When students leave through our front doors and climb aboard our buses daily, we understand there are a variety of destinations students and their families call home. While each child's front door may change from time to time we believe that access to a high quality education should not. “The Front Door Project" aims to streamline school enrollments and services made available to students and their families who may be between long-term living environments in alignment with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Act.
According to board policy 5111.01:
Children who meet the Federal definition of "homeless" will be provided a free appropriate public education in the same manner as all other students of the District.To that end, homeless studentswill not be stigmatized or segregated on the basis of their status as homeless and will be assigned to the schoolserving those non-homeless students residing in the area in which the homeless child is actually living.The District shall establish safeguards that protect homeless students from discrimination on the basis of their homelessness.
Homeless children and youth are defined as individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence, and include those who meet any of the following criteria:
- share the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or similar reason
- live in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to a lack of alternative adequate accommodations
- live in emergency or transitional shelters
- are abandoned in hospitals
- are awaiting for foster care placement
- have a primary night time residence that is a public or private place not designed for or ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings, or
- live in a car, park, public space, abandoned building, substandard housing, bus or train station, or similar setting