Liv Ames for EdSource

School district accountability plans offered "slim show of districts' attention to foster youth" as required under California's new schoolhouse funding police, according to a report released Mon by SRI International and J Koppich & Associates.

The commencement round of local control and accountability plans – which describe the goals and actions districts plan to implement over a 3-year period – "typically did not outcome in large numbers of districts specifying comprehensive or coherent plans" to address the needs of their foster youth, according to the report, Foster Youth and Early Implementation of the Local Command Funding Formula: Not Yet Making the Course. Instead, foster youth were lumped into programs for other targeted groups, such as depression-income students.

The report quoted an employee in a district with eighty percentage depression-income students as saying that the superintendent wanted "to make changes that would aid all youth, not merely foster youth."

But foster youth have some of the poorest academic outcomes – including the lowest graduation and higher enrollment rates – of whatever subgroup of students. Foster youth have been subjected to the trauma of being removed from their families and many change schools at to the lowest degree once and often multiple times during a school year. About 63,000 youth are in foster care, with more than than one-half ages five to 17, according to the California Kid Welfare Indicators Projection at UC Berkeley.

The written report, commissioned by the National Centre for Youth Law, relied on reviews of recent studies on foster youth and relevant state policies, telephone interviews with educators in iv districts with large numbers of foster youth, and visits to two school districts and their county offices of educational activity considered by the youth police force center as exemplary in their policies toward foster youth. The researchers also talked to county offices of education that represented about half the districts in the state, said author Daniel C. Humphrey, and reviewed well-nigh 50 accountability plans.

The researchers did hold out hope that future accountability plans will include more specific help for foster youth as districts become more familiar with what has been a largely invisible subgroup of students.

1 county office of pedagogy official who had been working on foster youth problems for years described for the written report'due south authors a recent workshop for district educators on foster youth and trauma that she led: "The rooms were packed. And now nosotros are having all this follow up…can y'all train our staff?…They're coming to trainings. They're showing up at our meetings. They call to say tin we attend this? That'southward stuff that merely didn't happen earlier. I call up information technology's a seismic shift."

"With the exception of a few individual educators charged with monitoring foster youth, school districts notice themselves on still unfamiliar terrain," according to the report.

Districts have a lot to acquire, the report noted. They need to sympathise the complex systems involved with foster youth – the courts, children and family services agencies, local advocacy groups, private service providers and county offices of education.

"With the exception of a few private educators charged with monitoring foster youth, school districts find themselves on still unfamiliar terrain," according to the report.

In addition, districts need to improve their own student information systems to amend track the bookish results for foster youth, the report said. The authors also found that social service agencies often do non notify schools when a youth is removed from one foster dwelling and placed in another, making it difficult to transfer records and guarantee immediate enrollment in a new school.

"California nonetheless has a long way to go before it can guarantee that foster youth do not fall through the cracks in the organization," the authors said.

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