Lincoln Public Schools seeing, and helping, more families near homelessness

During the 2025-26 school year, there seemed to be more families balancing on that brink, according to the district. 

LPS ended the school year with 757 students who qualified for assistance through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. The law defines homeless youth as those who lack a fixed, regular and adequate night residence.

While that number is 96 fewer than the year before, it doesn't mean the issue is going away. Rather, struggles appear to be more intense and spread across more families, said LPS homeless outreach coordinator Efrain Jimenez.

“This last school year, I feel like just basic needs across the board with our McKinney-Vento families, as well as those on the brink of homelessness, really went up,” Jimenez said.

Jimenez said his team spent more time throughout the past school year helping families find food, make utility payments and prevent evictions. Families typically first seek help through the social worker assigned to their school, and then additional needs filter up to Jimenez's team.

He said his team added a part-time social worker because of the increase in support requests.

“She helped us screen a lot of those situations where they're not necessarily McKinney-Vento yet, and hopefully we can do whatever we can to prevent them from ending up on our list,” Jimenez said.

While he can't pinpoint exactly why more families are reaching out for help, Jimenez said it's partly a reflection of the financial struggles many people are experiencing right now.

Grocery prices are still up about 3% from last year. Rent is rising, too, which Jimenez said has been a pain point for many of the families his team assists — especially those on the verge of homelessness. Even with a steady income, many families are spending the bulk of their earnings on rent alone. 

“What about those who aren't experiencing homelessness?” Jimenez said. “They're kind of stuck in this middle ground where they still have to come up with that amount of money every month to be able to stay housed. So, yeah, the times are pretty expensive at the moment.”

Marco Pedroza, LPS director of federal programs, said more families could also be reaching out because they trust that the school district has resources to help.

“It's a great reflection of our social workers and our McKinney-Vento team, and just our district as a whole, wrapping around our community and ensuring that they have the resources they need to get to school,” Pedroza said.

One of those resources is transportation. LPS partners with EverDriven, a Colorado-based company, to provide rides for students who qualify under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act or students experiencing other hardships, which could be anything from a car breakdown to a family member losing income.

The company transported a total of 422 students for LPS in a single day at its peak during the 2025-26 school year, up from 134 the year before. In total, EverDriven provided 52,870 rides during the 2025-26 school year.

That could have been thousands of instances where a student didn't get to school on time, or at all, to learn alongside their peers.

Pedroza said strong collaboration between LPS' transportation department and his team is an intentional effort to reduce the district's chronic absenteeism rate — 26% as of the 2024-25 school year, which is higher than the state average.

“We are trying to help as much as we can when the barrier is transportation,” Pedroza said.