The Brief

There are two ways that people look at what filmmaker Brandon Loran Maxwell calls “homeboy culture,” that of the pachucos, cholos, and lowriders who’ve long been a part of the L.A. fabric.

“They look at it as either a meme, it's just a joke to them, and they don't have any understanding of the history behind those things,” he said. “Or they look at it like it's an abomination, like it's corrosive, and it's ‘all these people are criminals and they're bad.’”

Both interpretations are wrong, Loran Maxwell said.

“They're missing the bigger picture. And so I wanted to go into that bigger picture.”

That bigger picture led Loran Maxwell to spend the last three years producing American Homeboy, a new documentary that’s been screening in select cities. It comes to Santa Ana’s The Frida Cinema this Saturday, and to the Gardena Cinema in Gardena Oct. 12. Next month, the documentary is set to be on Chela TV, a new subscription streaming app dedicated to amplifying Chicano and Latino voices.

The movie combines interviews and archival footage to explore the rich history of pachuco and cholo culture, set against the backdrop of the Chicano and Mexican American experience that gave rise to it, in L.A. and around the Southwest. 

"American Homeboy" director Brandon Loran Maxwell on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A.

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Brian Feinzimer

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The film takes in historic events and policies that fueled Chicano youth counterculture: anti-Mexican racism after the Mexican-American war and the Mexican Revolution, discrimination during World War II (including L.A.’s 1943 Zoot Suit Riots), the Vietnam War and the Chicano civil rights movement.

In more recent decades, gangs, mass incarceration and prison culture also played a role in shaping a subculture that has since risen to global influence. Cholo culture has inspired fashion, music, tattoos, street art and lowrider car clubs as far away as Japan.

“You have this subculture that was refined over a century through different events, different world events, multiple wars,” said Loran Maxwell. “I wanted to explain how some of these events and some of these policies shaped this subculture.”

The first-time director sifted through 50 hours of archival footage to make the film, and interviewed a dozen-plus experts — lifelong cholos, authors (including Luis Rodriguez (of Always Running fame), other filmmakers, lowriders, artists, academics, a former law enforcement officer, a full-body tattoo “collector” — several of them from Los Angeles, where cholo culture is inextricably tied to the city’s identity.

Loran Maxwell himself grew up Mexican American far from Los Angeles, on the outskirts of Portland, where as a teen he absorbed cholo culture imported from points south. He became involved in gang life, too — but as the film portrays, he said, cholo culture is much bigger than that.

“I was very conscientious of, you know, putting forward another gang movie,” he said. “I didn't want to do that, because this is different.”

Exploring Pachuco roots

The origins of pachuco and cholo culture go way back.

“The word ‘cholo,’ let's focus on that for a minute,” said James Vigil, a retired professor with UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, who was interviewed for the film. “That word stems from the 16th century, when the Spanish arrived.”

Vigil said the term was used derogatorily by the Spanish to refer to mestizo children born to Spanish and Indigenous parents, typically children born out of wedlock who were deemed outsiders.

“They had no roots, no family standings, no recognition to be absorbed into 'normal' society,” Vigil said. This sense of outsiderness endured and carried over to the U.S., as the Mexican American population grew in the early 20th century following the Mexican Revolution.

Pachuco culture, the early progenitor of cholo culture, with its Caló slang and baggy zoot suits inspired by the Black jazz scene, didn’t start in Los Angeles. It’s believed to have originated in the late 1930s in El Paso, Texas, migrating west with transplants to L.A., San Jose, San Diego and other Mexican American cultural hubs.

While pachuco and later cholo culture took root and flourished in other cities — notably San Jose, the original home of Lowrider Magazine — it holds a special place here in L.A.

“I think L.A. does it in its own way that's different than the rest of the Southwest,” Loran Maxwell said. “I think California has really embraced it and owned it and championed it, in a way that other states haven't, and continues to.”

Zoot suiters line up outside a local jail on their way to court after the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, begun when sailors attacked pachucos in Los Angeles.

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Pachuco culture became popular among rebellious young Chicanos and Chicanas in 1940s L.A. It also gained notoriety: In 1942, several young L.A. pachucos were accused of murder, without sufficient evidence, in what is known as the Sleepy Lagoon case.

The following year, as anti-pachuco sentiment grew, American servicemen stormed East L.A. streets, assaulting, beating, and stripping the clothes off pachucos they encountered in what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

L.A. as 'motherland'

The film delves into this and other slices of L.A. Chicano history, like the lowrider car culture that became synonymous with Whittier Boulevard and other local cruising strips.

“I feel like L.A. is kind of the motherland of lowriding and Chicano culture,” said Sandy Avila, president of the Lady Lowrider car club, who is interviewed in the film.

Sandy Avila in the driver's seat of her 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, Simply Beautiful.

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Avila grew up in Pasadena with parents who didn’t consider themselves cholos but embraced the lowrider lifestyle. She remembers cruising Pasadena’s Old Town back when Colorado Boulevard was a popular spot.

Her mother would tell her about being harassed by police.

“She would say, ‘I hated taking out the Impalas, ‘cause I always got pulled over,’” Avila said.

Growing up, Avila also didn’t consider herself a chola, a term that at the time was associated with female gang members, she said. But she was drawn to the bigger scene nonetheless.

Sandy Avila of the Lady Lowrider car club in a still from "American Homeboy."

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“For us Chicana girls, those were the guys you wanted to date,” she said. “That was what was in — that culture, that look, that style.”

‘From something bad, something good’

As pachuco culture gave way to cholo culture, that style evolved, giving way to uniforms of crisp khakis and white t-shirts, influenced by blue-collar workwear and the military. Influences from gang and prison life, including a distinctive tattoo style, began playing a bigger role in self-expression as well.

Also in the film is “Compton” David Oropeza, a self-described full-body tattoo “collector” who’s intimately familiar with the unique, highly detailed monochromatic Chicano tattoo style that cholo culture helped popularize.

“The prison system is where it really got its legs, you know, because you have nothing else better to do,” said Oropeza, who served as a co-producer on the documentary Tattoo Nation. “They would just practice and practice … the shading, the black and gray with the single needle. And the designs just got better and better and better.”

"Compton" David Oropeza with some of his tattoos; the face is tattooed onto his scalp.

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Michael Jaffe / Courtesy David Oropeza

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Oropeza, who got his first tattoo as a teenager, said those who wore them were once looked down upon; now, these prison-inspired tattoos are considered art.

“From something bad, something good came out of it,” he said.

Why make 'American Homeboy'?

For the filmmaker, American Homeboy grew out of a desire to tell Chicano stories in a deeper and more nuanced way than what Hollywood and mainstream media tend to put forth.

The DIY documentary is the first film produced by Chela Media, a small digital media company that he launched in 2020. It all started as a labor of love for the writer and essayist, whose day job was (and still is) in marketing as a video editor and copywriter.

“I wanted to talk about issues that related to culture and related to Latinos and Chicanos,” he said. So, “I went out and I raised some money and I launched my own little small company.”

First came The Daily Chela, a freelance-driven digital news and culture website.

“Really the goal was to like, just put forth different perspectives,” Loran Maxwell said. “‘Cause there's so many different personalities and perspectives within the Chicano community that aren't usually covered by the media.”

The Daily Chela recently led to Chela TV, the streaming app that will carry the documentary starting in October.

The film “was kind of our first major project,” said Loran Maxwell, who said he spent a grueling year pitching and competing for funding from venture capital startups until he gathered enough to produce the film.

To get around hefty fees charged by photo and video archive collections, he tracked down original photographers and videographers, pleading his case, cutting licensing deals. One such acquisition was footage from Barrio Expressions, a community access cable TV show that ran between the late 1970s and early 1980s in the East San Francisco Bay area.

Brandon Loran Maxwell as a teenager.

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Loran Maxwell said he contacted the city of San Jose, and “they told me that I needed to find the original filmmaker, and so I tracked him down and I found him in Oakland.”

In the end, “I think we had 20 terabytes of archival footage” from multiple sources, he said. Loran Maxwell edited the footage down himself and used AI technology to restore some of it.

There’s even some VHS footage that he shot himself back in the 1980s and '90s, he said, when he was a teenager in the Portland gang scene.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “I've always been into film.”

The documentary features original music with an oldies vibe, including from Bay Area artists Andre Cruz and Chris Lujan.

Why screenings are like 'a revival'

The plan had been simply to release American Homeboy on Chela TV in mid-September. Loran Maxwell said early on while producing the film, he had been in touch with a larger streaming service, but “they asked me if I'd remove the word Chicano from it — and I told them no, not gonna happen.”

The director crossing Whittier Blvd in East L.A.

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As he proceeded DIY, the trailer started drawing interest from theaters. Since last month there have been screenings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and San Jose, as well as Tucson, Chicago, Albuquerque and Portland.

The director, left, with fellow filmmaker Kenneth Castillo, right, at a recent screening. Castillo is also in the film.

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This Saturday it will screen both in Santa Ana and Sacramento, before its planned final screening in Gardena next month.

Loran Maxwell said he’s been blown away by the reception from audience members.

“Every show has had a bunch of lowriders come out,” he said. “To be honest with you, it's felt more like a revival than a documentary screening.”

The plan now is to release the documentary on the Chela TV subscription streaming app by mid-October.

“And then I'm gonna meet with some distributors,” Loran Maxwell said, “and we'll see if there's any interest of taking it to a bigger audience.”

The immigration detention center closest to Los Angeles has placed dozens of people in solitary confinement each month since June, according to the most recent data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In May 2025, the Adelanto ICE Processing Center had 14 people in isolation. When the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort revved up in June 2025, the number of detainees in solitary confinement there more than tripled. By July, it was 73; by August, 105.

The most recent data available shows that number went down slightly in January, to 74 people.

Ranked by percentage of the detainee population in “segregation,” as it is called at immigrant detention centers, Adelanto is among the U.S.’s top 10 facilities as of January, according to an LAist analysis of the most recent ICE data.

The data shows that of 229 ICE facilities that reported holding people since October 2024, between 50 and 60 usually reported putting at least one person in segregation in a given month. Out of the facilities that did place people in solitary confinement, Adelanto tended to do so less often than others until June 2025. (The facility held just a few people from October 2024 into January 2025.) When ICE’s presence increased in L.A. in June, the number of people sent to isolation in the facility also shot up — three to five times as many people have been isolated in Adelanto compared to the average facility that used any solitary confinement.

Since June, only two facilities have sent people to solitary confinement more times than Adelanto: one southwest of San Antonio, the other in central Pennsylvania.

Both of those facilities held twice the number of detainees as Adelanto on average from October 2024 through September 2025; but the number of people held in Adelanto since then has tripled, growing larger than either of the other facilities to hold an average of 1,800 people a day since October.

More on solitary confinement  

According to ICE, detainees may be placed in segregation for “disciplinary reasons,” or because of:

• “Serious mental or medical illness.”
• Conducting a hunger strike.
• Suicide watch.

The agency also says it might place detainees “who may be susceptible to harm [if left among the] general population due in part to how others interpret or assume their sexual orientation, or sexual presentation or expression.”

Not only is ICE holding more people in solitary confinement, but the agency's data also shows that detainees across the country are being isolated for longer periods of time. Detainees ICE considers part of the "vulnerable & special population" spent an average of about two weeks in solitary confinement each time they were isolated in 2022, when ICE first made the data available. By the end of 2025, the average stay in isolation had risen to more than seven weeks straight.

The GEO Group Inc., a private company that operates the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, has not responded to requests for comment.

How isolation can affect immigrant detainees  

UN human rights experts consider solitary confinement placements that last 15 days or more to be torture, though the U.S. Supreme Court has held that isolation doesn’t violate the Constitution.

The UN also maintains that solitary confinement should be prohibited for people “with mental or physical disabilities when their conditions would be exacerbated by such measures.”

In January, a coalition of immigrant rights groups filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of current detainees, calling for conditions at Adelanto to be improved. In addition to an unsanitary environment and a lack of healthy food and clean drinking water, detainees say solitary confinement is frequently used to punish those who speak out about conditions at the facility.

People held in immigrant detention centers are technically in “civil detention,” meaning that they are being detained to ensure their presence at hearings and compliance with immigration orders — not to serve criminal sentences.

According to the immigrant rights groups’ complaint, one detainee was placed in solitary confinement after complaining about the showers being broken. Another detainee said that, after asking a guard to “use more respectful language toward him, he was ridiculed, written up and given the middle finger by a guard who shouted, ‘Who the f--- do you think you are?’” Then, the detainee was placed in solitary confinement for 25 days.

Alvaro Huerta, the director of litigation and advocacy at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing detainees at Adelanto, told LAist that when people are placed in isolation at the facility, they’re typically in the same cell for 23 hours per day, unable to receive visits from their families.

For clients who are experiencing mental health challenges — especially those with suicidal thoughts — being placed in solitary confinement “can really exacerbate their condition,” he added.

In multiple statements to the media, ICE has said that the agency “is committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.” The agency has also said that detainees receive “comprehensive medical care” and that all detainees “receive medical, dental, and mental health intake screenings within 12 hours of arriving at each detention facility.”

Huerta called that “laughable.”

“We have countless examples of people who have said that this is not true, that they're not getting the medication that they're requesting, that they're not being seen for chronic conditions and emergency conditions,” he added. “And we know it's not true because 14 people have died in ICE custody this year alone.”

Lori Rovner of Manhattan Beach is a big sports fan, so there was no question that when tickets for the Olympic Games went on sale, she'd be signing up.

She scored a slot in the first ticket drop, which launched Thursday, and logged on right at 10 a.m., hoping to score tickets to the Opening Ceremonies and some finals too. After battling her computer to get through "access denied" screens and a lost shopping cart due to a 30-minute time limit, she bought 16 tickets.

It was only when she was about to purchase that she noticed the service fees, which were around 24% of each ticket. One $2,100 ticket had a $505 service fee, bringing the total cost to $2,604.63.

"It's insane," she said of the fee. "I don't understand what the service is."

As the locals-only sale kicks off and Southern Californians have their first chance to buy tickets to the Olympic Games, some fans are wide-eyed at the high fees on all tickets and the prices in general, which start at $28 but go up to more than $5,500 a pop. Opening Ceremony tickets start at $328.68

The service fees aren't a surprise add-on. The price fans see when browsing the site is the total cost, including the fee. Still, some who bought in the first phase of sales were surprised when they saw the fees add up.

One user on Reddit of shared their cart of 10 tickets, which added up to $11,264. That included $1,038 in fees alone. Commenters responded in shock and awe.

Service fees are standard in ticket sales, but the percentage they charge can vary widely. High fees have been a source of ire for music and sports fans for years. A 2018 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the average fees on a primary ticket market were 27%.

LA28 did not respond to LAist's requests for details on the service fee, like what it pays for or why it's a percentage rather than a flat rate.

Not everyone seemed bothered by the prices. Some people LAist spoke with opted for only $28 or similarly priced tickets, even if it meant missing some of the biggest Olympic events. One user on Reddit said they purchased 18 tickets for around $550.

"I went with all $28 tickets," they wrote in the online forum about the Olympics. "I got women’s soccer, gymnastics, beach and regular volleyball, track and field, baseball and a few others."

For some, the ticket process, the prices and the dense web of events to choose from made it too hard to pull the trigger.

Jeff Bartow of Sierra Madre made a spreadsheet with some competitions he was interested in seeing before he logged on to buy tickets Friday.

"So many times, so many schedules, so many events," Bartow said. "I think I initially thought I was going to go to a bunch, but thinking about how crazy it's going to be … I might be a little more limited."

This is just the first ticket drop. There will be more opportunities to buy tickets in the months to come — and on a resale market that launches in 2027.

Some ticket-buyers told LAist they already were contemplating which tickets they'd keep and which ones they'd re-sell, just minutes after buying them.

In the more than two months since the Department of Justice released its latest batch of files on the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, prosecutors have not brought any new charges based on the documents, despite federal lawmakers on both sides of the aisle continuing to demand accountability.

The more than 3 million pages of documents include accusations by alleged victims of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's abuse and thousands of emails and photos showing Epstein associated with prominent figures. The files indicate that many of these people maintained contact with the disgraced financier long after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to sex crimes that involved minors. Appearing in the files is not necessarily an indication of criminal wrongdoing.

The release of the Epstein files came after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which forced the Justice Department to make public all documents it held related to Epstein.

Epstein died in prison about a month after a 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges. Maxwell was convicted on sex-trafficking charges in 2021 and is serving a 20-year sentence. Since the release of the files in 2025 and 2026, there have been no related arrests in the U.S. However, the disclosures have led to some resignations and other reputational repercussions for some high-ranking Americans.

The lack of arrests in the U.S. contrasts to the fallout in the U.K., where investigators have pursued charges related to corruption, not sexual abuse, in their dealings with Epstein. Two former government officials — former Prince Andrew and ex-ambassador Peter Mandelson — were arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known, has denied wrongdoing and has not been formally charged. Mandelson has also not been charged, and lawyers for Mandelson have said that the arrest was prompted by a "baseless suggestion."

In the U.S., top Justice Department officials have said that they found no evidence compelling enough to pursue further charges related to Epstein, and that the public can make their own assessments based on the disclosed documents.

In a statement to NPR, Justice Department spokesperson Katie Kenlein said that "there have not been additional prosecutions beyond Epstein and Maxwell because there has not been credible evidence that their activities extended to Epstein's network. However, if prosecutable evidence comes forward, the Department of Justice will of course act on it as we do every day in sexual trafficking and assault cases across the count[r]y."

On Thursday, President Trump announced that Attorney General Pam Bondi is out of the top job at the Justice Department, following bipartisan criticism over her handling of the Epstein files.

NPR asked four former prosecutors and one former law enforcement officer why there may not have been enough evidence to levy additional charges. Here's what they said.

Prosecutors must prove guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt"

Prosecutors must prove to a jury that a person committed a crime "beyond a reasonable doubt," according to Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

"One of the biggest misconceptions people have is how difficult it is to charge and convict somebody for a criminal case," said McQuade, who served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

A prosecutor's ethical responsibility is to charge cases only if they believe there is enough evidence for a conviction, McQuade said. Documents, including emails, jokes, and even plane itineraries, can be a place to start, but, alone, they are not enough to prove guilt, McQuade said.

"What you would need [is] rock solid evidence," McQuade said. "You can't charge someone for a crime without sufficient evidence, and I have yet to see evidence of a crime involving an Epstein associate that has gone uncharged."

Based on his understanding of the case, Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown Law, said he agreed that prosecutors who investigated Epstein's alleged associates "may have believed that they couldn't persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt." He said problems with witness credibility or certain forensic evidence can prevent a case from moving forward.

The U.K. cases are focused on corruption 

In the U.K., the two people arrested are being investigated on suspicion of "misconduct in public office." McQuade said the U.S. does not have a single equivalent federal law. Instead, the U.S. prosecutes public corruption through statutes that focus specifically on crimes such as bribery and extortion.

After the release of the latest files, British police began investigating Andrew's correspondence with Epstein when Andrew was a U.K. trade envoy. At that time, Andrew allegedly shared government itineraries, investment plans and notes from official foreign trips with Epstein. The information may have been covered by the United Kingdom's Official Secrets Act.

Similarly, Mandelson has been accused of passing confidential government information to the late sex offender when Mandelson was a U.K. Cabinet minister.

Meeting the burden of proof is especially challenging for sex crime cases

Victim statements are essential for establishing basic elements, such as the timeframe of events, required to build sexual assault cases, said Diane Goldstein, a retired police lieutenant from California and the executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. But a victim may be reluctant to come forward because of a fear of retaliation, not believing the police can help, believing it is a personal matter, or not wanting to get the perpetrator in trouble.

McQuade noted that in some sex trafficking cases, especially those in which a perpetrator is in a position of power, victims may experience intimidation or threats that prevent them from speaking out.

Victims also may be hesitant to move forward with allegations because they fear having to testify at trials where defense attorneys may attempt to poke holes in their allegations, McQuade said.

Goldstein said that for sex crime cases to advance, investigators need to follow certain policies and procedures. "If you don't have a legitimate police investigation to start, you're not going to get any type of criminal filing," Goldstein said.

Other potential charges are also a difficult path

Prosecutors may have considered pursuing charges of criminal conspiracy related to sex trafficking against people associated with Epstein, said Jessica Roth, a professor at Cardozo School of Law. FBI documents in the files relating to its investigation into Epstein's crimes identify certain people as "co-conspirators."

But Ankush Khardori, a senior writer and columnist at Politico magazine who worked as a federal prosecutor on financial fraud cases, told NPR those identifiers are not "formal accusation[s]" and are simply part of "interim documents."

"The FBI does not determine who is a co-conspirator," Khardori said. "That is a legal judgment that prosecutors make."

But for those conspiracy cases, "criminal intent," in particular, is difficult to establish, said Roth, who worked as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York for seven years. Criminal conspiracy charges "would require knowledge and intent on the part of each individual who was charged," Roth said. If a person who communicated with Epstein had some suspicion that he was engaged in illegal activity, that alone would not be sufficient evidence to press charges, she said.

Investigators may have considered charges related to criminal tax violations, McQuade said. But the statute of limitations has likely ended on those cases, she said, meaning that prosecutors can no longer bring charges.

The current evidence lacks context

Legal experts say the haphazard way the documents were released and redacted makes it difficult for the public to understand why no additional charges have been filed.

Roth, the Cardozo law professor, said the information is in "isolation," without the appropriate context. "We'll see an individual photograph that looks perhaps incriminating. We'll see an email that looks incriminating, but we don't necessarily have everything that was said before and after that email and that exchange," Roth said.

One document that could explain why no charges were pursued, according to Butler, is a heavily redacted DOJ memo naming "potential co-conspirators" of Epstein. "The parts that should indicate why the department declined prosecution on any alleged co-conspirators other than Ghislaine Maxwell [are] redacted," said Butler, the Georgetown law professor and a former federal prosecutor.

Butler said those redactions are "unusual" because they do not appear to follow the permissible reasons for redactions in the Epstein documents. Those reasons include confidentiality for Epstein's alleged victims, or anything that would compromise an ongoing investigation, Butler said.

"When the Justice Department grudgingly releases information when pressed by politics or forced by Congress, it also creates the impression that they have something to hide," Butler said. "That there is some cover-up going on."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nearly 30% more students in Los Angeles County experienced homelessness from 2022-23 to 2023-24, making it the county’s highest rate in the past five years and far outpacing the rate of homelessness across the state in the same timeframe, as the resources to identify and support this student population have decreased.

The UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools published two reports on Wednesday on the state of student homelessness in the county: “Rising Numbers, Fading Resources: Students Experiencing Homelessness in Los Angeles County” and “Hidden in Plain Sight: Fear, Underidentification, and Funding Gaps for Housing-Insecure Students in Los Angeles County.”

Researchers found that Norwalk-La Mirada Elementary Unified School District had the highest rate of student homelessness in the county — 1 in 3 students, meaning that over 4,700 students were identified as experiencing homelessness during the 2023-24 school year out of a total cumulative enrollment of about 15,600.

The city of Norwalk, where the district is located in the eastern region of the county, was sued by the state in 2024 for banning emergency shelters and other support services for people experiencing homelessness. Last year, the state reached a settlement with the city, which was forced to overturn the ban and put $250,000 toward building affordable housing.

Student homelessness is defined differently under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal law that requires every public school to count the number of students who are living on the street, in shelters, in motels, in cars, doubled up with other families, or moving between friends’ and relatives’ homes.

As a result of this expanded definition, McKinney-Vento includes doubled-up students in the count of homelessness. Doubled-up is a term used to describe children and youth ages 21 and under living in shared housing, such as with another family or friends, due to various crises.

There were a few other patterns seen in the L.A. County data analyzed by the UCLA researchers:

• Latino students were disproportionately more likely to experience homelessness: they represent 65% of the county’s student population, but 75.5% of student homelessness
• A third of homeless students were in high school
• Many districts with the highest rates of homelessness had higher school instability but lower dropout rates

While McKinney-Vento has an expanded definition that includes more types of homelessness than several other definitions, identifying students remains difficult.

The second report from the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools focuses on the lack of dedicated funding for school staff to identify and support homeless students. Students and families facing homelessness do not always self-identify, whether due to fear, shame or being unaware that their housing situation is considered homelessness under McKinney-Vento.

“A lot of these young people are dealing with a lot of trauma, so they don’t want to be identified. They don’t want to be pointed out; sometimes it’s scary for them, because they think we’re going to report them to the Department of Children and Family Services,” said L.A. County Office of Education staff interviewed for this report.

School staff, known as homeless liaisons, who work with homeless students received a historic influx of federal funds during the Covid-19 pandemic — $98.76 million for California, out of $800 million nationwide, from the American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth.

That funding has since ended, and there is no other dedicated, ongoing state funding set aside solely for the rising number of homeless students. This has led districts in California to “heavily depend on highly competitive and unstable federal streams,” the UCLA researchers wrote. Those federal streams have become increasingly precarious as the federal administration last year sought policy changes that would shift how they are structured.