Date

12-2018

Department

School of Education

Degree

Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership (EdD)

Chair

Christie McClendon

Keywords

Homelessness, Students, McKinney-Vento, Rural Education

Disciplines

Education | Educational Administration and Supervision

Abstract

The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to understand how school personnel in two rural Virginia school districts perceive the phenomenon of homelessness and the McKinney-Vento Act for Homeless Education. Participants in this study were10 school employees from two school districts located in the rural Central Virginia counties of Framingham and Marlborough, and included teachers, reading specialists, school administrators, registrars, counselors, and homeless liaisons. The theoretical framework guiding this study was Burns’s (1978) theory of transformational leadership, which holds that, with the proper leadership, stakeholders, such as teachers, can be connected more to the project at hand and to the identity of the organization. Recent trends are leaning towards administrators placing teachers in leadership roles (Cosenza, 2015), in hopes they can become transformational leaders by connecting their peers to important information that can help students socially, personally, and academically. The central research question of the study was: How do school personnel in two rural Virginia school districts describe homelessness? Two sub-questions helped guide the study. The first sub-question was: How do school personnel in two rural Virginia school districts describe their experience with homeless students? The second sub-question was: How do school personnel in two rural Virginia school districts describe their understanding of the McKinney Vento Act”? Data collection methods included journaling, document analysis, and personal interviews. Moustakas’s (1994) method of analysis was used to interpret collected data.

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