Within weeks, Liam began to act out at school — refusing to follow instructions, screaming at peers when upset or shutting down completely. Back at his foster home he often isolated himself, despite efforts by his foster family to engage him in various activities. His grades continued to plumet, his attendance worsened.
Over time, however, Liam received intensive therapy provided through a local nonprofit that partnered with his district and worked with a counselor at his school to practice managing his emotions. Educators connected lessons to his interests during after-school small group tutoring sessions, which helped to improve his math and English language arts (ELA) outcomes. He began to make friends. He joined a youth soccer team. He was able to share his experiences with his siblings during weekly scheduled phone calls. He began to thrive.
“Our foster youth are as capable as any other student group,” said Riverside County Office of Education Superintendent Edwin Gomez. “It doesn’t matter their skin color, their poverty level or the challenges that we acknowledge are authentic, real issues — they have the same promise as any other student, and they deserve the same opportunities as others.”
Of the 27,466 foster youth who attended public schools in California during the 2024–25 academic year, 3,009 were served in Riverside County. The COE’s Foster Youth Success Initiative was recently launched to support them. It is grounded in a moral imperative to remove barriers, expand opportunity and transform the educational experience of foster youth in the region, Gomez explained.
California educates the largest population of foster youth in the nation. Recent research published by CSBA shows that these youth are “more likely to experience homelessness … are disproportionately students of color, disproportionately from low-income backgrounds, and disproportionately identified for special education services — intersecting vulnerabilities that demand targeted policy and practice interventions at both the state and local levels.”
Disciplinary data reveals stark inequities for students in foster care. In the 2023–24 school year, 14 percent of foster youth were suspended for at least one day, compared to just 3 percent of their non-foster peers. Black foster youth, particularly boys, face the highest suspension rates at 20 percent, which is substantially higher than their peers from other racial and ethnic groups.
Meanwhile, 64 percent of foster youth graduated high school compared to 87 percent of their non-foster peers in 2023–24. And state testing data highlight the significant academic achievement gaps for foster youth: just 25 percent met grade-level standards for science in 2024, 20 percent met or exceeded ELA standards, and 11 percent met or exceeded math standards.
CSBA Vice President Jackie Thu-Huong Wong, who is also a Washington Unified School District trustee and director of First 5 California, has extensive experience working with foster youth at every level of policymaking.
As the statewide director for the Foster Youth Services Coordinating Program at the California Department of Education (CDE), Wong worked with state and local stakeholders to ensure the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) specifically addressed students in foster care. She continued these efforts as senior policy advisor to former Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg.
A school-based social worker by training, Wong has also served as an administrator for Oakland USD’s Student, Family and Community Services Department helping to develop the district’s Foster Youth Program, among others.
“I learned that as much as we could do on the ground, there were systemic and legal barriers to what we could do,” she said of her time in that role. “And unfortunately, we’ve made a lot of changes, created a lot of different opportunities, but the stats [on long-term outcomes] haven’t moved a lot.”
However, for Wong, there are two particular areas of improvement that districts and COEs do have control over.
During her tenure at Oakland USD, Wong was directed to reduce suspension rates. “My mentality was, ‘OK, if I have this opportunity, how do we do this differently? How do we go from, essentially, an enforcement mentality to a restorative one?’” she recalled. “I would see crazy things, kids being referred for expulsion for threatening a teacher with a hair pick, throwing papers. But the process doesn’t ask about your history, doesn’t ask why you threw that piece of paper. There’s just a judgment.”
“What’s fascinating to me is that there are higher rates of expulsion and suspensions for the system-involved youth, and there’s this mentality of punish, punish, punish, but we don’t actually take a trauma-informed approach,” she said. “You have to approach discipline differently.”
In California, more than 70 percent of adults and 30 percent of children have faced at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE), such as experiencing or witnessing violence, abuse or neglect; growing up in a home environment with substance abuse or mental health problems; or undergoing family or parental separation.
ACEs and the toxic stress response they create in the body correlate to long-term health issues like heart, kidney and chronic lung disease, as well as increased rates of depression, substance use disorders and homelessness.
According to Wong, understanding ACEs allows policymakers to build systems differently and not be so quick to turn to exclusionary discipline practices — a move that could benefit teachers and staff too.
“The prescription for dealing with ACEs is actually very simple. It’s creating safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments. It reverses that trauma. It creates the calm. It turns off the toxic stress,” she explained. “I think a safe, stable, nurturing environment is good for the adults in the system too. When we can create an ACEs-focused environment in schools, it’s good for everybody. I want people to realize that things that happened to you, things have happened to this kid; that’s not who you are, that’s not who this kid is.”
CSBA’s Research and Education Policy Development Department released two briefs, along with policy recommendations, in March focused on helping district and county office of education governance teams better serve the foster youth they enroll.
CSBA Principal Research Manager Angela Asch, who oversaw the development of the new resources, noted several findings she found particularly concerning. “The academic outcomes are disheartening and a call to action,” she said. “We know from research that individuals without a high school diploma struggle more financially and have worse health outcomes — mental and physical — than those individuals that graduate high school. Furthermore, one in four foster youth become homeless after aging out of care. California offers a safety net for foster youth as they are eligible to attend college for free — tuition, housing and food are covered. This is a huge financial barrier that has been removed. However, foster youth do not complete or have access to college preparatory classes at the same rate as their peers. Being able to attend college for free but not being able to complete the requirements to attend because of lack of access is a disparity that needs to be addressed.”
In addition to Wong’s points, Riverside COE’s Gomez noted that targeted collaboration among COEs, the districts they serve, and local nonprofits and agencies can help address the myriad logistical difficulties foster youth face, such as chronic absenteeism due to a lack of reliable transportation, and high rates of school mobility that reduce the ability to connect with peers, mentors and educators.
“Having a cross-agency collaboration, like what Riverside COE is doing with the Riverside County Department of Public Social Services is important,” Gomez said, noting how improved services dedicated to ensuring more effective school transitions, fulfillment of case management needs, and expanded access to mental health and social-emotional supports has benefitted children’s educational outcomes and well-being. “When systems align, students experience fewer disruptions and greater stability.”
CSBA Principal Research Manager Angela Asch, who oversaw the development of the association’s new resources, expressed similar thoughts.
“There are several challenges that LEAs face when serving foster youth, including geographic location, which may limit the resources available in an LEA’s area, and staffing or funding issues may impact transportation services and social-emotional supports such as mental health services and mentoring,” Asch said. “In the second brief, we have highlighted LEAs across the state that have found creative and innovative solutions and utilized unique and/or multi-agency partnerships to address the aforementioned challenges. I encourage everyone to read the examples of best practices and see how they can incorporate similar strategies and partnerships into their LEA’s work in supporting foster youth.”
Gomez recounted watching a documentary with his wife, “Possible Selves,” which follows two California teens in foster care as they navigate their education, placement changes and futures. “It describes their heartaches, it describes their successes. I was moved and it really created an urgency within me,” he said.
In October 2024, Gomez gathered all 350 countywide Riverside COE Management Leadership Team members to view the film. After that, a panel of foster students explained to attendees their issues navigating the education system and what could be done to ease their burdens, and the group examined the data and discussed the need for unified action.
The Foster Youth Success Initiative resulted from those discussions, but Gomez credits county-wide alignment and student input for the program’s growth. “It’s student centered by design. It’s data driven, but it’s really focused on the humanity of our students,” he said.
Foster youth are brought together regularly to meet with mentors and discuss everything from their emotional struggles to financial aid, resilience to college opportunities. A student advisory panel composed of foster youth share insight that guides resource development, training priorities and program decisions across the initiative.
“Our foster youth, their voices are not an add-on to our work. I would say that they are our guide — nothing about them should ever be decided without them,” Gomez said. For example, “we’ve co-developed the FosterFerret app based on their input, based on their ingenuity.”
Features in the app include:
- A secure, digital vault where foster youth can store critical records such as birth certificates, school transcripts, individualized educational programs and more.
- The Burrow Shop — an app-based shop where students can use “Ferret Funds” to request school supplies, personal care items and more, which are delivered discreetly to their school.
- 24/7 access to accurate information about school, jobs, applications and housing, as well as to trained crisis counselors who can provide extra support and promote early intervention and care.
“I think county offices of education have a unique responsibility and opportunity in this work,” Gomez said. “When counties lead with student voice and shared accountability, I believe that’s when real transformation follows. And that’s why making that a priority is extremely important. Our foster youth should not be defined by what they’ve endured, but by what they are capable of becoming.”
Education systems from top to bottom need to pause and build understanding of what foster youth experience and what they need, Wong said. From understanding rules and regulations around education rights holders to addressing underlying causes of poor behavior, “education tends to often be reactive, in my experience, at all levels. We have not created a healing-centered system,” she said.
“What we did with LCFF was make front and center the importance of young people in foster care as a funding mechanism, and all of a sudden, they became important. Because the money was there for coordination, and the priority and accountability was there,” Wong explained. “That was intentional because they were never seen. And therefore, when you’re not seen, you’re not heard, and your needs are not met.
“The population is so small, it’s oftentimes 1 percent or less than 1 percent of enrollment, yet the responsibility is so huge,” she continued. “A system will never be able to replace the parent, but we can create a stable connection.”
Gomez agreed, noting that since launching the Foster Youth Success Initiative in Riverside County, there’s been “remarkable growth” on California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress scores among foster youth, as well as shrinking rates of chronic absenteeism.
“We’re focused on it, we’re looking at the data, we’re talking about great strategies that are working for foster youth,” he said. “I think whenever you pay attention to something and people are understanding the ‘why’ and it becomes real to them, it starts to move mountains.”
In addition to any legal responsibility an LEA has to the foster youth they serve, CSBA’s Asch agreed with Gomez — that it is a moral imperative for district and county boards to care about the outcomes of every student they are entrusted to lead and serve.
“The foster youth percentage at most LEAs may be small, however, the work of a governance teams is to ensure all efforts are made to support student achievement for all students,” she said. “When thinking about the percent of a specific student group, those percentages are in reference to humans — real students — that need and deserve support. Foster youth are a vulnerable but capable student group that need extra care and support. We all benefit when students are supported and encouraged to achieve all that they can become.”