When hundreds of school superintendents from across the country gathered earlier this month in Washington, D.C., for their annual policy summit, the 2020 decennial census was top of mind.

The Supreme Court had days prior to the school officials' arrival in the nation's capital, effectively crippled the Trump administration's attempt to add a citizenship question to the census. The question, it was widely believed, would drive down participation rates and have devastating implications for federal education funding, particularly in school districts that serve the most vulnerable children.

But the superintendents there were not resting easy. Far from it, in fact, for they know what many don't: Counting kids has always been difficult, and the more marginalized those children are – homeless kids, those who live with their grandparents or temporarily with a relative, those in the foster care system and children whose first language is something other than English or whose parents are in the country illegally – the greater risk they are of not being counted.

"It's not a question of whether or not there will be an undercount," Deborah Stein, director of the Partnership for America's Children, said to the superintendents, validating their concerns. "There will be an undercount. The question is what can we do to minimize the impact."

The last time the census was administered in 2010, 1 million children 4 years old and younger were missed – the most undercounted age group by nearly double – and it cost states roughly $500 million in federal funds. The next most undercounted age group was 5- to 9-year olds.

This year, however, census officials have an even heavier lift than in 2010. Not only will the census be administered online for the first time ever – creating potential problems in areas of the country with limited access to the internet – but also the immigration landscape is vastly more politicized, and it's widely anticipated that the threat of the citizenship question alone will drive down participation rates in communities that serve lots of Hispanic and immigrant families.

About 5 percent of children were undercounted in 2010. In 2020, experts expect it to be much worse.

As one school superintendent from New Mexico put it: "The root cause of undercount in New Mexico is lack of trust in the government. If we don't as a country try to somehow address the lack of trust and the need some people have to hide because of what they're seeing on the news, we're going to have a big problem."

In response, educators, school officials and community advocates are all hands on deck ahead of the looming school year, strategizing about how they leverage their resources and the trust they've built with families to ensure an accurate count.

In Kentucky, preparations are underway for schools to teach students about the census during Constitution Week in September.

Amy Swann, the senior policy analyst at Kentucky Youth Advocates, is on a mission to make sure that schools know that they're required by law to teach students something about the U.S. Constitution, and since the census is mandated by the Constitution, she says, what better way to highlight its importance than during Constitution Week.

"This is a prime opportunity for us as advocates to push for an accurate count, for the census bureau whose job is to do everything they can to get an accurate count and for schools who have a lot of skin in the game to all work together," she says.

The hope is, Swann explains, that by instilling excitement among students about all the types of data and information the census collects and how important it is to make sure everyone is counted, that they will pass that along to their parents.

"What we knew even before the administration proposed a citizenship question was that it was already going to be difficult," Swann says. "There has historically been an undercount so it's not something that's going to magically go away. Ultimately, we hope this will be a small way to help boost participation."

Census officials themselves are pouring resources into initiatives to ensure a more accurate count than ever before, producing hundreds of lessons that highlight the census that teachers in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade can easily fold into their curriculum for any subject.

"The final report for the 1850 Census noted that undercounting children has been a concern since the very first census," Steven Dillingham, director of the Census Bureau, said at a congressional hearing last week where he told members of the Senate how the bureau is upping the ante by, among other things, recruiting 300,000 people to help reach hard-to-count populations.

"We have made many improvements since 1850 and several improvements since 2010 to address past experiences in undercounting children, particularly children under the age of 5," he said.

It's unclear how those efforts will play out in places like Texas, where the ramifications of an undercount could be even more severe because of a new formula that uses census data to disburse state education dollars. The state uses data pulled from the census to categorize students into different socioeconomic blocs in order to target funding to those with the greatest needs.

"If the count is not accurate, if it's off, it will equate to less dollars," says Mohammed Choudhury, the chief innovation officer at the San Antonio Independent School District. "In a nutshell, the count needs to be as exact as possible, especially for a school district like ours that is both high poverty and high minority."

San Antonio school officials are working with city and county officials to organize a count campaign to ensure that people are not scared to fill out the census and to begin thinking about how schools can leverage back-to-school events to others to draw attention to the importance of the census.

But Choudhury, who is credited with pioneering the funding formula, a version of which he initially introduced in Dallas and more recently implemented in San Antonio, says families are scared and the damage might already be done.

"There is a lot of concern there," he says. "As much as we do and can organize, fear is fear, and I think at the end of the day the fear will take over. Right now, families are worried to the point that some people are questioning whether or not they should fill out basic school district forms. That's going to create some serious implications."

Those concerns are echoed by others in states with large immigrant populations, like New York.

"The fear of an undercount was really heightened because of the citizenship question," says Nora Moran, director of policy and advocacy at United Neighborhood Houses, which works with 42 different settlement houses across the state of New York that provide services like day care and preschool, summer camp, English language classes and job training to disadvantaged families.

"For us, an undercount would be really devastating," she says. "Many settlement houses serve predominantly immigrant communities, and an undercount in those neighborhoods would cause us to lose out on federal funding for programs that are really important."

Among other federally funded services provided, the settlement houses run 33 Head Start programs, the funding for which is dictated by census data.

"We're giving a lot of thought to how can we be creative," Moran says. "Community-based organizations are facing a challenge, and it's something that we need to think about seriously in how do we message information about the census to a population that might be wary to fill it out for reasons that are very understandable."

Outreach efforts in the past have included ensuring that each community has pamphlets in their language of origin that explain what the census is and why it's important to fill out accurately. Settlement houses also hire their own staff to go door to door, just like census field officers canvass areas, to prod families to fill it out.