When Destiny was faced with eviction, she was a sophomore attending a Baltimore City public high school that specializes in preparing students for careers in the health care industry. She had chosen that school because she dreamed of becoming a pharmacist. When the heat and power in her rental house were cut off by a landlord intent on forcing her and her mother out, they refused to leave—charging their phones at the park across the street and using a cooler and Bunsen burner as their kitchen. Her mother was desperate to provide adequate housing for both of them, but she could not find another affordable rental unit on the bus line her daughter had to take to get to school on time.
This type of story is very familiar to Felicia Moore at Renaissance Academy in Baltimore. Moore has seen first-hand the impact of unstable housing on students. In fact, growing up in Baltimore, she was not far from the experience herself. She knows that in the school community that she serves, there are families and children squatting in buildings or facing eviction or simply unhoused altogether. As a community school coordinator, her job is to connect with families, develop relationships, and find out how the school can help meet their needs. At the same time, as a school employee, she is very concerned about the school’s need to improve its attendance statistics and academic outcomes. Schools are scrutinized over these data points, and can be threatened with sanctions, severe oversight, or even closure if they do not make progress.
While similar schools were trying to incentivize students with prizes for perfect attendance, Moore knew that her school’s outcome data did not exist in a vacuum. She was aware that the attendance numbers were intimately tied to the housing stability of students’ families.
Moore is a trained social worker and knows the impact of unstable housing on families and young people. “They may show up to school late or not at all because they have to come from far away, or without clean clothes because there is no access to laundry facilities,” she says. What is more, those same students will have difficulty learning: “If you don’t have your basic needs met, you cannot learn.”
Moore’s observations are backed up by research. As Megan Gallagher, a researcher at the Urban Institute, told EdSource, “We know that low-quality housing—housing that has mold or electrical issues—is associated with lower kindergarten readiness scores. That causal relationship has been established… Spending too much on rent is connected to increased behavioral problems. Housing instability, and I would really put homelessness and housing insecurity into the housing instability bucket, really affects school stability and then has an effect on math and reading scores.” On the other hand, as Gallagher and her colleagues wrote in a policy brief, “When housing is safe and high-quality, stable and affordable, and located in well-resourced, low poverty neighborhoods, children tend to do better in school, parents report improved mental health, and the whole family benefits.”
To address the adverse impact of outside-of-school factors like housing instability, some states, including Maryland, are systematically investing in a “whole child approach” across their school districts. One such approach, community schools, leverages local partnerships to meet the outside-of-school needs of students and their families. Advocates for this approach recognize that by addressing issues such as food and housing insecurity, schools can mitigate barriers to learning and thus be better able to educate students. Maryland made a massive investment in community schools in 2021, and now there are 621 of them serving families living in concentrated poverty. Community schools have community school coordinators on staff who interact with families daily and hear about their direct needs, whether employment, health care, or housing. Not surprisingly, lack of safe, stable, and affordable housing is an issue that comes up often.
In her position as a community school coordinator, Moore heard about housing struggles so often that she thought a bolder solution was required than just sending families to an agency that would typically only have temporary solutions to offer. Working with the Center for Restorative Change (part of the University of Maryland School of Social Work), Moore and other community school leaders who recognized the clear connection between the local housing crisis and the students’ ability to access their education, began to organize parents.
They began during the pandemic, by conducting one-on-one meetings with residents to understand what their struggles were, as well as to learn some of the history that they did not know. Connecting the housing and education sectors was not the original intent, but Moore says that housing was a consistent theme among the families. It was not hard to organize families around housing in a community like West Baltimore, facing such high rates of eviction and homelessness. She worked with parent leaders and a group called Social Advocates for Social Change, a coalition of MSW students at the University of Maryland School of Social Work that works to promote equity and justice through public policy. Together, they brainstormed ways to respond more systematically to the problem of housing insecurity.
It was no surprise that housing issues were a theme for the parents they were organizing. By 2022, federal funding that had provided eviction prevention funds in Maryland during the COVID pandemic was drying up. Housing advocates, some community school coordinators, and local political leaders anticipated the funding cliff and began advocating for “$175 million in state funds to extend the emergency rental assistance program through June 2024,” according to reporting in the Baltimore Banner. This was a difficult ask at the time for the Republican governor, Larry Hogan, but their advocacy was somewhat successful and in 2023 resulted in the passage of Senate Bill 848, which established a statewide housing voucher program, with funding of $10 million.
This clearly fell far short of the need, and housing advocates and community school coordinators continued to lobby, citing research which showed that statewide, over 75 percent of low-income tenants were severely cost-burdened in 2023, with children disproportionately affected. In fact, nationwide, children under 5 are the demographic most likely to be threatened by eviction. Additionally, approximately 20 percent of Black renters are threatened with eviction annually, and 1 in 10 is actually evicted. In late 2023, housing advocates began to connect directly with community school coordinators and an organization called MD4CS (Maryland for Community Schools, a statewide coalition that advocates for community school funding). Together, they approached Sen. Shelly Hettleman, who they believed would be sympathetic given her history of supporting housing and education issues.
They strategized ways to make rental assistance more appealing and generated an approach that would route additional housing assistance through the community schools. Those schools were a logical vehicle for this assistance since they serve Maryland’s lowest income families, the renters most likely to be in need of rental assistance. By the 2024 legislative session this strategy was converted into Senate Bill 370 and House Bill 428, which were cross-filed by Sen. Hettleman and Delegate Vaughn Stewart, both of whom have been strong advocates of both renters’ rights and education funding. SB 370 required the Department of Housing and Community Development, in consultation with the State Department of Education, to establish a Rental Assistance for Community School Families Fund. Although individuals who were not connected to community schools would not be eligible for the assistance, this was seen as a step in the right direction of providing rental assistance more broadly, and a good companion effort to a separate push to add more unrestricted rental assistance funds to the FY25 state budget.
A positive aspect of tying rental assistance to the community schools was expanding the number of advocates who would support the idea. This established a joint effort between housing advocates and education advocates, who recognized their shared goal of stabilizing housing and benefiting students and families. Housing advocates noted the prevalence of young families among their client bases and education advocates were concerned about the heavy potential cost of eviction to children. Consequently, they recognized that working in silos would simply result in pitting one request for funds against another and so joined forces in fighting for SB 370.
Education advocates connected with Renters United Maryland (RUM) and the newly formed Maryland Eviction Prevention Funds Alliance. Felicia Moore, at Renaissance Academy, organized parent leaders from West Baltimore to testify at the state capitol in support of the bill during the 2024 legislative session. Their testimony was invaluable in demonstrating the far-reaching impact of emergency rental assistance. Moore was able to explain the connection between students facing homelessness and data related to school success. Parent leaders who knew and had the trust of families in need of assistance were able to explain the families’ situations and promote true understanding of the need for support, especially for students whose education was at stake.
While they fell far short of extending the expansive COVID-related rental assistance programs, together housing and education advocates did succeed in securing $2 million in rental assistance funding earmarked for students in community schools, to augment the $10 million in unrestricted rental assistance funds for low-income renters that was also added to the state budget. This win helped increase overall housing stability in Maryland, established rental assistance as a valid goal for education advocates, and boosted parent leaders to engage in more advocacy. However, it is still too early to tell what the total impact will be on families.
[RELATED ARTICLE: Education and Housing Advocates: Better Together, But Too Often Apart]
This year, Maryland is in a budget crisis and once again, funding for both community schools and emergency rental assistance needs support. With the connections forged during the 2024 legislative session, housing and education advocates continue to work together, through ongoing communication and shared advocacy, in support of expanded rental assistance and other bills that will affect school communities in 2025. For example, when RUM organized a listening session in Baltimore City to highlight the need for safe, stable, and affordable housing, the community school coordinators were among the first large groups contacted for support.
Closer to the ground, coordination between housing advocacy organizations and community schools is having an immediate positive impact. The Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland (PBRC) provides free legal representation for low-income tenants facing eviction. Partnership between PBRC and numerous community school coordinators in Baltimore City has resulted in outreach to school communities about tenants’ rights and resources for low-income renters at school food banks and back-to-school events. PBRC looks to the community school coordinators to learn about the specific needs of the community, and the school communities benefit from the resources and easy access to a legal services organization.
Community school coordinators do not always see themselves as advocates, but they are well-poised to be, because they work at the intersection between families and schools. They are the eyes and ears of the community and know the issues that families are contending with. Through their work, they can galvanize parent leaders to fight for more just solutions to the problems poor communities face and encourage the cross-sector organizing that will be needed to lessen the harm of housing insecurity on students.
Community school coordinators monitor a number of issues at once: they hear not only about housing, but also food insecurity, health care needs, and a lack of reliable transportation. In the era of uncertainty ushered in by the Trump administration, many people working with low-income communities are raising alarm bells. That is all the more reason to break down silos and work across sectors to fight for the rights of low-income communities. It will require the kind of relational work we saw among the community schools and housing advocates, especially as we face cuts from the federal level.
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