Evaluating the Impact of a Joint School-Housing Agency Homelessness Prevention Initiative on Children’s Educational Outcomes

Background and Purpose: The number of families with children experiencing homelessness increased by 33% between 2016 and 2024, which is especially concerning given evidence documenting the adverse effects of housing instability on an children’s educational outcomes. Partnerships between school districts and housing agencies that seek to prevent homelessness may help mitigate these negative educational impacts. Yet, there has been limited attempt to assess the impact of homelessness prevention interventions—whether delivered through school-housing agency partnerships or more broadly—on children’s educational outcomes. We address this gap by evaluating the impact of the Early Homelessness Intervention and Prevention (EHIP) program—a homelessness prevention initiative implemented through a partnership between a large, urban public school district and a nonprofit housing services provider—on student attendance, school mobility, and academic achievement.

Methods: We used several school district administrative data sources to identify a group of 154 students who were referred to EHIP during the 2021-2022 school year and a comparison group of 245 students who were at-risk of homelessness. We also obtained several outcome measures for the EHIP and comparison group students during the subsequent school year (i.e. 2022-2023) from these administrative data sources including: student attendance rate, chronic absenteeism, any change in school and any non-normative school change between school years, and student performance on statewide standardized tests in English language arts, math and science. To minimize the threat of selection bias in comparing outcomes between the EHIP and comparison group students, we used a propensity scoring approach known as inverse probability treatment weighting (IPTW) to balance the two groups with respect to the following covariates: age, grade level, gender, race/ethnicity, receipt of special education services, and number of siblings. We then incorporated these weights into regression models in which we examined the relationship between EHIP referral and each of our outcomes.

Results: Students referred to EHIP during the 2021-2022 school year had a significantly higher attendance rate than comparison group students (86.7% vs. 81.7%) in the following school year, although there was not a significant difference between the two groups in terms of the rate of chronic absenteeism. Similarly, there was no significant difference between the two groups with respect to our measures of school mobility. Students in the EHIP group were more likely than those in the comparison group to

meet performance expectations on standardized tests in English, math and science but these differences were not statistically significant—likely due to small sample sizes as these tests are only administered to students in select grades.

Conclusions and Implications: This is the first study to our knowledge to evaluate the impact of a homelessness prevention program on educational outcomes. Our finding that referral to a school-housing agency homeless prevention program is associated with improved attendance underscores the potential value of expanding the availability of such interventions and leveraging schools as a key platform for preventing homelessness among families at risk of housing loss.