UCLA

For the past decade, every year at least 1.2 million students in the United States have been identified as homeless. While many youth graduate high school despite experiencing homelessness, a large minority do not complete high school in four years. Not obtaining a high school diploma negatively impacts future opportunities for youth and increases their risk of becoming homeless as adults. This dissertation uses Los Angeles County as a case study to evaluate the formal and informal networks of support that high school students use to meet their academic and physiological needs to remain housed and graduate high school.

This study is guided by three main questions: (1) How does Los Angeles County support students experiencing homelessness in their pursuit to graduate high school? (2) How do students in Los Angeles County navigate the barriers of homelessness and successfully graduate high school? (3) How do school districts in Los Angeles County successfully support students experiencing homelessness in their pursuit to graduate high school? Data for this study come from 63 interviews with formerly homeless youth, youth experiencing homelessness, teachers, counselors, principals, district homeless liaisons, community-based organizations, and city and county homeless administrative leaders, as well as school district site observations, and a review of 890 city, county, and state documents. The study considers structural racism when assessing county and school district level strategies that support the needs of students experiencing homelessness.

Major findings speak to a phenomenon this dissertation coins as Impoverished Institutional Network (IIN). An impoverished institutional network is defined as a public institution’s inability to provide the necessary financial, social, cultural, and organizational capital to adequately support historically marginalized, vulnerable populations, thereby becoming overly reliant on punitive practices or punitive public institutions like the criminal justice and foster care systems to serve those populations. While youth and some school personnel interviewed in this study exhibited a high degree of agency, their efficacy was limited by the networks to which they were relegated.

This dissertation is the first comprehensive study on student homelessness that utilizes a municipal county as the unit of analysis. Additionally, this dissertation introduces IIN as a new construct for assessing a school districts' ability to respond to student homelessness.