Fostering Success: How board members can improve foster student outcomes

How board members can improve foster student outcomes

by Angela M. Vázquez

The first day of school is a nearly universal experience that brings up a variety of emotions — anticipation, excitement, curiosity, hope, relief, trepidation, nervousness, apprehension. These feelings can be amplified among students arriving at a new school and facing new challenges, from making friends to navigating an unfamiliar campus.

How board members can improve foster student outcomes

by Angela M. Vázquez

tudents in foster care have these experiences far more than their peers, changing schools about twice as often. Nearly one-third of foster youth will change schools two or more times in a single year, compared to 7 percent of their peers.¹ Adding to the personal uncertainty of changing schools, students also lose months of academic progress. Such transitions for foster youth typically come from changes in their home environment, including removal from their homes of origin and being placed into a foster or relative’s home, moving between foster and/or group homes, or even successfully reuniting with their families. Along the way, foster youth can experience profound trauma from abuse and neglect, along with persistent “small traumas” from the uprooting of their lives and belongings time and again.

Academic challenges for foster youth

These traumas, social isolation and stalled academic progress contribute to poor outcomes that accumulate through the months and years of being in foster care. Just over one in five students in foster care in California are proficient in English (compared to about half of their peers) and only 12 percent of students are proficient in math (compared to 39 percent of their peers). Even compared with low-income students, foster youth are much more likely to drop out (28 percent a year) and fail to graduate (47 percent) in four years. Across their lifetime, both in and out of care, they experience a layering of multiple systemic barriers related to poverty, unstable family and home environments, and poor health. African American and Native American youth make up a disproportionate number of children in the welfare system in California² and nationally.³ Further, up to 80 percent of foster youth nationally have a chronic medical condition,⁴ and from 30 to 70 percent of children in foster care have a disability (including behavioral/emotional disabilities).⁵

These traumas, social isolation and stalled academic progress contribute to poor outcomes that accumulate through the months and years of being in foster care.

Adding to these challenges, rather than a caregiver or parent who knows the child well and tracks the student’s progress through school, knows who their best friends are, what music they are listening to lately, and any health problems the student struggles with, foster youth have an often-rotating team of adults tasked with managing the various aspects of their lives. Given the frequency in which foster students move around, communication between students’ home caregivers and the school can also be a challenge. Social workers, teachers, special education coordinators, therapists, foster parents and relatives all are involved, but the shifting nature of foster life can create logistical or administrative barriers that can cause important information about the child to become lost in the shuffle.

Strategies for foster youth education in California

TRANSPORTATION — A KEY STRATEGY FOR MAINTAINING STABILITY

Despite the challenges facing foster youth, California has shown exceptional leadership in trying to mitigate the negative education impacts of being in foster care. Assembly Bill 490 enshrined many rights for students in foster care, including immediate school enrollment even if records are slow to transfer, and the right to remain in their current school (their school of origin) despite changes in their home placement, which is often outside of the school or district’s boundaries.

At the federal level, Congress has also acknowledged the importance of school stability on a foster youth’s education. With the adoption of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, school districts must now work with their county child welfare agency to develop a plan to ensure students have access to transportation to their schools of origin when their placement changes and it’s not in their best interest to change schools. These plans must include how to fund the necessary transportation, and can include Title I, Local Control Funding Formula and county child welfare dollars. While the right to continue attending a child’s school of origin has been in California law since the passage of AB 490 in 2004, the obligation for securing transportation to that school was ambiguous. With the passage of ESSA, the national policy goal is now shared responsibility between the child welfare and the education systems.

Who has access to school records?

California law distinguishes between custodial rights and education decision-making rights for children in the foster care system. Many foster youth’s parents retain the right to make education decisions while a student is in foster care, and this is often a way a parent can demonstrate progress toward reunification goals with their child. However, this can mean a student’s custodial caregiver, such as a foster parent or relative, who is tasked with meeting the daily needs of the child, including monitoring homework, attendance and responding to behavior incidents, does not have consistent access to school records that are required to be kept confidential, without the parent/education decision maker’s consent. In 2018, California adopted Senate Bill 233 to clarify existing education records privacy laws, ensuring that a student’s caregiver (foster parent, relative caregiver, etc.) has access to the foster youth’s critical education information in order to support their education progress at home.

Using data to support school stability

With the Local Control Funding Formula and the California School Dashboard, California was the first state in the nation to require school districts to track the progress and outcomes of its students in foster care. Districts can now view their foster students’ outcomes data in the Student Group Report section of the Dashboard. Initial data point to persistent achievement gaps for students in foster care across the state; in many cases, gaps that are more prominent for these students than other vulnerable groups in the district, such as low-income students or English learners. Translating this data into district-specific progress metrics that districts can regularly track in real-time (such as how frequently students are enrolling or disenrolling from the district, or improvement of grades after enrolling in after-school tutoring) is the next step in closing the opportunity gap for foster youth in California.

Coordinating transportation services

County offices of education, through the state-funded Foster Youth Services Coordinating Program, have been taking the lead in bringing together school districts and county child welfare agencies around the important issue of transportation of foster youth to their schools of origin. Board members can work through their superintendents to inquire about the status of the district’s federally mandated plan to transport foster youth to their schools of origin.

Identifying and tracking such a highly mobile student population is an enormous challenge for districts, particularly when students’ academic histories are scattered across district boundaries over several years. Many students in foster care report not remembering which schools they attended for certain grades, and that information isn’t readily available to the person enrolling the child — the new foster parent. The California Department of Education has taken the lead in providing districts with regular lists of the foster youth enrolled in their schools. However, the state’s foster care system’s data does not readily align to CALPADS and contains little useful information about the child’s education, limiting the data the state can provide to districts.

Some districts are taking important steps to invest staff time in creating comprehensive academic histories for students enrolling in their schools to get a clear picture about student needs, especially if the students’ records are missing or incomplete. Other districts are experimenting with centralized enrollment and disenrollment processes to ensure that information between school administrators is shared to mitigate the impacts of school transfers on foster youth.

“Our district’s highest priority for our foster youth should be to increase stability for them, when possible, by helping them stay in their school of origin,” said Pasadena Unified School District trustee Kimberly Kenne. “When that is not possible, we should aim to improve continuity of support for the students by using warm handoffs.”

These “warm handoffs” can result in greater school stability for foster youth if and when their foster care placement changes. Often, foster care placement changes happen quickly, without adequate notice to all the adults in a student’s life. Districts have reported that proactively initiating conversations at the point of enrollment/disenrollment between school districts, a foster youth, a student’s caregiver and their education decision-maker/parent have resulted in a student’s re-enrolling in their original school having lost only a few instructional days, preserving their academic and social stability.

“Our district’s highest priority for our foster youth should be to increase stability for them, when possible, by helping them stay in their school of origin.”

— Kimberly Kenne, trustee, Pasadena USD

Partnerships between local district and county offices and with community-based advocacy organizations can also help provide support to foster youth. Azusa Unified School District in Los Angeles County has found such a partnership allows the district to better serve its foster youth.

“Working with a consortium of districts and the Alliance for Children’s rights has provided valuable insight for the Azusa USD,” said Garry Creel, Azusa USD director of child and welfare attendance. “We discussed macro-level policy and procedure, compared best practices and then were able to dial down to the microlevel using our own data.”

What board members can do to help foster youth

Because they represent such a small fraction of most district’s students and are not easily understood as a distinctly vulnerable student population (as, for example, low-income students are), students in foster care need champions on school boards to spotlight their historically invisible achievement gaps and ensure their unique education needs are met. Steps that school board members can take to become advocates for foster youth in their schools include:

Review your district’s Student Group Report on the California School Dashboard website.

The Dashboard’s Student Group Reports contain important student outcomes information on foster youth in your district — are they achieving or improving at the same rates as other student groups? Could foster youth benefit from additional, targeted interventions?

Request a board study session on the district’s available data on its students in foster care.

Even a lack of data tells an important story and can guide your board’s next steps in gathering the information it needs to create equitable policies and practices and invest in priority activities through Local Control and Accountability Plans.

Evaluate your board policies and ensure their alignment with district practices.

Confirm they are, at minimum, compliant with existing law. The laws regarding foster youth education change frequently due to important advocacy in Sacramento on behalf of vulnerable youth.

Be proactive about networking with your neighboring districts and your county’s leaders.

The foster care system is administered on a county basis, which means district-specific issues are more likely to be addressed and productive partnerships established if school districts are communicating across their district boundaries and with county officials. This cross-system communication can show a critical mass of students in foster care across a county are impacted by a particular issue. This kind of cross-county communication is now even more essential given the new federal mandates for collaboration between school districts and county child welfare agencies regarding foster youth transportation.

Consider policies that give priority access to students in foster care in existing district extracurricular activities, supports and interventions.

Many, if not most, foster youth can benefit from foster-youth specific school programs and interventions. Still, there are existing universal and targeted supports in schools that foster youth frequently do not access equitably compared to their peers. Due to their mobility and frequent need for intense remedial schoolwork, they often miss important academic and extracurricular opportunities and are not actively recruited or encouraged to become part of the school’s fabric.

Angela Vázquez is CSBA’s Public Affairs & Community Engagement Representative (PACER) for Los Angeles County, East. She has spent nearly eight years in education public policy, convening local and statewide education and child welfare stakeholders, facilitating policy development and implementation discussions for children in foster care in Los Angeles County and California as a policy analyst at Advancement Project and as the associate director for FosterEd California.

Resources

California School Boards Association – Foster Youth in California’s Schools

California Department of Social Services — California Foster Youth Education Resource Hub

California Department of Education – LCFF Resources: Priority 10 Foster Youth

California Foster Youth Education Task Force – Foster Youth Education Law Fact Sheets and Local Control and Accountability Plan Resources

Endnotes

Barrat, V. X., & Berliner, B. (2013). The Invisible Achievement Gap, Part 1: Education. Outcomes of Students in Foster Care in California’s Public Schools. San Francisco: WestEd.
Agosti, J. & JRA Consulting, Ltd. (2011). California Disproportionality Project Breakthrough Series Collaborative Final Report.
Children’s Bureau/ACYF/ACF/HHS (2016). Racial Disproportionality and Disparity in Child Welfare.
Leslie, L. K., Hurlburt, M. S., Landsverk, J., Rolls, J. A., Wood, P. A., & Kelleher, K. J. (2003). Comprehensive assessments for children entering foster care: a national perspective. Pediatrics, 112(1 Pt 1), 134-42.
Powers, L. Youth With Disabilities in Foster Care: Identification and Support.

Back to Issue