 |
| From left, Gail Chang Bohr, Bridget Kennedy
Brewster, Virginia Wise, and Frank Cervone. |
Posted
October 19, 2004
Conference Aims at Keeping Foster Children in
School
Children in foster care or in the juvenile justice system urgently
need to stay in school and should be encouraged to have the
same educational goals as other children, according to a panel
of speakers at a National Children’s Law Network conference
sponsored by the Mortimer Caplin Public
Service Center and the JustChildren Program of the Legal Aid
Justice Center at the Law School Oct. 15. Four panelists presented
a program titled “In
School, the Right School, Finish School” to
an audience of school officials, social workers, probation officers,
and law students. Schools offer children in state custody the
clearest way out of their predicament, but the likelihood of
success depends on the quality and stability of the relationships
they form there, panelists agreed.
 |
| Andy Block, Director of the JustChildren
program at the Legal Aid Justice Center, introduces
the talk as Frank Cervone, Executive Director for the Support
Center for Child Advocates in Philadelphia, looks on. |
“These are children, who
because of situations of abuse or neglect, are in the custody
of the state, not their parents. We are the state.
We represent these children in one way or another. . . . It’s
our responsibility to see that these children succeed and
we have not done a very good job,” said
Virginia Wise of the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts. “We
want them to succeed just as if they were our own children.
”There is an obvious connection between school failure
of children and our burgeoning prison population,” said
Wise. “Our failure to educate these children has long-term
consequences for society. We haven’t given them the tools
they need. Instead of going to college they’re going to
prison.”
Children of color are disproportionately represented in foster
care and juvenile justice systems and they face additional barriers
to attending school and finishing school because they are in
the custody of the state, she said. Adults involved with these
children should always keep in mind that “court-involved
children have faced extraordinary trauma and loss. . . . Besides
learning the ABCs and getting ready for those tests they have
to pass, they have to deal with life on the streets and getting
shot at when their mother was out shooting up drugs, or stealing
food so their baby sister could stay alive.” Their personal
histories are often so shattered that they are at a loss for
how to respond when school assignments ask them to write about
their families, she said.
She encouraged everyone involved with such a child to attend
all court hearings regarding them. “The judge needs to
hear from you at every hearing. Parties should present information
on the educational standing of the child. Make sure you know
who has educational decision-making authority for the child.
Make sure a surrogate parent is appointed by the court.” Bring
educational and medical records to the hearings too, she advised,
so that their absence does not cause other obstacles to staying
in school.
Studies show that foster children can have developmental delays
up to five times greater than other children and that children
lose four to six months of academic progress with each move
to a new school, Wise said. In California, children in foster
care average nine different schools by age 18. Federal laws
give foster children the right to stay in their school of origin,
Wise said. The foster parents or the school are responsible
for transportation. “They have a right to school
stability and that’s very important because we often find
when we get to a court hearing three weeks after a child has
been removed from the family—guess where the child is?
She's at home with the foster mother and hasn’t gone to
school for three weeks. She should have just kept going to the
school she was going to.”
School secretaries should be aware of foster children’s
rights, she said, and be alert to when they may change foster
homes. “Schools
should be especially sympathetic to kids in state custody. They
don’t have parents speaking up for them. . . .The more
often they miss school, the more likely they are to end up in
delinquency and then in our prison system.”
Turning to delinquency issues, she faulted schools for expelling
students even when the charges against them are dismissed. “School
officials fear their influence on others,” she acknowledged,
but children not in school have higher arrest rates.
“We don’t want them just warehoused in school,” explained
Bridget Brewster of the Children’s Law Center. “We
want them in the right program for their unique needs. We want
to maximize their potential.
“What I worry about is that we are all in our silos” working
on the problem in isolation from each other, she said. “If
we don’t work as a team, the children do start to fall
through the cracks.”
Ticking off statistics showing their substantial academic development
delays—50 percent of children in state custody are held
back to repeat grades—Brewster said, “Schools are
the last place of resort for services to kids. I know schools
feel like ‘it all falls on us,’ but, in fact, it
does.”
Schools offer delinquent children safety, attention to learning
disorders, and a chance to develop good social behaviors, she
said. “They find role models there that they haven’t
had before.”
Schools should stress enhancing their relationships with delinquent
students, she said. Teachers in the audience later commented
that every student they teach is appealing to them for special
personal attention and there simply isn’t enough time
or energy to meet all their demands.
Brewster said special education laws provide for high levels
of service for students and “anyone in this room can refer
a child for a special education assessment.” Behavioral
and emotional problems, not just academic ones, qualify students
for special services. “Include [the student] in the dialogue,” she
said. “It doesn’t really help for them to be in
a program they really don’t want to be in.” The
more invested they are in the plan, the more likely it is to
succeed.
To reinforce the goal of high school
graduation, they should
be encouraged from an early age to describe their educational
goals for themselves. When asked what their aspirations are,
kids in the foster care system report the same ones as other
kids—college
and successful careers, said Gail Chang Bohr of the Children’s
Law Center of Minnesota. But, meanwhile, about 20,000 students “age
out” of
foster care every year nationwide. About half of those never
get their diploma and half will end up with arrest records. “Something
happened to these children that they became frustrated with
school,” she
said.
The aim is to keep foster kids on grade level, panelists agreed,
and pointed out the need for better preschool programs.
A law student with experience teaching stressed that a child’s
own motivation to succeed in school is reinforced by having
them describe their personal goals to supportive adults.
• Reported by M. Marshall
