Debbie DiAnni is the McKinney-Vento Liaison and Foster Care Point of Contact, as well as a non-public school tutor, for the School City of Hammond in Hammond, Indiana. The district has nineteen schools–all of which are Title I schools–including twelve elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools, two middle/high schools, and an Area Career Center housing Area Career Center University. The School City of Hammond enrolls approximately 13,000 students, 175 of which have been identified as experiencing homelessness. In her many roles, Debbie serves students experiencing homelessness, those placed with the Indiana Department of Family Services, and those placed in non-public schools due to academic struggles. She has worked in Hammond for the last thirteen years and is starting her fourth year as the McKinney-Vento Liaison. Says Debbie, “I enjoy how many of the staff work together to help our students be the best they can be.”

What is one of the most helpful strategies you have learned in a training?

One?!? Hmm…probably learning how to talk to families and students who are experiencing homelessness by coming from a place of empathy, but not pity. I never say they are homeless: I refer to my families as being displaced from permanent housing or temporarily without permanent housing. This came from a training where we were listening to a mother and family speak about their journey in and out of homelessness.  It really opened my eyes to just how pervasive the problem of homelessness is; often by no fault of their own, families find themselves without a home. 

I’ve worked in education for over 20 years but I’ve always been more on the teaching side of things. If anyone had asked me years ago what homelessness looks like, I would have said, “Someone living in an abandoned building or on the street.” I thought that they must have done something to end up there. Families who are experiencing homelessness are not often broadcasting it, so I felt like I had never really met anyone who was homeless. I was uncertain how to approach them, not wanting to offend them. By listening to families’ stories, I began to understand that they wanted no less for their children than what every parent wants.   

What is your most successful community partnership? 

I have two very successful partnerships: one is with a local domestic violence shelter. We have a fabulous working relationship and rely on each other for many things. I am able to assist them with clothing, transportation, and school supplies, and on occasion they have been able to help place a family or student in their shelter that we identify through the district as needing services. They also help me to better understand the agencies that serve our families and how to access things like copies of birth certificates.

Another highly successful community partnership that has evolved over the past three years is with our Township office. They want to be able to assist the most vulnerable students, and I refer many families to them for a variety of needs. For example, the Township office has the ability to provide temporary emergency housing for families that have experienced fires. Last year, the office provided vouchers to a local motel for three of my families that had nowhere to go after they lost their home. This allowed one of the families to have a place to stay until their insurance kicked in. With the other two families, it gave them sufficient time to figure out what their next step would be. They have also been helpful with some of my unaccompanied youth. In one instance, the Township office was able to get a youth placed into a shelter after she had been kicked out of her home. Recently, I had a mom who needed legal assistance, and I had no idea where to refer her for her need. The Township office was able to give me the name and number of a lawyer for her who does work on a sliding scale.  

Can you give us some examples of how you use data at the district level to better serve students experiencing homelessness?

As I launch my fourth year as McKinney-Vento Liaison, the data from the past three years helps me plan for the future. We have nineteen schools in our district, and I have noticed that some schools have identified greater numbers of students experiencing homeless than others. Looking forward, I want to implement some building-level supports for students at those locations. For example, my goal is to train one person in each building to meet with students on a regular basis (weekly or bi-weekly) just to check in with them, see how things are going, etc. I’m hoping that by fostering this relationship with someone at the school, the students see the need to stay in school and develop an understanding of how important school can be for them. I learned long ago in my classroom that students thrive when they have a good relationship with you. Many students who are identified as McKinney-Vento do not have those relationships and are less likely to value school.  

I have also noticed that we need to do a better job of getting our homeless seniors to graduate.  I’m hoping that, by implementing building-level supports, we can improve the graduation rate of our students experiencing homelessness and help them either enter a trade, the workforce, or move on to college. This idea came to me in a two-fold kind of way. A few years ago, I was at a Title I conference and I heard a speaker who was working under a grant she had written to be able to meet regularly with a group of foster care students in her district. I really liked her idea of checking in with the students. Then I realized that a staff member at one of our high schools was unofficially doing just that with a student experiencing homelessness. She had a direct connection to the students. They could drop into her office at any time, or schedule a time to meet. She was able to build a relationship with several of my unaccompanied youth. One such instance was with a young lady who had left her home due to safety issues and moved in with a friend. The staff member would regularly see her and ask how things were going. All of a sudden, the student stopped showing up at school. The staff member reached out to find out what was going on, and learned that she had had a disagreement with the friend and had to leave. The student had no choice but to move in with someone in another town and could not get to school. Because the staff member proactively reached out and discovered the problem early on, we were able to provide transportation to and from her new location before the student missed too much school. This allowed her to finish school and graduate on time with her peers.

I’ve worked in education for over 20 years but I’ve always been more on the teaching side of things. If anyone had asked me years ago what homelessness looks like, I would have said, “Someone living in an abandoned building or on the street.” I thought that they must have done something to end up there. Families who are experiencing homelessness are not often broadcasting it, so I felt like I had never really met anyone who was homeless. I was uncertain how to approach them, not wanting to offend them. By listening to families’ stories, I began to understand that they wanted no less for their children than what every parent wants. 

What do you consider your biggest barrier in helping homeless students?

Identifying homeless students, hands down, is our biggest barrier. Our district is in an urban area with over 80% of our students receiving free and reduced lunch. In a district with 13,000 students, I know we have many more students experiencing homelessness than we are identifying. If I cannot identify them identifying them, I cannot support them. This under-identification shows a need for me to provide better training to the district employees whom our families and students first contact. I have some schools that still don’t believe they have “homeless” students and do not or will not reach out to me for help. 

With just around 2,000 employees district-wide, I think the best training is targeted to the different jobs in our district. The training that I provide to a registrar or secretary is not going to look like what I use with food service. While I like to make trainings interactive, time constraints mean that I have to keep it simple.  My favorite is randomly giving attendees a color (could be on name tag or a Post-It) and calling out a color to move periodically with one color moving the most often. It isn’t entirely clear to the audience what is happening, but slowly you can see everyone begin to understand that this activity represents the frequent and ongoing movement that our homeless families face. Those with the most called color represent our homeless families who need to move, often with little notice, to collect their things and find a new place.  

 I also like the game “Spent” if I have a little more time in the training, because it helps staff better understand the ongoing struggles that our families face. It is an online game about surviving poverty and homelessness where players must make the difficult decisions necessary to live for one month on $1,000, often having to choose between equally disagreeable options. We launched an online registration system this year and I’m hoping this will help identify students more accurately. Most of the children enrolling in our schools are students returning to the same school. With returning students, our district doesn’t check residency each year–they may check it every two or three years. Parents complete the registration paperwork and use their old address. This works until they are asked to provide proof of residency. It is often at that time we learn about a family’s housing status. By incorporating online enrollment, we were able to include a residency survey where families answer a couple of simple questions. Their answers help us determine whether we need to meet with them to determine if they are McKinney-Vento eligible.  

What is one of your greatest accomplishments as a liaison?

I am not one to brag about myself, so this one is a bit harder to answer. I am proud of the relationships I have built with the schools in my district, local community services, and other McKinney-Vento liaisons in my area. This is something that really didn’t exist four years ago. Nurturing relationships with my colleagues has helped me to support families and students in need. It’s easier to do this job when we all come together to support our families and each other. After all, we all want what is best for our students.

My second greatest accomplishment would be creating a better system for my data. When I started, everything was on Excel and the information I kept was very basic. I found that I needed a lot more information than I thought if I wanted to properly serve these families to the best of my ability. I now use Google Sheets, which allows me to access my data no matter where I am. This comes in very handy when I’m away from my office. I include data on program participants, contact information, documents distributed and completed documents received, clothing I’ve given, and transportation requests. I’m always tweaking this to make it work better for me and our students.