Lessons from Real Life: McKinney-Vento Liaisons Share Insights on Disaster Response

“November 8, 2018. Camp Fire started about 6:30 AM. Within 12 hours, the entire community of Paradise, California was completely wiped out. It was absolutely devastating. 93 percent of students in that school district lost their homes or could not return to their homes. We went from having about 1,500 homeless students to over 5,000 students who would be McKinney-Vento eligible as experiencing homelessness overnight.

I’m Meagan Meloy with the Butte County Office of Education in Northern California, about 90 miles north of Sacramento. I am the Homeless Liaison at our County Office of Ed. We have about 30,000 students total in the county, mostly rural. 14 school districts and 17 charter schools. We typically identify about 1,500 students county wide. The majority, around 80 percent are usually doubled up. And that’s typical in a rural area. Families depend on doubling up with family and friends.

The school community did such an amazing job. It just gives me, it gives me chills when I say this and when I remember it. Every single student got safely down the hill. So students were already at school. Just imagine, you know, you’re at school and a lot of parents worked down the hill in Chico or Oroville and not in the community. So, you know, you can’t get up there. Your kids are there. The teachers, the support staff, admin got kids into vehicles. The bus drivers were absolute heroes. Every single student got safely down and evacuated from the fire. It all just, it happened so fast and it was that complete devastation.

In the immediate response, my number one recommendation is setting up systems for communication. We had daily interagency briefings that schools could hop on. That was really helpful to keep that communication consistent. Our superintendent held a summit with all of our school district administrators and counseling staff. And that was, I think, really helpful to just get everyone together as soon as possible and be together kind of in community and do some planning.

In our homeless education department, we thankfully had really good relationships with our, continuum of care (COC) partners. So, that’s one tip I really suggest in preparing for a natural disaster like a wildfire. If you already have those networks with the community partners and community agencies, it can be really helpful.

I also can’t overstate the importance of, as a school liaison, stepping out of our silo of being at schools and connecting with the community partners. And doing that before a disaster hits so you already have those relationships in place.

We decided to partner with our 2-1-1. Which is the information and referral number. We set up a text number and pushed that messaging out that said, “If you’ve been impacted by the Camp Fire, and you need help enrolling in school, and getting school transportation for your student if you’ve been displaced, text this number.” And that linked to our staff.

We also had a FEMA center that got set up fairly quickly. It was so sad how long the line was and so many people seeking help. But we were able to set up a table there and assist with school supplies and school enrollment. And we were disseminating the McKinney-Vento rights everywhere that we could. In the Red Cross Center and at the FEMA Center.

It was really helpful that we already had that network set up with housing providers and other community partners so we could start sharing the school information.

The families who needed a little more ongoing assistance did get connected with case management services. We also had a presence at the shelters. FEMA trailers did eventually come in and set up too. And so that was transitional housing and we worked with families there.

In our liaison world, it’s, you know, school of origin, school of origin. “Oh, there is no school of origin. What now?” The Students did want to stay with their school of origin, with Paradise, and felt really connected to that community.

Other school districts opened up classrooms and had the Paradise staff operating there. Also, in a warehouse-type building out by our airport, that’s where the high school landed. An old hardware supply store is where the junior high landed.

And students said it was like a temporary school that they set up there. So the options were like, stay with Paradise Unified at one of these alternative locations that are getting set up or enroll immediately in another school district.

It was still school of origin. It was still that school district. It was just in a different location. So we had our team of case managers and we had other folks within our C.O.E. who jumped on board to help us too.

And then each of those school districts, we asked them to designate a point of contact for campfire enrollment. And we did meetings and we coordinated really closely with them.

We also worked with the districts with their student information system to include that question. Have you been impacted or displaced by the campfire? So they could flag that in the student information system and then we would know to bring some extra supports to those students.

Transportation was really, really tough. We did, thankfully receive a lot of donations because it was big national news. And through our North Valley Community Foundation, we got some funds to purchase a whole bunch of gas cards and bus passes. The bus offered free rides for a little while. It was great to be able to give them those gas cards so they could get their kids to school.

The other tip that I have for Homeless Liaisons: if there’s other people providing clothing and food and shelter, stay in your lane of school support. Focus on getting students enrolled and transported to school. Find someone already set up to handle the big donations of clothing and food and other basic needs and stick with backpacks, school supplies, school transportation.

Another tip that I have for kind of preparing. If there’s a school safety plan, or an emergency response plan, or some districts may have a school safety officer or a comprehensive emergency response plan, find out in your district who does that, who writes the plan? Connect with that person as the Homeless Liaison to try to be sure that there. You know, is a plan for students experiencing homelessness, how to connect them to the liaison. I would compare it to how we say talk to your Title I Coordinator, get with your emergency response, safety planning people too.

Why EHCY is important, it’s doing what we do just on a larger scale overnight or, in a shorter timeline, much more people impacted. We are the experts in helping students who are experiencing housing loss, instability, homelessness. So we are the natural, program and spot to start with connecting students. If our systems are already in place, students impacted by natural disasters should be able to enter right into that door of those systems we already have in place. This is what we do.

Families are eligible for McKinney-Vento services if they lost their housing and it’s economic hardship or a similar reason. And are in the doubled up, hotel, motel, shelter or unsheltered category.

What I always say is that Liaisons should be identifying students on a case-by-case basis and especially in the wake of a disaster like this, there are so many scenarios with so much nuance. It’s important to empower Liaisons.

Here in California, if a student has been evacuated, but they go home, they’re most likely not going to be identified and eligible for McKinney-Vento. If they’ve lost their home, they’re most likely going to be identified. There’s all the nuance in identification. I think It’s just important to think about is the housing safe, sufficient, adequate, and really think about the intention of the McKinney-Vento Act. Has the students housing been disrupted? Yes. Is it impacting their access to their education? Yes. Then identify them and serve them.

In the past, I had thought about these large scale, massive wildfires as being more of a rural issue, but it’s also an urban issue. There’s just so many different scenarios, kind of depending on the community and the extent of the damage. I always err on the side of identifying and serving the student. In a lot of the services that we can provide, as a local decision, we can choose to do that for our students. Err on the side of identifying and serving and getting the student to school.

A lot of families experienced homelessness for the first time due to the wildfire and were not probably comfortable self identifying as homeless. When talking with families, we really like to say “McKinney-Vento eligible.” “Are you in transition?” “Are you in stable housing?” And really to focus on, “While you’re in transition, while this is temporary, while this is unstable, we can make sure that your student stays connected with school.” We don’t put the, the word and the label homeless in our messaging. It’s like, “Are you in one of these living situations?” So I think just being sensitive to that, and especially in a large-scale disaster like this where a lot of families never have experienced housing instability or homelessness like this and wouldn’t self identify. Really focus on: What is the nighttime residency? What’s the living situation? Not that label and that question, “Are you homeless or not homeless?”

We just hit the six year mark. I have a lot to say about the long term impacts. We didn’t even realize as a community how long the recovery would take. I cannot overstate how important it is to be sure that staff are supported. A lot of school staff also lost their homes, and then they had to come back to work and working with students who lost their homes.

Social-emotional learning, trauma-informed systems and responses and practices became so important and continue to be really important. We already had one of the highest ACEs scores, Adverse Childhood Experiences, in our state before the campfire. So that was 2018, and then 2 years later, which felt like a blur in time, the pandemic hit. It just felt like that complex trauma, it was just compounding. Mental health, mental wellness, and trauma responsive practices became a priority in our schools in the wake of experiencing that horrible fire.

Working with foster youth and with students experiencing homelessness, we were always trying to bring those ideas and those practices to our schools. But after the fire, it became evident that it was a top priority. It really quickly transformed our schools into being more trauma informed, trauma responsive, and also thinking about the wellness of staff too.

Something that I did not think about at first was the ripple effect in housing. Families who had insurance coming into our other communities in the county and buying homes, pushing renters out. There was sort of this second wave that I hadn’t really thought about until it started happening. So we had students who had not been directly impacted by losing their home in the fire, but lost their home because the housing stock was so stressed. And we already have insufficient housing and really lack affordable housing. So it was this, layer of ripples that, Families who are renting then pushed out and didn’t have anywhere to go. Six years later, we still have families who are not permanently housed in the wake of the disaster.

There’s the immediate physical safety of where you’re going to live and you can’t go home. But then there is the trauma and going through that traumatic experience and we know that stability and routines can help to mitigate that. Getting students to school can just bring them that feeling of, I’m stable, I’m safe. I know what’s going to happen. I know my schedule for the day. I know my routine. My friends are here. My trusted adults are here. So I think being that school connector, it can really help to bring just overall stability for our students.

I believe that in our broader community, people had more understanding and empathy about experiencing homelessness. It really raised empathy and awareness around the doubled up category. Especially in rural areas, we identify a lot of students who are doubled up. Over the 20 years of doing this, I encountered a lot of that kind of attitude. “Well, that’s not really homeless. They’re staying with friends. They have a place.” That kind of pushback on identifying those students or really seeing how sometimes it’s a greater risk factor because there aren’t systems in place. There aren’t safety measures. There aren’t meals provided. There aren’t showers. There aren’t utilities. There aren’t support staff. After the fire, so many people had to share housing with others. It really changed how they thought about that experience of sharing housing and doubling up and how really impactful it is overall.

It changed from being this is something that people over there experience that would never happen to me to, this could happen to anyone at any time. There’s a reason that that is a category of McKinney-Vento eligibility.

And we know that as Homeless Liaison. Our understanding of the different types of housing situations is critical after a disaster like this. But there are other kinds of disasters that happen in people’s life that lead to the experience of homelessness. Mental illness, physical illness, poverty, loss of employment, illness and death of a family member. All of these are types of disasters.

The impact of helping a student succeed in school is going to reduce the risk of homelessness later in life too. It’s prevention and it just makes so much sense to me that we should be putting our energies and our efforts into getting students through to high school graduation and beyond.”

Learn why the McKinney-Vento  EHCY program is so important during disasters, how eligibility works during natural disasters, and why sensitive language matters when supporting displaced students.

Discover the critical first steps Paradise schools took to maintain educational continuity, from establishing communication systems to coordinating with FEMA and community partners.

Understand essential pre-disaster strategies, including building community partnerships and integrating homeless student considerations into emergency response plans.

Explore the lasting effects of the Camp Fire six years later, from ongoing housing challenges to the transformation of schools into trauma-informed spaces.