Advancing Educational Stability, Continuity, and Success: A Policy Agenda for Highly Mobile Youth in the U.S.

Individual populations are emphasized over supporting the multiple needs of a youth in most federal and state HMY policies.

Most policies focus on serving youth in individual systems like homelessness or foster care, without addressing their overlapping, interconnected needs. Colorado’s Education Stability Grant is the only policy designed to support multiple HMY populations through coordinated, cross-agency services.

Emergent, rather than preventative or targeted policy approaches for HMY are more common at the federal and state level.

Most HMY policies respond to immediate challenges rather than preventing system involvement, resulting in fragmented approaches and policy conflicts, with only a few federal and state efforts, like The Federal Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), The Federal Youth PROMISE (Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education) Act, and Connecticut’s Youth Homelessness Prevention Plan—serving as proactive exceptions.

Federal laws aim to address either population-based or individual need-based issues, not both.

Federal laws are generally divided into two categories—broad, sector-based policies like Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and targeted laws like McKinney-Vento that serve specific populations—without integration between the two approaches.

Siloed approaches in education policy affecting multiple populations are not unique, but they can be changed.

Education policies are often developed in isolation without shared goals or coordination, but this can be changed through strategies like interagency councils, shared data systems, pooled funding, and stakeholder collaboration to support more integrated, cross-sector solutions.

Most state laws extend federal requirements, but some states lead with creative, context-specific solutions.

While most state policies build on federal laws to ensure implementation, several states go further by developing innovative, locally tailored programs that provide expanded services such as housing, mental health care, reentry support, and educational stability for highly mobile youth.

These recommendations are organized from big ideas aimed at long-term transformation to short-run advances that address urgent, immediate system needs. Each recommendation is grounded in foundational actions that would promote greater coherence and integration across policy and practice.

Align target populations, service periods, eligibility, and renewal processes for federal programs serving HMY and, where possible, establishing intersectional or presumptive eligibility across programs.

Increase funding to complement existing efforts that promote prevention and streamlined approaches to serving HMY.

Integrate comprehensive whole child data systems.

Provide meaningful opportunities for youth and young adults to offer insight, identify barriers, and co-design solutions to be incorporated into specific policies and actions.

Establish cross-system standing committees of child-serving federal agencies.

Reissue–and potentially strengthen–Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) guidance to require training for serving unaccompanied homeless youth.