Abstract
Children who experience homelessness face a host of challenges that threaten their health, development, and ability to succeed in school. Once children enter the public school system, the education subtitle of the federal McKinney–Vento Homeless Assistance Act (42 USC 11431 et seq.) (“McKinney-Vento Act”) facilitates their enrollment and attendance, mitigating barriers to academic achievement that homelessness poses. Unfortunately, the youngest homeless children continue to struggle to access early care and education programs, most of which operate outside of public school systems. Universal access to early care and education is not yet a reality, which means there are not enough affordable or accessible spaces in early care and education programs to serve all families who need and want services. In that light, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth (NAEHCY) and Cloudburst Consulting Group engaged in parallel and companion studies of both homeless and early childhood providers and parents and families who had recently exited from homelessness to explore related issues of access to and support for early childhood education. This chapter will discuss these two exploratory studies, their findings, and their shared implications for community-based practice and program policy.
Author Note
Data referenced in this chapter are based on two separate studies conducted by: (a) the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth and (b) The Cloudburst Group, under a contract with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Office of Policy Development and Research (Grant#H-21616RG).
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Perlman, S.M., Shaw, S.H., Kieffer, C.H., Whitney, GA.C., Bires, C. (2017). Access to Early Childhood Services for Young Children Experiencing Homelessness. In: Haskett, M. (eds) Child and Family Well-Being and Homelessness. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50886-3_5
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