The McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth (McKinney-Vento) program is authorized under Title VII-B of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, most recently re-authorized December 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The Education of Homeless Children and Youth program at SCDE oversees the federal McKinney-Vento Education for Homeless Children and Youth program. The program provides training, technical assistance, and monitoring, as well as competitive federal funding to support school district McKinney-Vento programs. South Carolina school districts identified 14,360 McKinney-Vento Students during the 2015–16 academic year.

The McKinney-Vento Program is designed to address the problems that homeless children and youth face in enrolling, attending, and succeeding in school. Under this program, the SCDE must ensure that each homeless child and youth has equal access to the same free, appropriate public education, including a public preschool education, as other children and youth.

Homeless children and youth must have access to the educational and other services that they need to enable them to meet the same challenging State student academic achievement standards to which all students are held. In addition, homeless students may not be separated from the mainstream school environment based solely on the fact that they are experiencing homelessness