UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools

Highly Mobile Youth (HMY) — students experiencing homelessness, foster care, migratory status, or juvenile legal system involvement — are among the most underserved populations in the U.S., facing instability that disrupts schooling, limits access to supportive relationships, and contributes to poor educational and health outcomes. Drawing on federal education, child welfare, and juvenile justice data from 2013–2022, this brief synthesizes national datasets and existing literature to analyze demographic trends, overlapping needs, and patterns of dual-system involvement across HMY populations. Findings reveal that Black and Latine youth are disproportionately represented among HMY and face compounded challenges, including higher rates of disability identification and English Learner status. Migratory youth remain among the most underserved, while youth involved in both child welfare and juvenile justice systems experience particularly stark racial and gender disparities. Foster care and juvenile-system-involved youth also face heightened risks of homelessness, further destabilizing their development and education. Critically, persistent gaps in national data obscure the true scale of these inequities and limit the design of effective supports. The instability HMY experience is rooted in systemic inequities — structural racism and poverty chief among them — that increase the likelihood of involvement in multiple child-serving systems. Addressing their needs will require stronger cross-system collaboration, more robust and consistent data collection, and targeted interventions that disrupt cycles of displacement and disadvantage.