Housing Stability for School Success Toolkit
Housing stability matters for a child’s mental and physical wellbeing, educational success, and connection to a community. Involuntary displacement leads to greater material hardship for families, poorer health and avoidable healthcare costs for children and their mothers, and negative impacts on children’s academic achievement. Children who experience housing instability can have lower vocabulary skills, grade retention, higher rates of drop-out, and lower educational attainment as adults.
Launched in spring 2021, Housing Stability for School Success is a collaboration between the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL) and Dallas ISD to reduce student middle-of school year moves through campus-based housing interventions. The work began as an action research project focused on elementary schools with high rates of middle-of-year moves and located in neighborhoods with historically high eviction filing rates.
Since fall 2021, CPAL has implemented family-centered solutions at two pilot campuses, Elisha M. Pease and J.N. Ervin Elementary Schools, in partnership with school staff and housing-focused nonprofit organizations. CPAL has worked to scale interventions district-wide and bring data to the center of decision-making. Although the toolkit was built based on a pilot project with Dallas ISD, the featured interventions can be implemented in any school or district context.
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Eviction less likely for Dallas County tenants who get a lawyer — but most don’t have one
CPAL's data analysis shows that eviction chances fall dramatically when tenants have legal representation.
- Law students at SMU observed nearly 1,300 eviction hearings across five of Dallas County’s ten justice of the peace courts from November 2022 to April 2023, representing about 10% of all initial eviction cases heard in those courts.
- Renters who had lawyers lost their cases just 7% of the time, whereas renters without lawyers lost their case – and, typically, their home — nearly 70% of the time.
Can a cleanup plan from Philadelphia work in South Dallas? What $300,000 has done so
CPAL and key partners are using data to remediate blight in the Mill City neighborhood.
- Many Dallas neighborhoods have extensive blight, which signals systemic disinvestment and invites harm.
- Blight has become a focal point of citywide investment in many cities across the country to accelerate programs to re-green vacant lots.
Yes, Dallas violent crime dropped in 2022, but the number of arrests is even more
CPAL analysis shows Dallas is getting safer while the number of arrests continues to fall.
- Reducing those arrests that do not make us safer is important: 80%+ of arrests are for nonviolent offenses and 75% of the jail population is pretrial, impacting thousands of children and families.
- A recent CPAL study showed Dallas County children are more likely than kids in any other Texas county to have parents in prison. At least 80,000 of them had a parent behind bars, according to the report.