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Trenten longs for the days when he lived together with his whole family. For the past six months, Trenten and his older sister have stayed with close friends while his mother lives elsewhere as she continues to search for housing that will bring them together again.
The distance is hurting his confidence, which has impacted his schoolwork and performance, said his mother, Tanisha Adkins.
Twelve-year-old Trenten has dyslexia and manages his learning through an individualized education program, or IEP, a legally required plan for students with disabilities. Because of his disability, he struggles significantly in math and reading, Adkins said. Trenten is only being identified by his first name to protect his privacy.
Researchers and advocates say Michigan officials are focused on literacy and growing overall educational achievement in the state but that should start with addressing students’ lives outside the classroom – especially those who are economically disadvantaged.
“The real answer to fixing the reading problems across the country and in Michigan is that we need to address poverty and we need to address housing instability,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of Housing Stability Programs and Policy Initiatives at Poverty Solutions.
There’s more than 710,000 economically disadvantaged students across Michigan, according to 2026 state data.
Nearly 36,600 school-aged children, or almost 3 percent of pre-K through 12th grade students, experienced homelessness during the 2024-25 school year, a steady rise since the pandemic, state data shows.
About 64% of homeless students statewide graduated with the Class of 2025, 20 percentage points below the state average for all students. Homeless students also drop out at double the statewide rate of about 7%.
‘Poverty is a policy choice.’
“It is too hard for us as people in society to acknowledge the fact that we collectively are responsible for the degree of harm that exists, and that degree of harm on children,” Erb-Downward said. “Poverty is a policy choice.”
Candidates for Michigan governor, Democrat Jocelyn Benson and Republican John James, have platforms that include education goals and outcomes for the state, yet neither candidate includes ways to tackle issues of poverty as they push to improve schools.
Benson’s plan outlines expanding Rx Kids, which provides cash payments to new mothers, and ensuring pre-K for all, while James wants to expand school choice and support for Michigan boys who have fallen behind in school. Both candidates name absenteeism and literacy as major problems to address in education.
Erb-Downward said it’s difficult for many children to succeed because of multiple barriers to learning, such as midschool year moves, homelessness, and families who live separately. Experts also point to food insecurity, healthcare access, living conditions, and education equity.
“We are forcing parents into situations where they have no good decision to make,” she said.
For Trenten, each night at their previous home, the 7th grader would read books aloud with Adkins. Now, he’s withdrawn and not as interested, she said.
“He’s like, ‘It’s not the same. You’re not here full time, so why should I do it?”’ Adkins said. “That affects me a lot.”
His grades dropped after they started living apart. He improved them, but only slightly. All of this is taking a toll on the family, she said.
For now, Trenten just began the new school year living separately from his mother.
Navigating the system
In August, education advocate Jenna Pickman checked on a family living in a long-term stay hotel. They were preparing for the start of school when they realized their school transportation cards had not yet arrived in the mail.
Pickman, of the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan, reached out on behalf of the family to the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s Office of Homelessness and Foster Care. The advocacy center is a nonprofit organization that provides support to K-12 students and their families living in poverty.
District officials told her the family would need to resubmit paperwork for the McKinney-Vento Act, which protects the rights of children dealing with housing issues. Pickman said it felt like yet another barrier for the family she’s helping through recent homelessness.
It’s hard enough when families have a case worker to make calls and push for aid, Pickman said, but “if you don’t have someone doing all of that and you’re trying to function and go to work and make money and do these calls, you’re going to be two or three steps behind, and it’s going to be exhausting.”
Detroiter Imani Foster started working with the local education equity nonprofit 482Forward when she was in high school. She recalls when a local charter school closed abruptly, scrambling many families who attended.
“I remember working alongside a family who was already dealing with homelessness, already dealing with lots of other things that just come alongside homelessness, and also now are trying to scramble to find a new school for their child that will accept their child with no transcripts,” Foster said. “This has been a longtime problem.”
In DPSCD, where Trenten attends school, about 8% of students were identified as experiencing homelessness, although homeless student counts are almost always undercounted.
Stressors from inconsistent housing eventually reach children who are taking all of those feelings and anxieties to school with them, Pickman said.
“Watching the kids that I work with and just seeing their demeanor and the looks on their faces, I think it’s like a big shock,” Pickman said. “It’s a trauma.”
Living separately from Trenten was the only option for Adkins after several housing agencies left her with nowhere to go, she said. The agencies helped with temporary housing, but that did not lead to a permanent place, she said.
About 72% of Michigan homeless students reported that they stayed with others while experiencing housing insecurity, far more than other solutions, according to data from national organization SchoolHouse Connection.
Jim Schaafsma, a housing attorney for the Michigan Poverty Law Program, trains and provides resources to legal aid groups statewide while also working directly with some families in need. Over the years, Schaafsma said he repeatedly watched housing costs push more people into unstable situations.
“There’s this enormous mismatch, not just in Michigan, but nationwide, between income and housing costs, so it’s a failure of a market system, and then it’s a failure of a governmental response to that market failure, and so the two combined go to produce these terrible outcomes for families that are so often really beyond their control,” Schaafsma said.
Seeking success
Nearly half of all Michigan students are considered economically disadvantaged, which includes homeless students plus those who live in households receiving food or cash assistance or qualify for free and reduced school meals, among others.
Michigan provides more than $1.3 billion for economically disadvantaged students, an amount that has increased since 2023 when the state began moving toward a weighted funding system that allocates more money for schools for at-risk students, as well as for other vulnerable children. Yet, the state’s at-risk funding need has jumped significantly in recent years.
School districts can use state at-risk funds for a variety of services like school health clinics, crisis intervention programs, mental health services, and noninstructional and instructional offerings. The money may not go to administrative costs.
Michigan’s Housing Choice Voucher program allotted nearly 22,000 vouchers to more than 20,200 families in the program, according to the agency’s June report. These vouchers subsidize rent to private landlords to help very low-income families, veterans, and elderly individuals afford housing.
In Wayne County, the state’s largest county, vouchers accounted for about a third of statewide spending. So far this year, the program has dispersed about $104.7 million, an average of $860 in assistance per family.
The county also reported the highest number of households that were homeless when they were admitted to the program. Across the state, more than half of families were homeless at the time they were admitted to the program.
In Detroit, the city and the Detroit Public Schools Community School District have implemented several programs to battle chronic absenteeism. Experts say students from low-income homes are two to three times more likely to become chronically absent, which is defined in Michigan as missing 10% of the school year, or 18 days in a 180-day school year.
Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield said absenteeism is one of her administration’s priorities for city youth, which she repeatedly stressed to voters during her campaign. She created the Ride to Rise program, which targets chronically absent students with free DDOT bus transportation for all K-12 students in Detroit.
About 85% of district students are from economically disadvantaged families, which can greatly impact student attendance rates. The chronic absenteeism rate dropped to 60.9% for the 2024-25 school year from the pre-pandemic rate of about 62%. Chronic absenteeism soared in the district during the early pandemic school years to about 76%.
DPSCD’s 2027 attendance plan aims to decrease chronic absenteeism to below 43% and raise average daily attendance to 90%.
The district’s health hubs also deliver resources to families but schools only have so much they can offer, Foster said.
“It’s hard to ask our schools to do everything right. They’re supposed to be educating the child. Now they’re feeding the child. Now they have health hubs for the child,” Foster said. “We haven’t really cracked that code yet.”
This story is part of a collaboration between Chalkbeat Detroit and the Detroit Free Press to cover key education issues in the race for Michigan’s next governor.
