Problem: Over 40% of Homeless Students Drop Out of High School

Homeless students face their own daily binary trap: Attend school or work to afford food and shelter. They can either earn or they can learn. Neither option is sustainable. If they attend school, they go without income for survival needs. If they work, they miss school and eventually drop out. Research shows youth without a high school diploma are 4.5 times more likely to experience homelessness as adults—making lack of a diploma the single greatest risk factor for adult homelessness. 

Making matters worse, New Mexico faces a massive housing crisis that is rapidly destroying educational opportunity for vulnerable students. Across the state, housing costs have become unaffordable for working families, creating waves of homelessness and housing instability that devastate students' ability to complete high school.

In many parts of New Mexico, rents have climbed 40-50%, while wages have remained largely stagnant for service workers, educators, and other middle-income earners. Families who were stably housed even a year ago now face eviction, utility shutoffs, overcrowded living conditions, and complete lack of housing.

“APPROXIMATELY, 350 STUDENTS WERE LIVING IN CAMPS OR OTHER TEMPORARY HOUSING ARRANGEMENTS THAT QUALIFY AS HOMELESS UNDER FEDERAL STANDARDS.” -DR. GERRY WASHBURN, SUPERINTENDENT, CARLSBAD MUNICIPAL SCHOOLS 

NM Appleseed’s Solution Design Process

With all of our work, we began with a research question. How do we improve graduation rates for inadequately housed or homeless students? That starts the process of questions that open up more questions and more questions until we finally get to an answer to test.

Design Team: Appleseed's design process for GPA began by convening homeless liaisons from school districts statewide and students experiencing homelessness. The design team met repeatedly to understand what actually prevented school attendance and graduation. The answer was consistent: Money. Students needed cash to pay for gas to get to school, food to eat during the day, clean clothes, and rent. Counseling, tutoring, and financial literacy all help, of course—but lack of money is the real barrier to graduation.

Academic Research: There are decades of global research about using cash to incentivize behavior and dismantle financial barriers to participation. The evidence was clear. Direct cash support reduces barriers to school completion, particularly for students facing housing and food insecurity. The traditional educational response has vacillated between ignoring the problem and simply offering more support services. Students definitely need support, but if they can't even access it because they don't have money to get to school or have electricity to do homework at night, then none of those services are helpful or relevant. 

State Experts: We continue to partner with the New Mexico Public Education Department to understand implementation realities and scale requirements. This partnership proved essential—PED understood both the scope of the problem (over 9000 McKinney-Vento students statewide) and the bureaucratic requirements for statewide programs.

NM Appleseed's Solution: Guaranteed Payment for Attendance (GPA)

GPA provides homeless high school students with $500 per month deposited directly into their bank accounts. The material requirements are that the student must maintain 90% attendance, complete 90% of homework on time, and participate in twice-weekly tutoring sessions.

The program includes financial literacy training, teaching students how to budget, save, and manage bank accounts—skills often not taught at home when families are in crisis. Students learn to balance immediate needs (food, transportation today) with longer-term goals (saving for after graduation).

The weekly tutoring serves multiple functions. It provides actual academic support students need to catch up and stay current, it creates regular connection with a caring adult who monitors wellbeing, and it's a requirement that keeps students accountable without being punitive. If you miss tutoring, you don't lose all your money, but your tutor will call to check in and help solve whatever barrier kept you away.

GPA explicitly includes 'compassionate exceptions' recognizing that absences related to housing instability (moving homes, caring for siblings while parents work multiple jobs, lack of transportation) don't count against students. The program focuses on solving problems, not punishment.

GPA breaks the cycle by ensuring students can complete high school despite housing instability. As New Mexico's housing crisis continues and potentially worsens, GPA provides a scalable intervention that can adapt to serve more students. The program's success has attracted national attention, with other states inquiring about replication. New Mexico has the opportunity to lead the nation in demonstrating how to educate students through housing crises rather than watching them disappear from schools as families lose
stable housing.

A Legislative Win and 2025 Launch: Based on pilot success, Appleseed successfully advocated in the 2024-2025 legislative session for $6.4 million in state funding through the GRO fund pilot program. 

The expansion now serves 330 inadequately housed sophomores, juniors, and seniors across multiple districts statewide. Albuquerque Public Schools, Artesia, Carlsbad, Cobre, Dulce, Las Cruces, Monte Del Sol Charter School in Santa Fe, Pecos, Santa Fe, Taos, and Silver City will all have participating students. 

THE FIRST GPA PILOT

GPA launched as a pilot in Cuba and West Las Vegas school districts in 2020-2021, serving 46 students. 

Results exceeded expectationS

93% graduation rate compared to typical 50-60% rates for homeless students in New Mexico.

Appleseed is working side-by-side with all of the participating districts and PED on a weekly (often more frequently) basis as the lead substantive issue expert. We are providing training for homeless liaisons and program coordinators, offering technical assistance on program implementation, and troubleshooting to districts and schools, and helping PED evaluate outcomes and refine intervention protocols. 

The greater impact extends beyond individual graduates. GPA challenges the assumption that homeless students fail because they lack motivation or ability. They fail because they're making impossible choices between survival and education in a system that doesn't acknowledge this reality.

INCREASING IDENTIFICATION OF HOMELESS AND HOUSING INSECURE STUDENTS

Improving Identification in Districts Around the State. As COVID-19 kept children out of school, homeless children became even more at-risk of being unidentified and unsupported. Appleseed worked with districts to identify nearly 1,600 inadequately-housed children to help them get the support they need and are entitled to under federal educational law.The mini-grant program led to improved identification of students experiencing homelessness through creative and strategic ways, including payment of transportation expenses to conduct home visits and providing bilingual school staff a stipend to conduct outreach to families in their native language. Outcomes include:

• 11 mini-grantees increased the number of students they identified

• Mini-grantees identified 103 more students in 2020-2021 compared to 2019-2020—a 10 percent increase.

Statewide and nationally, identification of students experiencing homelessness was significantly down during the 2020-2021 school year—in large part because of school closures—yet, the evidence suggests that housing instability and homelessness actually increased. The fact that over half of our grantees increased identification during the 2020-2021 school year is a huge success.

Combining Data Sources to Develop a Better Estimate of Youth Homelessness. Due to our deep knowledge of the communities in which we work, Appleseed’s hypothesis is that there are far more students who qualify as homeless under federal educational laws than are identified. The robustness of districts’ outreach and identification efforts are highly variable. To better understand the scope of the problem we are working in partnership with DOH epidemiologists and PED to compare the self-reported homelessness data among middle and high school students from the biennial New Mexico Youth Risk and Resilience Survey with school district reporting of homeless students' data to develop a more accurate snapshot of housing instability. This type of analysis sheds light on the scale of the problem and identifies areas of the state that will benefit from more targeted outreach in 2022.

Developing a Universal Housing Screener.
Our work on a universal housing screener also experienced significant progress. There is no comprehensive data set on the number of students experiencing housing instability in the state and efforts at identification are variable, depending on the district. A universal housing screener will help solve that. Staff worked in partnership with PED’s State Coordinator for the Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program to revise and update student housing screener templates to circulate statewide. The screeners ask about a student’s living situation, including whether the student has access to utilities. As a result of our continued advocacy PED is exploring adding the homelessness questions to existing surveys administered in schools, and some districts have also expressed an interest in piloting the use of the screener. Our goal is to have a consistent approach statewide on housing screeners, where every student is screened using the same form.

SHARING KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERTISE

Statewide Legal and Policy Experts on Homelessness. Appleseed is a state and national thought leader on child and family homelessness. During 2021, we also became experts on federal and state relief funds and the eviction and utility moratoriums. We share our expertise with partners and communities around the state so they can better identify and serve families experiencing homelessness:

• Provided media outlets background information for multiple in-depth stories covering different aspects of homelessness and evictions.

• Trained over twenty early childhood intervention social workers on federal education laws that address homelessness, provided resources and presented to hundreds of attendees.

• Provided technical assistance to dozens of liaisons, state leadership, and school staff on issues including confusion over who qualifies as homeless, emergency housing options for unaccompanied youth in rural communities, and how to access eviction prevention funds.

• Provided substantive feedback and analysis to the Program Coordinator of Community Schools and Extended Learning at PED on a study they are launching in partnership with J-PAL at MIT and will be providing support throughout the duration of the study.

• Presented to the NMSU economic development cabinet about how the university can improve outcomes for its high-poverty families and students. 

• Presented at the Harvard Kennedy Government Performance Lab meeting on cash transfers.

• Provided support to the Governor’s task force on fiscal and policy implications of free meals for all children.