It’s been six years since Vanessa took in her brother’s grandchildren, but it is only in the last couple of weeks, with their start at a new school — Immaculate Conception in Astoria — that she knows “everything will be all right.” Thanks to a scholarship from the Children’s Scholarship Fund, they are finally in a “quiet” and “loving” school.
But for the 5,000 or so school-age foster kids around the city and the thousands more who have spent time in the system, the educational options offered by the city and state are insufficient to mitigate the trauma and turmoil they’re experiencing at home.
Ayana was 4 ½ and Willa was 2 ½ when the Administration for Children’s Services took them away from their parents, who were on drugs. A 6-month-old who was also in the house had fractured ribs and other evidence of abuse. Ayana and Willa spent six months in a foster home until Ayana reported that the foster mother was hitting her. That’s when their great-aunt Vanessa stepped in, first as a foster mother and then eventually adopting them as her own. (A third child, Tanya, was born five years ago and Vanessa also took her in.)
The years after they first became foster children weren’t easy. The caseworkers tried to reunite the family but their parents wouldn’t show up for meetings. Their mother “cleaned up a little,” Vanessa tells me, enough for the kids to visit her on weekends. But then they would return to Vanessa on Sundays saying that their mother was kicking them or they were sleeping in a bedroom with adult males.
Needless to say, their problems at home were spilling over into school. At PS 122, Vanessa says, “the girls didn’t get their services. They couldn’t focus.” It took three years for them to get speech and behavioral therapy. And they were bullied by other students.
It’s no wonder the outcomes for kids in foster care are so disheartening. A University of Chicago survey found that about a third of foster kids nationally earned neither a high-school diploma nor a GED. A survey of inmates in California prisons found that 13 percent had been in foster care.
Bill Baccaglini, CEO of The New York Foundling (a nonprofit that helps foster kids and other children in need), knows all about these problems. Ten years ago, his group launched Haven Academy charter school in The Bronx, whose student body is mostly kids in foster care or those receiving preventive services.
He says large public schools simply can’t manage the problems these kids come with.
In addition to placing social workers on site (so that any kind of behavioral problems can be dealt with immediately and without kids missing school) they have also extensively trained teachers in how to react to student behavior.
Baccaglini knows this approach is working because 60 percent of the kids are performing at grade level on math and English tests in fourth grade, compared with only 13 percent and 12 percent of foster kids whom The Foundling helps outside of school.
Baccaglini doesn’t think the city will let him open enough schools to serve this whole population. So The Foundling has doubled down on its tutoring efforts, providing kids in their junior and senior year in high school professional one-on-one help for a couple of hours a week.
The tutors come to wherever the students live or want to meet and stay with them throughout the course of their schooling. Just these two years of tutoring has quadrupled the number of kids who go on to college.
Other states are way ahead of New York. Arizona, Florida and North Carolina all have voucher programs for kids in foster care. And this fall, Oklahoma expanded a program for special-needs kids to include foster children as well.
The ability to enroll in a private or charter school is important not just because a smaller, calmer and more controlled environment is often better for these kids. It also means that even if they have to change homes (to another foster family or to return to their biological parents), they won’t necessarily have to change schools, says Jonathan Butcher, who studies education for the Heritage Foundation.
Butcher, a former foster parent himself, notes “that stability is always key.” For Vanessa and her daughters, it’s an enormous relief.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.