Q&A with Catherine Knowles
On the first day of classes at Metro Nashville Public Schools, the Director of the Homeless Education Program for the district said they had already processed paperwork for 757 students who were considered homeless this school year.
Catherine Knowles has served in her role as director for 26 years, and she’s a nationally recognized expert among homelessness providers and advocates. In her time with the district, she’s seen students and their families who experience homelessness grow from 200 students a year to close to 4,500 this past school year (2023-2024), which showed a 27 percent increase over the prior school year.
“We used to see about 800 students in the first month of the school year, and now we go from zero to 1,200 students in the first month,” Knowles said.
In 2019, Knowles was recognized as The Homeless Liaison of the Year by the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth. She serves on Metro’s Homelessness Planning Council and was appointed by the governor to sit on three statewide councils to represent the concerns of families who are experiencing homelessness. In her job with MNPS, she oversees the Homeless Education Resource Office (HERO) program, which is a federally funded program through the McKinney Vento Act that provides support for students who lack a fixed regular and adequate nighttime residence.
How do you count MNPS’ homeless population? And who qualifies for your programs?
Any student who fits that broad McKinney Vento definition, who lacks a fixed and adequate nighttime residence, qualifies. The majority of the verification occurs when families register for school because they will present to the school [administrators], and if they don’t have a lease in their name, then that triggers a different set of paperwork that asks questions about where they’re staying, are they staying in a temporary place, how long they’ve been there, etc. And then we get referrals that way.
We also receive referrals throughout the year from school staff, social workers, counselors, bus drivers, directly from families and from community providers.
In the past few years, you have moved the HERO program offices out of a trailer that was sitting next to the MNPS headquarters on Bransford Avenue to the former Buena Vista Elementary School in North Nashville. You have also expanded your team. Tell us about those changes.
We have moved into that vacant school space, and we now have the entire former school library that has been converted into a clothing store for families experiencing homelessness. We also have a food pantry where we offer hotel-friendly meals, which can be heated up in a microwave. We also have winter coats to ensure kids waiting at the bus stop are warm. And household items so when people go into housing they have a few things to start out.
We now have a team of six people. Prior to COVID we were a team of three, then during COVID we had special federal funding through the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act that allowed us to temporarily have a team of nine people. So, for a three-year period we had extra funding that then expired, and now we are back to six folks. We have one full-time person who is focused on special transportation; we have two folks working directly with families and they have split the city in sectors [each working with families in their sector]; some folks work on community partnerships; we have someone who does the processing and eligibility work; and then myself.
What else would you like to see happening, so you are able to serve MNPS students who live in a housing crisis even more efficiently?
I would like to see better integration and quick communication among school staff and the various community providers. I am thinking about something that goes beyond the coordinated entry process, so when school staff have some of the kids staying at their office at the end of the school day, they have a phone number they can call that will quickly connect the family with a shelter for the evening. But it’s hard to get that immediate response for a variety of reasons. So, a quick and immediate response to connect families in a crisis with support, that would be nice.
You have been doing this work for many years. How has homelessness changed in Nashville in your opinion?
In the last two years, we have seen a significant increase in the number of long-term, low-income renters who are forced into homelessness due to gentrification, loss of Section 8 vouchers, and loss of affordable housing options. In my opinion, we see far more employed people. We see the working poor who are priced out of the housing market. We have seen the loss of affordable housing in Davidson County. I think in the last five years, families have been forced to move out of the county altogether.
And even with that displacement you see numbers of homeless students going up here in Davidson County?
Yes, for sure.
With all the data improvements in how we count the different unhoused populations, what are we, as a community, still missing? In other words, what populations are we mostly overlooking?
There is a big gap between the federal education definition of homelessness, which includes the families who are doubled up or those who are staying in motels that they are paying for on their own, and that narrower HUD definition.
When we look at those staying in motels who are working and are paying a high weekly rate, but we have a [homelessness response system] where they do not qualify to be connected to service providers or someone to help them navigate them getting back into a place of their own. So, we essentially leave a lot of people to struggle on their own, and we’re not serving those children very well.
Can you briefly explain the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) definition of homelessness?
That is the very narrow definition of literal homelessness that includes folks who are in a shelter or on the street. And those are the only folks that the HUD definition covers.
About how many families are doubled-up, stay in motels, or in emergency shelters?
Right now, we see about 88 percent of families we serve that are doubled-up. (Editor’s note: Doubled- up is an informal term that is covered by the definition of homelessness that education departments use. It refers to families that share a living arrangement with family, friends, or others mostly due to hardship. They generally do not hold their own lease and can be asked to leave by the leaseholder at any time.)
Nationwide that regular number is between 78 and 90 percent. Then, we have about eight percent who stay in motels, and the rest (four percent) are in emergency shelters. The shelter population is the smallest percentage of our families.
In fact, when the homeless service providers talk about families they serve, they are not counting the vast majority of the families we’re serving in the school system.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I would like to see a shift in the conversation where we are not only thinking of the individuals out on the street corners as experiencing homelessness but rise to the challenge of meeting the needs of all people in our community who are unstably housed.
When we talk to our families who are doubled-up, we see how they bounce around. One week they live here, the next they stay there. I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to stop and recognize the challenges and frustrations that leave these families who truly have no place of their own in complicated situations where there are really no resources, and they are told they don’t qualify for services.
Occasionally I have families who tell me they’re not the right kind of homeless. In a sense, we have a system that is set up to force people into shelter situations [to access resources]. But that isn’t exactly the solution for all of our families. Then after going into that shelter system, they still cannot get the resources they need to get back into housing.
I have heard from providers that they are starting to see the children of families they served come back as parents. Do you see the same?
Oh yes. I’ve been doing this for 26 years, and I will never forget, back in the old family shelter in the late 90s, we had a family of an elementary school child who 15 years later came back as a parent. Housing insecurity has a long-term impact on kids who have not been raised in affordable, stable housing.
And then, there is always the great community call of engaging landlords, raising awareness, engaging for-profits, nonprofits, and all kinds of community partners — really anyone who can lean into the work. I think that’s desperately needed.
I invite anybody to think about family homelessness. it doesn’t get the press that encampments do, but it is certainly something that people can get behind if they have a better understanding of it.
How can people support your work?
Anybody who wants to donate or volunteer, they can contact me via email at catherine.knowles@mnps.org
We love volunteer manpower to help us pack clothes, sort through shoes and do all these things to get school items out to the kids.