resources to a growing crisis.” Since then, the coalition has acted to advocate for policy that addresses the needs of unhoused people and addresses the underlying causes of homelessness. Their membership includes over 50 organizations, spanning both massive organizations like the Salvation Army and respected grassroots orgs like El Centro De La Raza. Tax filings indicate that the Coalition incorporated as its own independent not for profit entity in 2018 (Roberts, 2023), though it is clear from press documentation that they have been active long before that time.

Their work as a coalition includes a few programs that address unhoused students specifically. The Coalition provides frequent trainings for educators and other service providers on how to help homeless students, in particular by understanding the rights of homeless students laid out in the McKinney-Vento Act. For the past 33 years, they have also provided backpacks and new school supplies to unhoused students through their Project Cool For Back to School program. They estimate that over 36,500 students have been assisted through this program, with over 1,400 of them being served this year. Beyond these very concrete interventions, the Coalition engages in broader policy advocacy – recent pushes have included calling on Seattle city and King County budgets to increase funding for shelters and renewing the Seattle housing levy (SKCCH, 2023)- which benefit unhoused students in a less targeted way.

In posing the question, “what could this organization do better,” I find myself humbled. Advocating for unhoused students, and unhoused people in general, is incredibly difficult in the Seattle area. Housing justice is caught in between crushingly high housing costs (and entrenched real estate interests who like it that way), and the absence of a progressive tax base in Washington State (and massive corporations who like it that way.) Policy changes that would change the funding landscape – like an employee hours tax promoted by Coalition leaders in 2018 (Daugaard, 2018) – are incredibly difficult to get through. That employee hours tax was eventually implemented, after a four year battle over a previous “head tax” on Seattle businesses, with modestly positive results (Nickelsburg, 2022). With progressive policy being so hard won, it makes sense to focus on proven tools: directly giving kids part of what they need, and training adults to make the best use of existing laws. With educational inequity especially, legal protections for students often are far more robust than practices on the ground. Using a “know your rights” kind of approach allows legal protections for unhoused students to have real power behind them. However, I found that the Coalition’s campaigns included no mention of recent progressive campaigns targeting the roots of homelessness: the I-135 campaign for a social housing developer, and Council Member Sawant’s proposal for rent control in Seattle. Campaigns like these address the roots of housing insecurity directly, by using public power to make housing more affordable, if not a guaranteed right. Now that I-135 has been passed, the Coalition on Homelessness could lend powerful support to guarantee that the Seattle Social Housing Developer is properly funded and staffed. Nothing would assist unhoused students more than a stable, guaranteed home.

Information about the Coalition was readily available, and well documented in the press. Their website provided news stories and op-eds from staff going back to 2010, documenting both advocacy in education and the work of Project Cool. However, it was difficult to find documentation of their work prior to that time. Through searching newspaper records, I was able to find that this is because of a name change; during the late 80s and 90s they were the Seattle King County Coalition For the Homeless. The name change, however, is arbitrary. Documentation from this time demonstrates Coalition members speaking out against anti-homeless backlash politics (Associated Press, 1993) and urging for emergency funding during times of inadequate shelter (Associated Press, 1990). The Coalition on Homelessness has a solid record of advocating for the rights of the unhoused, without any red flags I could see. Their tax filings indicate a very ordinary, small non-profit, with an executive director earning about 100k per year (Roberts, 2023) – a modest salary for a Seattle area ED.