Already struggling financially, Tacoma Public Schools takes another $750K hit

As Tacoma Public Schools gets closer to finalizing its budget for the 2025-2026 academic year after several rounds of staff cuts, it is contending with a new cost: The state is no longer providing funding to assist the district’s support of homeless students.

The district was on track to receive $750,000 from the state to cover some of the costs associated with the district’s compliance with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal law that seeks to remove barriers to education that are caused by youth homelessness. School officials often determine that a student experiencing homelessness should remain at their school instead of transferring to another district while contending with unstable housing. Under McKinney-Vento, the student’s home district is responsible for arranging transportation to make that happen, part of which the state usually covers.

The district had around 2,500 McKinney-Vento students during the 2024-2025 academic year – one of the highest number for one school district in the state, according to Tacoma Public Schools director of strategic financial operations Cary Campen. Of those students, 850 are eligible for special transportation to the district outside of a yellow school bus, a roughly $3 million cost.

The state of Washington ordinarily covers a portion of those costs with something called a “transportation safety net,” which this year would have been $750,000. Chief financial officer Rosalind Medina said at a school board meeting last month that the district was informed that the state would not be covering those costs at all – leaving it up to the district to cover.

“It was a $750,000 impact that we did not know was coming to us,” Medina said at the meeting.

A spokesperson for the state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction said the legislature “had to make difficult choices” given the $12 billion budget shortfall it faced this year.

“While the legislature protected basic K–12 education as best they could, they did not fund the transportation safety net in the 2025–27 biennial budget,” spokesperson Katie Hannig said in a statement The News Tribune.

The loss of the funds is an example of what the district has cited as reasoning for its enduring budget deficit – $40 million in the 2024-2025 academic year and $10 million the year before that. The district, which has depleted its reserves and has said is close to seeing revenues exceed expenses, has said the situation is the result of a combination of factors including inflation, insufficient funding from the state and new unexpected costs that the district could not predict. District officials also have said that it will continue to contend with deficits until the state of Washington changes the way it funds public education.

“We have to eliminate costs somewhere else within the district to help pay for that,” Campen said of the transportation safety net.

Barbara Duffield is executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit that advocates for homeless youth. Duffield said school districts often determine that it makes the most sense to keep a student in their school even if an unstable housing situation means they temporarily live outside the district.

The transportation requirement is a “big piece” of the McKinney-Vento act, Duffield said, which defines homeless children as “individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” according to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. That includes children who live in motels, cars, public spaces and transitional shelters.

“Typically it is in a child’s best interest to keep their education stable if they’re experiencing homelessness,” Duffield told The News Tribune.

Duffield said transportation is a key factor in preventing youth homelessness from persisting to adulthood.

“Lack of a high school degree is the single greatest risk factor for being homeless as an adult. So this program and these provisions are part of a larger goal to get students graduated and to prevent future homelessness,” she said.

Daniel Johnson is the executive director of Harbor Hope, a Gig Harbor-based nonprofit that serves homeless youth. Johnson said the McKinney-Vento Act through its strict transportation requirement helps give homeless kids a sense of consistency in the midst of the instability of being homeless.

“If you can, in some way, alleviate a little bit of that trauma by at least saying, ‘hey, at least you can get up and go to the same school tomorrow, even though you your housing situation is unstable,’ then that’s a huge benefit to that young person,” he told The News Tribune.

Campen said he doesn’t know why Tacoma Public Schools has such a high rate of McKinney-Vento students, but said it’s a positive sign that homeless students at Tacoma Public Schools want to stay in their home school.

“Students in Tacoma Public Schools, they like their home school,” Campen said. “They feel valued, they want to be there, and so we’re supportive of that too, of keeping them there. We think that’s a positive thing, even though it is a high number.”

This story was originally published July 8, 2025 at 5:30 AM.

Isha Trivedi

The News Tribune

Isha Trivedi covers Tacoma city hall, Pierce County government and education for The News Tribune. She has previously worked at The Mercury News, the Palo Alto Weekly, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She grew up in San Jose, California and graduated with a bachelor of arts in journalism and anthropology from the George Washington University. She is a proud alumna of The GW Hatchet, her alma mater’s independent student newspaper, and has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists for her work with the publication.