SAN DIEGO (KGTV) -- A recent study of California's community colleges found that 1 in 5 students had been homeless in the past year.

To help these students, San Diego's community college district offers showers, priority class registration, food pantries, and help finding homeless services on and off campus.

But a new State Assembly bill aims to aid homeless students further by requiring schools to let them sleep in their vehicles overnight in campus parking lots and structures.

For many college students, academics are an afterthought.

And it’s not because they’re bent on partying or other socializing.

It’s all about survival.

According to several recent surveys, around one in five — or about 400,000 — California community college students has experienced homelessness in the last year. Thousands more are at risk of becoming homeless.

One statistic explains why so many California civic and nonprofit advocacy groups are worried about next year’s U.S. census: 72% of the state’s population belongs to one of the groups historically undercounted during the once-a-decade process.

Researchers believe as many as 1.3 million residents could be missed — a mistake with profound political and policy implications for the next decade.

“There’s really a lot riding on census data,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla said at an event last week in Sacramento.

Doing homework at night is hard for her.

If her flashlight batteries are dead, she relies on streetlights to see, but it also gets cold and damp outside as her hands cramp up while attempting to complete assignments.

Ink sometimes bleeds and the letters blur—B’s begin to look like eights and M’s begin to look like W’s, she said.

But most enduring was when homeless El Camino College student Roxann Toshiko Tomiyasu used to sleep in the Masao W. Satow Library parking lot in Gardena and run into drunkards and gang members, she said.

By allocating $1 million last week toward a creek restoration project set to rejuvenate threatened and endangered species and reduce flooding in Pescadero, county officials locked in funding needed to begin a dredging effort experts expect will give the Butano Creek a chance to reset.