This article is part of our 2024 contribution to the D.C. Homeless Crisis Reporting Project in collaboration with other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the week.
With less than half of the school year completed, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) has already received notifications from 2,600 public school students who are experiencing some form of housing insecurity — including stints at a local shelter or doubling up with other family members.
Some school leaders, like Nikia Harrod, said they expect the numbers of self-reporting families to increase in the coming weeks and months, especially as she and other DCPS Connected Schools managers help families overcome fear of D.C. Child and Family Services Agency involvement.
“We prioritize building those relationships. Once we do that, families’ housing status comes out,” said Harrod, the Connected Schools manager at John Hayden Johnson Middle School in Southeast. “From there, we’re able to reach out to families to see the resources they need.”
DCPS Connected Schools, a program that has turned public schools into community resource hubs since 2019, has a presence in 20 District public schools, including several within the Anacostia High School and Ballou High School feeder patterns. This is thanks to a combination of local dollars and grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education.
Wards 4, 7 and 8 currently account for the most housing insecure families in the public school system, according to DCPS’ Families and Youth in Transition program. With Fiscal Year 2026 budget deliberations just a few months away, DCPS officials told The Informer that they are evaluating possible areas of additional local investments.
At Johnson Middle School, Harrod, the school’s former social worker, currently serves five families, each of whom she helps navigate the District’s continuum of homeless prevention.
“Circumstances vary. It could be loss of income, family dynamics changing, or the cost of living. The District is extremely expensive,” Harrod said.
Students on Harrod’s caseload receive academic and mental health support, food from the school’s pantry, school uniforms, transportation support and toiletries.
For the John Hayden Johnson Connected Schools manager, maintaining the family unit and reducing truancy counts as a major part of her work.
“If [students] have siblings in other schools, we connect with them to make sure those children are in other programs,” Harrod said. “We have partners we can connect them to, to help alleviate that situation.”
Getting to the Bottom of a Budget Season Mix-up
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget proposal included significant cuts to D.C.’s Rapid Rehousing program, a short-term subsidy intended to help one stabilize housing while working with a case manager to secure permanent accommodations.
By May, when budget season had been well underway, D.C. Department of Human Services (DHS) estimated that 2,200 families were exiting the Rapid Rehousing program. This was around the time of an annual point-in-time count conducted by The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness that recorded a 40% increase in homelessness among District families.
Throughout the budget season, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and D.C. Councilmember Robert White (D-At large) sifted through Bowser’s budget proposal, looking at tax increases, salary lapses, and agency underspending as possible revenue sources for extra vouchers.
As explained by a council staffer who requested anonymity, Mendelson and White funded local vouchers with the use of financial projections submitted by the D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA).
At the beginning of the budget process, the local subsidy portion of the housing authority’s budget experienced a top-down reshuffling to clarify what the staff member called a complicated budgeting system that, for years, didn’t reflect DCHA’ true expenditures. The budgetary revamp, the staff member said, led to a small percentage budget reduction that the Committee on Housing reinvested into the human services and housing portion of DCHA’s and DHS’ budget.
A large part of that reinvestment, the staff member said, funded the more-than-400 vouchers allocated for FY 2025. They went on to tell The Informer that they incorporated this math throughout most of the budget process, up until the council’s final votes on the FY 2025 budget.
Along the way, the staffer said, the committee, and Mendelson in particular, maintained contact with the Executive Office of the Mayor (EOM). EOM raised numerous concerns, albeit nothing about the reconfiguration of DCHA’s local subsidy that funded new vouchers, the council staffer said.
“We left more money than they projected to spend at the time,” the staffer told The Informer. “That was our goal. And we incorporated a 3% growth factor. Through all these votes, we got feedback from the mayor’s office.”
In June, Mendelson and White relished a council-approved Fiscal Year 2025 budget that funded more than 450 Permanent Supportive Housing and Local Rent Supplement Program vouchers.
However, in September, with less than a month before the start of Fiscal Year 2025, the D.C. Department of Human Services (DHS) circulated a letter revealing that it would only be able to match families with only 38 Permanent Supportive Housing vouchers during Fiscal Year 2025.
In the letter, A.D. Rachel Pierre of DHS’ Family Services Administration said the council “swept” resources that DCHA already allocated when it funded the 450 vouchers.
To this day, Mendelson denies that assertion, citing what he called a thorough budget process.
“Everything we did with the budget, including what Councilmember Robert White did with his committee, was double checked and cross checked,” Mendelson said. “We used the agency’s data and assumptions for voucher costs. We tripled checked with the chief financial officer. If we got the numbers wrong, it’s because the agency had the numbers wrong.”
An OFCO representative responding to an Informer inquiry said that, based on the estimated costs DCHA provided, historical trends, and LSRP spending to date, OFCO didn’t see any issues with the council’s FY 2025 budget adjustments.
A staff member in the council’s office of the budget director also confirmed Mendelson’s account. They told The Informer that DCHA, DHS’ associate fiscal officer, and OCFO’s Office of Budget and Planning confirmed, in writing, that the council’s modification to budgets in DCHA and DHS added the vouchers desired while balancing the FY 2025 budget.
Mendelson, who’s currently exploring means of forcing DHS to spend the funds, questioned the timing of the agency’s letter.
“It’s pretty clear that DHS is in a financial freefall,” he told The Informer. “They’re reversing council moves and squeezing contracts and grants to get money and cover overspending. We saw that last December with the SNAP controversy.”
DHS Director Responds to Assertions
DHS Director Laura Zeillinger told The Informer that the agency is helping families secure other affordable housing opportunities in the District to maintain stability.
In regard to the Fiscal Year 2025 local vouchers that DHS and DCHA say they cannot account for, Zeillinger said that DHS doesn’t manage those vouchers, nor did the D.C. Council involve DHS in discussions about them.
“They don’t ask me questions about funds that are in DCHA’s budget because I don’t have authority over there,” Zeillinger said. “Nothing came to me in writing. At no point in their deliberations did they engage with DHS about DCHA’s budget. If they would’ve, I would’ve sought answers…but this was outside of my responsibility, the budget and department I’m charged to lead.”
While Zeillinger acknowledged that DHS had purview over local vouchers in years past, she said that’s not the case for LRSP and permanent supportive housing vouchers.
Instead, she said that DHS only refers families to DCHA for those programs.
As explained by a DCHA representative, a DHS referral alone doesn’t trigger an expenditure. The agency pays rent subsidies to landlords once residents navigate the eligibility process and sign a lease. This means that the DHS-referred families who didn’t sign a lease yet would most likely not be reflected in DCHA’s quarterly financial reports to the CFO.
That includes the April 2024 report that the council’s Committee on Housing used to make FY 2025 budget adjustments. Staffers in the council’s budget director’s office and Committee on Housing said that, since the FY 2025 budget’s passage, DCHA has adjusted its FY 2024 financial projections.
The housing committee staffer said that DCHA cited staff turnover for the different calculations.
A DCHA representative didn’t directly respond to The Informer’s inquiry about what, from their vantage point, spurred any confusion about the D.C. Council’s ability to fund vouchers in FY 2025. They also didn’t speak specifically to the agency’s engagement with the council’s Committee on Housing.
However, the representative said DCHA will take its $163 million in FY 2025 to support as many families as possible, including those who are DHS referrals from previous fiscal years who haven’t signed a lease.
To this day, Zeillinger continues to maintain that the council made the budget snafu without her knowledge.
“We did some back and forth to understand what happened,” Zeillinger told The Informer. “We worked closely to figure out what we could do but when we found there’s no way to fund $7 million, we had to revise our expectations around referrals.
“It’s somehow inferred that DHS should’ve known and told somebody. That’s not how this works,” Zeillinger said. “Sometimes, the council will consult on a budget. Sometimes they don’t even ask at all. This impacts us in execution because we can’t refer people for vouchers that are not funded.”
The Fight Continues to Provide Resources for Unhoused Families
DCPS reported a post-pandemic increase in families, particularly those from Wards 7 and 8, voluntarily reporting their unstable housing situation.
With the 2024-2025 school year in full swing, DCPS’ central office is making headway in expanding Connected Schools’ presence in the public school system. Elementary schools most likely to have a Connected Schools include: Kimball Elementary School, Malcolm X Elementary School and Turner Elementary School.
“We recognized and always knew to be true that our families should view our schools as safe and trusted,” said Paige Hoffman, DCPS’ chief of School Improvement and Supports. “We make sure that there are meaningful engagement opportunities so families can feel comfortable disclosing their status. There’s a big stigma associated with being unhoused and being in transition.”
This summer, more than 1,000 families received notice of the rapid rehousing program exit, while DHS has announced plans to send letters to 900 families this fall.
Makenna Osborn of The Children’s Law Center reported that nearly half of notified families have appealed the decision.
“We had clients with young children going through this process for months of being told they’re going to be exited from this program, or receiving notice of program exit,” Osborn said. “Other families who don’t have legal representation are in the same position trying to navigate losing their rental assistance without any other assistance. Children take on the stress, and that affects their wellbeing.”
While DCHA authorized 1,300 federally funded Housing Choice vouchers for people leaving rapid rehousing, Osborn told The Informer that DHS and DCHA have been slowly processing families, even with events at Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, which provides up to 50 families per day with application assistance.
Such circumstances, she said, demand DHS to act quickly and provide resources to families awaiting vouchers.
“The District is putting families in a tough position… with unnecessary destabilization when we believe that DHS has the resources to extend families for a few months while awaiting vouchers,” said Osborn, policy attorney with The Children’s Law Center.
Osborn explained the particular challenges many families facing housing instability encounter when it comes to attending school.
“We know families receiving exit notices are either leaving their building, their community or the District altogether,” Osborn explained. “Moving in with family or friends isn’t the most stable, and it could mean having to go to school or having a long commute to school.”
Regarding the photo caption above, is “squatters camp” an acceptable way to describe it? That seems prejudiced.