Beyond The Foster Care System: The Future for Teens

Chapter 2: Education for Foster Care Teens

When we were lawyers in family court we were supposed to help our teen clients with their placement issues—that is, finding a place for them to live. But often we met teenagers who, when asked how it was going, complained about their education or lack thereof. This surprised us at first. Our prejudice was that teenagers didn’t care that much about high school and that, because these teens were in foster care, they should be exclusively focused on the things we were supposed to be concerned with—whether they would be reunited with their family soon, whether they should be in a foster home rather than a group home. But many first talked about school. They imagined futures for themselves that involved education as a key component, and they were angry and scared that no one was making sure they were getting a decent education. Our young clients knew what they needed and what they were deprived of; more than half of teens leaving foster care don’t have high school diplomas .1 We were aware of the many obstacles to high school completion and college attendance in poor communities, particularly for minorities.2 But an overriding question loomed: shouldn’t a child in the custodial care of a government system be assured of an education? After we left our jobs in family court, we began looking for funding to work on a project to help teens in foster care. The first project for which Youth Advocacy Center received funding was production of a video. Listen to Us 27 2 Education for Foster Care Teens Carlos would present the authentic teen perspective on foster care. We spent several months traveling around the city and met with groups of teens at foster care agencies and community groups. We talked about the project and asked teens if they wanted to work on a video in which they could talk about their experiences in foster care and their ideas for making the system better. The experiences of working in partnership with young people in foster care on Listen to Us and subsequently, other projects, increased our understanding of the challenges of changing the foster care system to meet the educational needs of teens. It also led us to understand that young people needed to be, and could be, effective advocates for themselves. Finally, through our collaboration with teens we grew to admire their resilience, ingenuity , and strengths. Betsy At one meeting to recruit teens for the video project at a journalism program for teenagers, I met Carlos. He was fifteen but looked much younger. Carlos had a baseball cap pulled down over the top of his face, so you could just barely see his eyes over his high cheekbones. He sat quietly listening to the other bigger, louder kids talk about the problems they had in foster care— you couldn’t use the phone; one group home put everyone on house restriction if one person got in trouble; no social worker had visited them for two months; and so on. Finally, Carlos spoke up. “Me, I just want to go to school.” I was not sure I heard him right. “Excuse me?” “I want to go to school! I’m sick of sitting in the house all day watching TV. Staff isn’t doing anything to get me in school.” He sounded exasperated. It was the last week of September and three weeks into the new school year. In New York, the law requires all children between the ages of six and seventeen to attend school full-time. How could Carlos not be enrolled in school? It seemed crazy. “Well, I don’t understand. Why can’t you just go to a high school near your group home?” I asked. Carlos nodded emphatically. “Exactly, that’s what I say! My agency wants me to keep going to their school all the way in the suburbs at their campus. Beyond the Foster Care System 28 But that’s a special ed school, plus it’s an hour and a half bus ride each way from Brooklyn. I just want to go to a regular high school.” “Have you talked to your social worker about it?” I asked. “Yeah, I told her at the end of the last year, in June, that I want to go to a regular school, and finally she said okay, but now they keep saying they...