Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: Hey, Leland.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: This is House Education on April 28, which is also Homeless Youth Awareness Day. And so we have with us today some folks that kind of give us a snapshot of the situation, hopefully with some relevance to our schools and their roles in all of this. But I'm just going to stop talking and turn it right over to you to introduce yourself and we'd love to hear from you.

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: Great, thank you. Doctor. Richard, my name is Lauren Higbee. I am Deputy Advocate with the Office of the Child Youth and Family Advocate, OCYFA. Independent office was created by legislation in 2022. We got up and running in 2023 and were charged with addressing the interests of children, youth, and families directly impacted by DCF, focusing on child welfare, health protection, and juvenile justice systems. So for Youth Homelessness Awareness Day, I'd like to share some important framing facts about the national landscape and then also Vermont's history. So there are 4,000,000 young people, ages 13 to 25, experiencing some form of homelessness in The United States each year. So, that breaks down into one in ten young people 18 to 25 years old and one in thirty children 13 to 17 years old. And again, that's the national landscape. Specifically about public schools, from 2023 to 2024, public schools identified 1,500,000 students experiencing homelessness, which is actually a 12.6 increase from the previous year. And that's actually the highest jump and also the highest number on record. So we're seeing the trending data of an increase of children experiencing homelessness in our pollinators. This disproportionately impacts LGBTQ youth and then BIPOC family and children as well. I don't have those specific data points, but I can ask you that too if that is stated by the FDA. And then if we look specifically at our point in time count, which is the national day that we all, we being the nation, tracks how many homeless people are either out of shelter, in shelter or unhoused for one day a year, that's conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD. There are approximately four in ten unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness that were unsheltered, right? So some people could be in shelter, still be counted in on point times count, but there are four in 10 unaccompanied youth that were unsheltered.

[Representative Kate Logan]: All right,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: perhaps you want share one sec. Four in ten of the homeless youth were unsheltered. Correct. You used another term I was gonna ask you about? Just say it again.

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: The twenty twenty three point in time count from the Department of Housing and Urban Development said, four in ten unaccompanied youths were experiencing homelessness that were unsheltered.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Unaccompanied means that they are emancipated, just not with their parents anyway.

[Representative Kate Logan]: Yeah, Yeah,

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: I'd say not in the physical custody of it. So specifically too, if we're looking at Vermont data and what the picture looks like, I think it's important to bring up our GA emergency housing or general assistance emergency housing. And as of foursix, so 04/06/2026, there were two fifty seven eligible families with children that were receiving general assistance emergency housing in the hotel during shelter. And that's really relevant, right? Just a few weeks old. And then specifically, if you look at Vermont's point in time count, there were 3,386 unhoused people in 2025, but 19% of that, about 3,300, were children 18. But I think it's also interesting for us to discuss what that looks like on the ground, right, in Vermont in practice. So prior to this current role, I was with the Department for Children and Families, DCF's Residential Licensing and Special Investigations Unit, and there I licensed the agencies and spaces, I like to say, that provided shelter and case management to unhoused minors and young adults across the state. I also ran two runaway homeless youth shelters in Brattleboro and Bellows Falls before that. And what I like to say is I previously worked in child protection in Philadelphia and in Chicago, and I was shocked to learn of the level of risk shelter providers are holding and what they're having to navigate, specifically with unhoused young people, both minors and young adults. And we all should really study this population and really have a tailored coordinated response here in Vermont.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So I'm what you mean by the level of risk they're holding

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: Yeah, in the most recent exactly. That's coming, so I love where your mind's going. Right? Pretty often every week we would have police officers drop kids off at our door saying this kid can't go home, can you please shelter them for as long as you can? We didn't have a lot of information about them. It was hard to navigate parental consent, what level of intervention they needed. Another interesting part, being in Brattleboro, we would often get calls from the Brattleboro retreat about young people discharging that had no place to go. So they're leaving inpatient psychiatric treatment and they need a place to stay. And congregate sheltering isn't always the best option for people with that experience. And then I think there's also a layer of what we have to understand that our child protection agency wasn't adequately responding to the needs of 16 and 17 year olds, right? So we would debate as mandated reporters, calls to DCF seeking assistance because this was abused or neglected child or abandoned child and there was lack of personal intimacy. Does that sort of get at what you are seeking? Great. So I think the main point is that our youth homelessness providers catch the children and young people that have already fell through the cracks. So then how are we going to build in prevention? And I think education is the continuing theme through here, right? Because we know our education entities, institutions, our educational providers also have eyes on these kids, most consistently as well. So I have met with the Agency of Education's McKinney Vento homelessness liaisons regularly in this role and the National Association of Social Workers School Social Work chapters, another round full. And educators are dedicated to serving this population and they're asking for help. And so what can we do? What can the committee do and what can we all do as part of that safety net? So one point is transportation remains a huge barrier across the state. Without access to consistent transportation, displacement no matter how temporary contributes to educational instability and it also increases chronic absenteeism. One major issue we ran into as well is trying to utilize some Medicaid rides and it was just one issue after another. We actually called in a complaint and young people were always saying things were supposed to change or get better for Medicaid rights, but they haven't changed for years. And so the transportation remains a huge barrier. Regional transportation doesn't quite meet the expanded hours needed to serve this population and it doesn't have the expanded locations that is needed given our rural landscape. And then school districts need the adequate resources to meet their mandate to support educational stability. This is through robust busing services. There's a potential also to codify McKinney Vento protections into Vermont statute. I think that is a change very much worth exploring. That includes also multilingual liaisons and making sure that there are enough McKinney Vento liaisons to match the increase of youth homelessness that we are seeing. And then I'd also note, I think it's very well known across our state that there is a lack of affordable housing and an insufficient safety net for those unhoused. And it is important to note the experiences in the GA emergency housing and shelter programs really do impact where children and families are having to move to, right, to stay safe and to stay sheltered. So children and families have to relocate or move where there are hotel openings. For example, when it was open, was at the Fortina Inn in Rutland and there was a family from, I think from L'Oreal County, they had been up to Newport Hotel that was open and down to Rutland, so they were just moving to where they could remain sheltered. And so the inconsistent and insufficient emergency housing and shelter programs directly contributes to our chronic absenteeism levels. So trying to solve the housing crisis with seasonal shelters then also impacts and limits the children's access to schools. And then I also would like us to think further, right, because we want Vermont youth to stay here. I know that's also something we all know, right? And so post secondary education must be included in the spectrum of educational supports for this population. And there must be advances to remove barriers for youth to access college. And I think some of those solutions were directly related to age 64 that has been submitted prior to the state. And so to explain that more, I'd like to just read an excerpt from a young person that I worked with in Brattleboro. This is my Oh the Humanity book. This is when we had successes. We would put it in a jar and my wonderful colleagues turned it into a book as I moved to positions. But this person was filling out an application for college, and the question was, why do you want to be enrolled in college? And this young person wrote, as a prospective first generation college student, college will open up doors none of my ancestors ever had access to. With the knowledge and credentials I will earn at this illustrious university, I will finally be able to attain what I so longed for during my childhood: stability. A college education, especially at college, often results in access to higher grade jobs, more job security, jobs with competitive wages, and the attainment of the specialized knowledge that I desire so fervently. All of this will give me the foundation I require in order to provide myself and my future family with a middle class life to serve. And so, with that, I I can't say it any better than what they've said. I just want us to keep in our mind that the needs of unhoused young people are dynamic and Vermont has to remain dynamic in its responses. And so we must continue to strengthen and adapt a cohesive and coordinated approach to de silo all of the helpers so we can best serve from the homeless youth, blinders, and young people.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you. And it's great that you're here. I remember when we created the office, so to see it in action is great. I also appreciate you sort of identifying the problems, but also identifying real solutions. Again, whenever we talk about various things, transportation just comes up over and over and over. You'll feel like there should be a fleet of cars and drivers across the state making all this happen. You had mentioned some

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: national statistics earlier You have local statistics as far as subnationally, I think you said one in fact, couple of places, but just as far as Vermont, what are we looking like as compared to the national average?

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: I could do the math if you want me to. So Vermont's point in time count of 3,386 unhoused people, 19% were children 18. So I'd be happy to

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: 19%, okay, so how does that compare? I'm just curious how Vermont sticks out to the national numbers. Are we trending up? Are we trending down? Probably about even We look at national numbers,

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: we just really go left to right with Vermont or national. Do we

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: have a specific problem or

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: a unique circumstance that should be addressed?

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: I think it's, think VCRIP will have more specific data point, is that right? Oh, there's more testimony? Yeah, but I also think we know Vermont is in the housing crisis and we do have a high level of homelessness. And so the trends usually follow for young people, like where the larger landscape is for the state. Is there a question?

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you very much, Leanne. Thanks. It is really up to all of you to decide how you would like to go. That'd be great.

[Representative Kate Logan]: It's in this environment right now.

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: I might not actually have

[Representative Kate Logan]: pictures for everybody. Beth's just got a bunch of homelessness stats to the skate. Some testimony provided ready to share with you as well. I'll just go ahead and share that and hopefully answer any questions you have. I also have flyers from my parent agency that I'll pass out at the end as well. So thanks so much for having me. I'm Representative Kate Logan. I represent the Chittenden 16 District. That's most of the Old North End in Burlington and Downtown Burlington. I also serve as the Director of the Vermont Coalition of Broadway and Homeless Youth Programs, EPRIP, which is housed at Elevate Youth Services in Berlin. It is a statewide program housed in Washington County. I also co chaired the Vermont Committee to End Youth Homelessness, which brings together state agencies, providers, and young people with lived experience to coordinate our statewide youth homelessness response. So I'll briefly introduce our work, what youth homelessness looks like in Vermont, and where I feel like the Education Committee's partnership is needed. And I'll try to focus primarily on unaccompanied homeless youth, so 18. Feel free to ask questions about the general population, serve twelve to twenty four year olds. I would say, I'd like to start off by saying that I don't think that youth homelessness is inevitable. I think with targeted coordinated investment, Vermont can ensure that every young person has a safe place to live and a path forward. BPREP is, again, a coalition. It's a statewide coalition of community based organizations serving youth experiencing homelessness across Vermont's Balance of State Continuum of Care. So Matt, I don't know how familiar you are with the state's homeless response system, but there are two Continua of Care, one in Chittenden County called the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, and one in the rest of the state called the Balance of State Continuum of Care. So I work, I live in Burlington, but I work everywhere outside Chittenden County. And our providers are often the only youth specific services in their communities, in their regions. The way that the homeless response system is broken up in Vermont outside of Chittenden County is that there are local housing coalitions, 12 local housing coalitions all over the state. Some are county based, like Rutland County has its own local housing coalition, but then like the NEK has a housing coalition that covers Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia County, for example. So a little broken up in ways that make sense locally around service coordination. So our providers work within those local housing coalitions to provide services directly to you. Our network was founded in 1981 and is federally funded. As those funds have remained largely flat over the decades, there's been level funding for decades at this point for runaway and homeless youth services. Our services for youth ages 12 to 17 have contracted. We used to serve the entire state and now we only have service providers in the NEPA, Washington County, and Windham County. So we have Jeff Kunsberger here from Memorial County. He'll be talking about his experience working with unaccompanied homeless youth. He used to be one of the agencies agencies funded by BPRIP to provide emergency shelter and counseling to runaway homeless youth under the age of 18. But $250,000 doesn't stretch far enough to provide nine agencies with enough funding to run any kind of program. And that's the federal funding level for years. There are just simply service deserts for this population in most of the state. Spectrum in Chittenden County Conservative Level Youth, their Commissioner of Designated Shelter, but no one goes. No one seeks out shelter there. And then most of the rest of the state is unserviced. I think there's plenty of bed in Windham County. So back to BGRIP. More recently, we've received funding from HUD, Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program, that allowed us to expand housing and services for young adults ages 18 to 24 in additional regions. For our funded agencies, BCRIPP also provides for connective tissue like all the program administration happens in our office. Representative Julie McCann is another member of the BPRIP staff and then we have one more staff person. We provide technical assistance, data coordination system design, drill the grant writing, etcetera, etcetera.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: You said that you've been able to increase housing for youth sixteen to twenty.

[Representative Kate Logan]: Eighteen to twenty four.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Eighteen to twenty four.

[Representative Kate Logan]: Technically we can't provide housing services to 16 and 17 year olds in Vermont because it's not allowed. We can provide up to twenty one days of shelter for anyone 18, but nothing beyond that.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So for the increase for 18 24 year olds, what does that look like? Is that congregate housing?

[Representative Kate Logan]: Is a mix of transitional housing and rental assistance. So youth specific programs that are similar to the housing opportunities program. So we have in five agencies that are part of our youth homelessness demonstration program. So NEK, Washington, Windham, Rutland, or Franklin County all have programming. Across those agencies, we offer 32 rental assistance vouchers per year and 14 transitional housing units. The transitional housing, those are master leased by the agencies and the youth can live there up to two years and they pay their fees directly to the agency. And so they can achieve some rental history by being in a master lease unit where technically the agency is kind of like the landlord, but it's transitional transitional housing, so it's not rental housing. But yeah, so we have that transitional housing program and then a rental assistance program that's specific for youth. And at this point outside of Chittenden County, the coordinated entry list, the list of folks who have signed up for services and been assessed and determined that they need medium length housing support. So don't need permanent supportive housing, like don't have a severe disability, for example, they're then referred into our programs. Often though, our agencies are already working with youth who end up helping them get onto the coordinated entry waitlist through other programming that they offer to youth experiencing homelessness. So that, federal as funding has kind of dropped off from the Department of Health and Human Services who funds the programming for 18, it's HUD has kind of increased its funding for eighteen to twenty four year olds. We are seeing a huge service gap for unaccompanied homeless youth and I'll talk about that a little bit more because I've mentioned that Spectrum has a commissioner's anticipated shelter. And then Windsor County Youth Services has one bed that they can use to provide shelter to an unaccompanied homeless youth. So in addition to BCRIP, we've also created a larger body given the limited nature of our funding. Agencies have, in some cases, continued to provide services or expanded their services to homeless youth through state funding like HOP or for private funding. So for example, in Rutland County, the Mentor Connector has gotten its own funding for transitional living program apartments that serve 16 to 21 year olds. So that larger coordinating body is called the Committee to Ending Homelessness. That's the group that's here today. So we've built that committee over the last couple of years to sort of piece everything back together again. As funding has become challenging and services have fragmented, we felt that there was a need for a larger body across the state uniting all youth service providers across the state. And so now I'll just turn to talking about unaccompanied homeless youth more specifically. The shelters that Lauren spoke about in Brattleboro and Bellevue Falls are funded through the funding that I was talking about earlier. It's called the Basic Center Program from US DHHS. And the primary data source that we have for information about unaccompanied youth homelessness in Vermont is the AOE. So this data that you are hoping to find out, it's actually really hard to get data about unaccompanied youth homelessness. We have information, like Lauren mentioned, about youth who are included in the PID count, but those are typically youth who are living with homeless parents. PID count often can't capture unaccompanied homeless youth unless the schools are participating in the pit count in their area and they generally don't. So, we do though have information from the Vermont Agency of Education McKinney Vento Program. For the most recent school year, schools reported 121 accompanied homeless youth across Vermont. That has doubled the rate five years ago. So, homelessness, unaccompanied homelessness for you under the age of 18 has doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, funding has stagnated, services have dropped off. So glaring neat. We have supervisory unions like the Southwest Supervisory Union down in Bennington that are independently organizing with no resources and unaccompanied homeless youth task force because they're seeing this increase in unaccompanied youth homelessness and there's nowhere for youth to go. They end up couch surfing or staying with somebody else who isn't a parent that may not be a stable situation. You may know about the Compass program. There are Compass providers in every county that is a family stabilization services counseling program, but it depends on how engaged the Compass providers are with their local school system, whether there's a good rapport between COMPASS and the school system so that youth are getting counseling and finding stability somehow. It's really invisible right now because we don't have a street youth population. I think that's the typical picture we have of youth homelessness under 18. It's too cold for a street population. I mean, our communities are too small. So young people are couch surfing. I have relationships with runaway and homeless youth providers in New Hampshire and Maine and Massachusetts and New York. And I've heard reports from them that we have sixteen 17 year olds from Vermont showing up at shelters in Manchester, New Hampshire and Portland, Maine because there's an actual shelter that you can go to. Here, our programs are entirely post home programs. In So order to get shelter in Vermont as a 16 year old, you have to contact a youth services agency like Elevate You Services, and then they would have to transport you to a post home provider who's a volunteer, provides a bed or two in their home for shelter. So, really interesting patchwork, unfunded, and really hard to get data. I have a lot more than I prepared to say about 18 to 24 population, but it doesn't seem like the right committee for that. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have about that or unaccompanied homeless youth.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Is there a pattern, especially when it comes to unaccompanied homeless youth? Are they by and large running away from unstable households? Are they by and large being rejected from their households because they're LGBTQ or some other reason? Or is every situation different?

[Representative Kate Logan]: I mean, are patterns. It's a race. LGBTQ plus youth being kicked out of their homes is pretty common. Definitely overrepresented in the homeless youth population everywhere, that includes Vermont. But a lot of times, for example, we served a couple of youth the year that we started cutting hotel room vouchers. So youth were separated from their parents because there was nowhere to go for the family because there's no family shelter beds anywhere. And so rather than camp outside with their mom, a youth has sought out services from a youth services program and gone into a shelter program. And then often what happens then is that case managers will work to help find a house that they can stay in with a family friend or neighbor, and then they provide case management and supportive services for that youth while they're staying in another house. So that's an example. So poverty, I'd say is a huge predictor of unaccompanied youth homelessness and family conflict. And there are a range of reasons for family conflict often having to do with poverty, but then also untreated mental health needs, substance use disorders, which are often untreated mental health needs or related to poverty. So there's a pretty consistent sort of poverty related set of circumstances. But then the other one is that rejection by your family for your sexual identity or gender identity.

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: When you talk about the untreated substance abuse, do you think that's more parents with substance abuse challenges and kids not being able to deal with other parents not buying them to be their only thing because the kids having substance abuse challenges and the parents not doing it.

[Representative Kate Logan]: Both. Yeah, it's both. I think the youth who end up enrolled in our programming, it's typically the parent. We often don't see youth who are almost due to substance use disorder until they're a little older. You. Yeah, thank you.

[Representative Kate Logan]: Jeff then we have Jeff from the Memorial County Beam Center and then we also have Christina Brown from

[Representative Kate Logan]: Spectrum who can talk

[Representative Kate Logan]: a bit about the Christmas prevention program that they've been involved with in.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Great question. Perfect. My name

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: is Jeff Huntsberger. I'm an MSW social worker. I'm at the tail end of my career. I've worked for DCF Family Services, was a supervisor out of Newport District, I was a district director for the health department down here for six years, and in the last twelve years, fifteen years I've been working back with youth, back where I like to work in non profit. So I work with the Lemoyle Family Center which is a member of the Parent Child Center network, if you're familiar with the Parent Child Center. We are unique in as much as we'll be celebrating our fiftieth birthday on May 17, which I'm very proud about. We serve young people from birth through Adult Save program and their parents and supporting that birth, the first six months of that cycle, and then we serve kids up to the age of six in the CIS program, Children's Integrated Services program. We have a gap from six to 12 or 11, and then my program picks up with kids technically on the Compass program. Used to be a V Trip program as well, we'll talk a little bit more about that. We serve 12 to the 20 birthday. I look at that as two different populations, I look at that as 18 and 18. So let's just capitalize on what's already been said. You've heard the macro, here's the micro. Lemoyle County is a complete service desert when it comes to youth. My other unique perspective is that I've been a school board member of Lemoyle North for the last ten years. So I've seen through consolidation, I've seen through watching my own child go through elementary school as a school board member and then on to the unified work, the pressures and challenges that Memorial North has had to try to support youth who are falling into this category. So kudos to McKinney Vento. McKinney Vento supports for the schools as one of the primary support functions, but it only does one certain piece of that. And if I could give you some numbers from Lavoyal County as a just a point in time if you will, as I checked with these three supervisory unions in our catchment area, we have about 49 youths who are being served under McKinney Vento title. So that would also include foster youths who are in foster care. So I don't have a breakdown between that and unaccompanied youth. So 14 in the Lemoyle South of Big Stow, Morrisville, roughly 10 to 14 in Lemoyle North, and up around 10 for OSS, New Orleans Southwest. Our EHS district, our agency of human service district services all of Lemoyle County 10 towns, plus five towns out of county. So that would be down the Orleans County towns of like Greensboro, Brassberry, Greensboro, Bend, Parkway, those towns because of the service delivery systems and our designated agency which is our mental health agency serves the youth from those extra five towns because of proximity to Memorial County Mental Health. So it's an odd shaped setup. So Woodbury could be the Washington County town that's kind of plugged in with us for those services. Same district area as DC has accomplished. So what's unique about what's happening is and what I think is important for you to hear from a boots on the ground perspective is this, because we have a desk, we have no way to serve in the last two and a half years since we had to give up the contract to the shelter program contract, we have not been able to work with the schools specifically to make sure that these unaccompanied youth, the ones who are couch surfing, the ones who are just floating around out there, they're not getting in trouble but they're not staying at home and there's some reason why they're not at home. And it's usually some kind of parent conflict and you've already listened to all the reasons for that. It's either domestic violence or substance abuse and I will say in our area the majority of those youth are not engaged in their own substance use. It is parental substance use and abuse that is really driving a lot of those situations. Since the program, the shelter program we had to give up, because we had a commissioner designated shelter program, I'm very proud to say that during Covid we had three shelter homes that were licensed. We made the only six placements for sheltering during Covid in the state, and then we had to give up the program. So we were very proud and we've been doing it for forty five years.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Your program due to funding cuts?

[Representative Kate Logan]: Funding cuts,

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: yeah, when VTrip and FSB re did their, reorganized

[Representative Kate Logan]: It the a in federal

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: FSB change.

[Representative Kate Logan]: It was a change in the way that Family Use Services, the bureau, which the ACF on the federal level did it. And so it made it, we couldn't apply for multiple grants and serve multiple parts, we could only do one. And so in that decision, we kind of tried, we could only keep three open. So we have kind of Washington County, Windham in Windsor, and then then McKees came down through McKees. And so trying to at least have, you know, do our best and based it kind of on the beef clumpers at the time. But it is woefully inadequate.

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: And we weren't the only ones that had to step away from that. I think there were five smaller programs because we were one of the smaller ones, and frankly we ran the shelter program on $18,700 a year. I mean that was it, and we were able to shelter kids and keep it going and move it. We only have three staff, myself and two case managers. So it doesn't take much when we have the resources to support the kids. Now I bring all of this up because we are one of these Compass programs that's a contract through DCF Family Services that has an outstanding relationship with our schools. And we do so much work with our schools, the vast majority of our referrals are coming from schools whether they're youth that fall into this category or just youth that are just they're on the edge of at risk. They're not getting in trouble yet because we have in our area, we have a restorative center, which is an outstanding organization that works with law enforcement engaged youth where people fall into that category with a version of those types of restorative programming. So we want to enhance our opportunities to support more youth and we don't have that opportunity because we don't have the federal grant to do it. Schools relied on us to help out and to stabilize these young people for up to twenty one days in these shelter homes and we don't have access to it for two and a half years. We're not going have access to it for the foreseeable future. The Federal Value Services Bureau grants are five year grants?

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: They're kind of whatever they just said.

[Representative Kate Logan]: We got a surprise NOFO and

[Representative Kate Logan]: a new grant cycle this summer,

[Representative Kate Logan]: two weeks turnaround time. But there, so that one now it's

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: two or three year, I'd say, yeah.

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: And we also have a transitional living program, a no TLP program, which I was trying to get. My frustration with this has been that I was the associate director here at Elevate prior to Elevate being Elevate Youth Services Bureau for six years and you know we had the TLP program, we had supported apartments, we had all kinds of stuff that we were able to service youth more on a continuum. In Memorial we have a wall and we can't break through that wall, there's just no capacity. Compass doesn't give us enough to do that, Compass gives us enough money to work with this Medicaid reimbursed, it can serve 12 kids per month. We used to serve 25 to 30, so that Compass program has pulled us. That has been pulled as well. So there's so many services that we would love to be providing and we would love to be partnering with the schools to do it. They love to have us there, but we need to find a way to bridge it. From my perspective as a school board member I will say this, I see more and more support and more and more resources being put toward kids mental health supports in schools, and I see the stress on the teaching staff and the faculty, and it's hard. It's hard for them to do educational planning, educational supports, and social services counseling and family supports because they're in the school environment but in our local communities they are the community. There aren't rural places, they are the community. That's where people come to watch ball games, that's where people come to participate in musicals and to see shows and to see their kids participate in things, because there's just not a lot out there. You know the transportation issues. When you're spread out in the county, when you have five or 15 towns to move around in, the hub of those communities is that. So that middle school, there's usually those union middle schools and high schools. So I just want to leave you with this, is that this has real implications for people, for young people. They don't care about education reform. The kids don't care. The kids want to be in a healthy happy place. I mean we care about it, but we want to make sure that we can find a balance so we don't lose our young people. That they don't leave the state because nobody provided the level of support for them that they need in order to grow and be nurtured and to be loved by their community if their family can't or just not available to do that. The state's not responsible for that, but we can do better as a community by re engaging people and providing the opportunity to have relationships with these young people that are missing because we're just not able to put enough people out there to do the work. So help us by considering that schools need the level of support. I'm not necessarily advocating for schools to get more money to do this stuff. What I am saying is that there needs to be a better focus on how we, the small non profit programs that have these youth service agencies, can interface with schools and provide across the board wraparound services for these kids. Truancy is out of control, it's absolutely out of control. And now we have young people in high school who are staying and choosing not to go to school to take care of younger siblings because the parents are so frustrated they don't know if they can't make the kids go to school, but they to go to work and keep a job in order to keep their housing and keep food on the table. So we cyclical challenges across the board here. So there are no simple solutions to any of it, but there is a will to do it and there are ways to be considering how to weave this together in a different pattern.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Why are these, especially unaccompanied homeless youth, not in the foster care program?

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: They don't qualify. They're necessarily abused or neglected. Frankly, we used to have this term called unmanageability. I guess it's still out there but nobody likes to use it, right? So when a kid is acting out and not able to be controlled by a parent, then what we have is a situation where everybody throws up their hands. The police will say he's 17, he can make it on his own, he can deal with it. In the last committee we were in we were talking about kids aging out of the foster care system at 18. Really, I mean picture it on a street corner with all their belongings and garbage bags because they have no other place to go. That's why these programs are so important.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you very much. Yeah,

[Representative Kate Logan]: We can hear about some possible solutions and tools and how it's going. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for

[Christina Brown, Chief Program Officer, Spectrum Youth and Family Services]: the opportunity to speak today and the time that you are all giving in recognition of the experiences of youth homelessness in our state. My name is Christina Brown. I'm the Chief Program Officer at Spectrum Youth and Family Services. At Spectrum, we serve over 1,300 youth each year between the ages of 12 and 30 years old with services that focus on prevention and intervention, life skills and basic needs. We provide crisis stabilization, employment and education coaching, outpatient mental health and substance use counseling, mentoring, affinity spaces, food and material resources, and supportive housing services, including up to 30 beds for youth experiencing homelessness in Chittenden County and an additional 10 in Franklin County. We provide services through the lens of positive youth development with an emphasis on trauma informed care, recognizing the unique strengths, challenges, social, emotional, and cognitive milestones of teens and young adults, and catering our programming to match these needs. At Spectrum, we recognize the compounding impacts of trauma on the developing minds of the children and youth we serve, and we pride ourselves in providing responsive, supportive programming that meets the youth where they are at, keeping their dignity, autonomy, and voices at the center of our work. A vitally important resource that we at Spectrum are proud to support is the homelessness prevention program in the Champlain Ballast District. This unique and impactful program first piloted in early twenty twenty two with the creation of a housing support services coordinator position embedded in the schools. The HSSC Jenny provides housing navigation services to families with children who are living in emergency shelters, places not meant for habitation, like a car or a tent, or imminently at risk of losing their housing and entering homelessness. She connects with these children and families in a place and through the people they trust, their school, the faculty and staff who see them every day. We often get asked why Chittenden Valley School District would be prioritized for such a pilot, being that this is not a district that many think of when they think of visible homelessness. But homelessness for children and youth is often invisible. Since launching in 2022, the Housing Support Services Coordinator has moved 73 families out of littoral homelessness into stable housing. This includes over 200 children, our Vermont students, from pre K through twelfth grade in the Champlain Valley School District alone. An additional 38 families were able to stabilize in their homes, preventing homelessness altogether. The HSSC has worked with 22 young adults aged 18 or over, homeless, alone, and trying to finish school while solving their own housing crisis. In this school year alone, 63 families have been referred to the program, totaling nearly 150 students. These are children who are unable to meaningfully engage in their education because they are already or at imminent risk of experiencing the deep and lasting trauma of homelessness. The HSSC and the Champlain Valley School District has been able to offer consultation and support to administrators and McKinney Vento liaisons in other districts where the need for these services is high and rising. The specialized and distinct role of the HSSC in CBSD, who is also the district's McKinney Vento liaison, brings the expertise and skill set of the housing world into the field of education, meeting young people where they are at, eliminating barriers to accessing care, building on the trusting relationships families have with their schools and keeping kids in the classrooms where they want to be. I work every day in the Spectrum Basic Needs programs where we see youth, mostly 18 and over, coming into our shelter, often spending years trying to find stability. For many of them, their first experience of homelessness was in their childhood with their family. And I see firsthand the impacts of these early experiences. Data from the National Network for Youth has shown us that half of all adults who are homeless had their first experience of homelessness before the age of 25. We must bring services to the children in the place where they are most connected and explore solutions that make the experience of a child experiencing homelessness rare, brief, and non recurring. The Housing Support Services Coordinator Program in the Champlain Valley School District is one such solution that has proven time and again to have a life changing impact on the stability of these families for a child who cannot separate their housing from their education. An investment in ending child and youth homelessness is a long term investment in a data driven solution to curb the rise of homelessness across all age demographics. Today, we have taken the important step of drawing awareness to this issue. Awareness is the first step. Many service providers are leaps and bounds ahead of awareness. We are in our communities, in our schools with these children every day, implementing solutions we know work to end and prevent homelessness, and we need others to join us. Thank you for taking the time to hear this testimony and to bring greater visibility to a population that has too often gone unseen.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Thank you. A couple questions. Who's funding the HSS?

[Christina Brown, Chief Program Officer, Spectrum Youth and Family Services]: Right now, funding comes half through the school district and half through the housing opportunity program through the office of economic opportunity. Spectrum receives the HOP funding as an emergency shelter provider. We offer a number of other HOT funded services to youth experiencing homelessness. And we are essentially a pass through of an MOU to the school district. How reliable is that grant? I would not say it is very reliable. Since the pilot in 2022, the location and the source of the funding for this one position has changed. Spectrum took on funding half of it two years ago.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I only bring it up because we often talk about services that schools are providing outside of classroom education. Another question. Oh, hear that. Okay, that's some pretty remarkable success. What do those successes look like? How are they finding in an era, especially in Chicken County where there is very limited housing available? How is this person getting these families stable housing?

[Christina Brown, Chief Program Officer, Spectrum Youth and Family Services]: Yeah, it's a great question and it's a full time job. I mean, I think that's the distinction here and that's why she's been able to be so successful is because housing navigation in one school district alone, it's full time. It's meeting with landlords. It is helping folks establish credit histories. It is getting them through rental training programs through CBOEO. She's with these families daily. She's moving around the county trying to really on the ground identify the housing opportunities. And that's what it takes because housing is so scarce.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So pretty much every case is different. There's not sort of a standard path. Yeah. CVST is the largest school state. Challenge comes is we've got a lot of school districts that are significantly smaller and can't justify the expense of somebody like that. But anyway, it's just kind of fascinating about, hey, first of all, we do think of that district as being a rather a district of beans. The reality doesn't, as you say, first of it isn't visible to all of us,

[Christina Brown, Chief Program Officer, Spectrum Youth and Family Services]: but it also takes this level of sort of sustained support to make those changes. Yeah, and as I mentioned, she offers consultation and support to the liaisons in the Winooski and Burlington school districts as well, where they don't have the benefit of this position, but Leland is significant. Bennington?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Your question just made me think about ways to get to those rural areas and how to And then thinking of the bill where we're signing up CSAs and wondering if there's a way that we can manage to get those through. Is that a function of a CSA? Mean, shared services are what we need to do to reach those in

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: the areas that are hardest.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I was having the same thought as I was thinking about transportation, just coordinating all those rides at our geographic area. Any other questions? Thank you very much. Thank you. That's all we have. Right, well that was

[Representative Kate Logan]: questions you come up with, you drive away from dinner tonight, talk to your brain just reach out to Keaton, Director of Interactions, that'll help you get the answers for you.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: I will ask a very baseline question to any one of you who wants to answer it. Could you give a sort of a brief explainer on McKinney Vento? Yeah,

[Representative Kate Logan]: I hear

[Representative Kate Logan]: it all the time, so it's more about the federal council.

[Representative Kate Logan]: McKinney Vento is a federal program and I know somewhere around this wall to codify that in our state, in law in our state. So it's enacted through the HEARTH Act. It's where the McKinney Vento was authorized. And it gets some pretty basic protections for youth and families experiencing homelessness. It requires that every district have a mental liaison is what we call them here. You'll see them called different things in various places, or educating homeless children and youth. And so it allows youth and families to either enroll right away in their new schools if they're in a shelter, even if they may not plan to stay there long term. Or they would prefer it allows them the right to remain enrolled in their higher school. It does things like allow maybe a family has lost all of their documents and things, and they've found shelter down in Rattlerville. It would allow them to enroll, for the youth to start getting, going to school and getting acclimated, and gives them a little more time to re get all those documents and get everything in order so that the youth and the children have no loss of stability in education. So I will say that our current administration does not like this part of federal law and has actively been trying to get rid of these on the federal level. And so that is just why I have been pushing. Currently under Vermont statute. We only have one of those protections for families experiencing homelessness.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Is that one protection that a student can remain in the district where they were?

[Representative Kate Logan]: No, it is actually that they can enroll right away in the new district until, I believe. Maybe I got it wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is. It's one or the other of those. But all of those other things kind of disappear for families. And we would see, hopefully, schools, we would have to act quickly. This would just ensure smooth smooth sailing relatively in terms of their education.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: So is there federal money attached to McKinney Vento?

[Representative Kate Logan]: There is a little. The way it works, it funds our statewide McKinney Vento coordinator. I've heard they're doing some restructuring, but that has been Katie Preston for a while. I'm not sure where that will land, but she's done a wonderful job. And so the way it works currently is there's the limited funds. And so folks apply and do grant applications. And some get it, some don't. Where we largely see it being used is for transportation. But it's not enough. Scratches the surface of the pain, I'd

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: say. I

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: would also add that it's usually a position added on to existing duties, And so as we hear from really successful programs where it's a full time job to support children and families in this situation, it's really inadequate for meeting their need.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Right, we've got lots of small districts that where that job just gets lumped onto somebody else's job.

[Representative Kate Logan]: Right, but I do think that that is where, I mean, CSUS will shine in a lot of places, but that it really is the solution for these small, like in Addison County, we could have just like one, and they could serve our multiple school districts. Have probably even more combined. So I think it is where you could see that work really well. And the model of our youth serving agencies is that they are already serving their same kind of distances. So I think it would all meld really well into a system that works.

[Jeff Huntsberger (MSW), Lamoille Family Center]: In my practical experience, we have individuals that are in the Supervisory Union. But often when I used this place and we were putting kids into shelter care, they had nobody to transport the kids. So it was a teacher who lived in the same town, if the teacher was agreeable to move the young person back and forth from whatever their out of home placement was to their student that they're penalized to. Would provide transportation, my organization would provide transportation for that youth for the first up to the first week back and forth to school and so the school could figure out who's going to do it. So that's been a small area, that's how we've and we eat the cost on that. Mean I'd rather do that to support a young person being safe and sound than to say no we're not transporting the gun, but that's around.

[Representative Kate Logan]: I will add on to that one thing, in particular last spring really was an issue is know folks have talked a bit about when the hotel program shuts down, we see youth. They go with their families. And we heard from a number of people that if they were living in a tent, because their tent didn't have an address, they then couldn't get the transportation. Or because it often takes at least two weeks is what folks are told before they can set up transportation. So you do it based on you're sleeping in this patch of woods, but then the police tell you you need to move. And so now you're over here in this. And it's this constant, and so the youth lose that connection with their schools. And so that I feel like is probably we could sit down and figure that out with our schools and our systems. But that is just one challenge I know we saw last spring. And as folks are hitting their eighty days, we're gonna start to see it, I think, again this year as well.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Well, I appreciate all of you coming in and sharing this with us, very informative.

[Representative Kate Logan]: So much for having us,

[Lauren Higbee, Deputy Advocate, Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate (OCYFA)]: and I look forward to more West Sidewalk partner guests. Thank you for to Stellhop.

[Peter Conlon (Chair)]: Hi everybody, tomorrow we're back in here at 09:15 with the head of the Career Technical