Additive, Substitutive, or Neither: How Administrative Burdens Shape Caregivers’ Navigation of School Administered Social Safety Net Programs

Twenty-five percent of U.S. families receive safety net services through schools, but we do not know how racial groups claiming benefits from school systems perceive, experience, and respond to administrative burdens, nor how those burdens may be racialized. It also remains unclear how low-income caregivers engage with school-administered programs, in conjunction with or independently from, other safety net programs. Conducted in collaboration with Tuscaloosa City Schools (TCS), Alabama, this project seeks to determine how low-income caregivers engage with school-administered safety net programs in conjunction with other safety net programs. Using the extended case method (ECM), Guz will recruit a total of 48 caregivers with responsibility for caring for at least one school-aged child and who are engaged in both means-tested programs outside of schools, such as TANF, Medicaid, SNAP, and/or WIC, as well as school-administered programs. Guz will purposively sample for variation in racial and ethnic identity, age, number of children, and marital status or cohabitation, as these characteristics may raise the stakes of accessing programs. Understanding how low-income caregivers engage across systems and respond to administrative burdens can help school systems create more robust, accessible, and localized safety nets, particularly in districts located in regressive states where state-level safety net reform is challenging.