Including coe mckinney vento data in your PIT count

HUD has asked providers to work with local school districts to increase the number of homeless youth included in the 2013 Point in Time Count of homeless individuals. Since 1996, ASR has worked with continuums across California and the United States to improve Point of Time (PIT) data collection strategies. (ASR) was an early adopter of homeless youth counts and is currently working with Santa Clara, Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Luis Obispo counties to include County Office of Education (COE) numbers in their counts. These current projects have increased our understanding of the partnerships, staffing, and time required to gather these data and has created a system to identify not only the number of youth but also the number of families experiencing homelessness. ASR has found that outreach through the local McKinney Vento liaisons, while targeted to enumerate youth, has granted access into the lives of families experiencing homelessness. Homeless families are a population that has proven difficult to count for many communities and the methods used in 2013 present an affordable alternative to strategies which rely on contacting the general population through telephone surveys. ASR will document: how local continuums can work with McKinney Vento liaisons to verify the number of children and families experiencing homelessness on a given night; how to streamline the data collection process; challenges to working with youth and school districts; and how high quality research translates into public policy changes for the homeless (new funding, shelters, programs).