Bachmann on Being a Foster Mom, the Foster Youth Caucus and Uninterrupted Scholars

The day before Congress went into summer recess on August 3rd, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) sat down with FMC’s Daniel Heimpel to discuss her experience as a foster mother, the formation of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth as well as the Uninterrupted Scholars Act.

The bill, which would ease access to foster kids educational records, had been introduced by Bachmann, and Caucus co-founders Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif), Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) on March 31st. The Senate followed suit on August 2nd.

- Daniel Heimpel

Sen. Mary Landrieu on Foster Care, Education and a Growing Movement

On August 2nd, Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Mark Begich (D-Ala.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced  the Uninterrupted Scholars Act.

The bill would amend education policy that currently precludes many adults and institutions from access to an individual student’s records. This makes sense in most contexts , but for foster children, who do not live with their biological parents, not having access to school records can create major hurdles in their educational success.

In this interview Sen. Landrieu discusses the importance of the law and the increased attention on foster care and children’s issues in Washington D.C. and around the country.

- Daniel Heimpel

Isn’t it Ironic, Don’t you Think?

By. Daniel Heimpel

As the federal government works toward eased flow of information between the foster care system and education, the state that led the charge now aims to dam up the spring. 

SACRAMENTO – As California stumbles into the oncoming fiscal year, a yawning deficit is forcing wrenching cuts. It is an environment wherein hard fought protections for the state’s most vulnerable are felled at a dizzying rate.

“What is sad is that somehow anything that might potentially have a cost is just being swiped away without any close analysis,” said Laura Faer, Public Counsel’s Education Rights Director.

Faer and an unrelenting group of advocates have been fighting proposed changes to California’s education code under Governor Brown’s 2011-12 budget.  These changes would save two hundred thousand dollars but the cost to the state would be far greater, hurting its status as a national leader in policy promoting the educational success of foster children. Not to mention the educational cost to foster youth who already bounce through an average of nine different schools from kindergarten to senior year. This all happening while Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-Calif.) – who was California’s Assembly Speaker in 2010 – promotes federal legislation she introduced last month facilitating the exchange of information between schools and foster care agencies to support foster children’s education.

But, the irony of federal advancement on foster care and education is lost on California administrators too deep in the budget hacking woods to see the forest.

On June 12^th, the Senate Budget Fiscal Review Committee held a budget hearing in Sacramento. Michael Cohen, Chief Deputy Director of the Brown Administration’s Department of Finance explained the rationale behind converting 18 state mandates on Local Educational Agencies and School Districts to a $200 million “block grant.” This would eliminate the cumbersome process wherein local level school authorities must file reimbursemnt claims to recoup costs on  mandates imposed by the state, Cohen said. “We moved to a block grant approach where you eliminate those mandates, which in retrospect were never needed or are no longer needed.”

But, two of the mandates that would be eliminated under Cohen and the Administration’s plan are essential for foster youth struggling to make it through the state’s faltering public school system.

The first deals with the need for all social workers to have access to foster children’s educational records. Over the years, public child welfare agencies in California have increasingly contracted with social workers employed by private Foster Family Agencies to handle day-to-day casework. This means that private social workers are often the person closest to the foster children. But until 2000 when then-Assemblymember George Runner introduced legislation to fix the problem, these social workers did not have direct access to the educational records that would help them make decisions in the best interest of the child.

“The direct link between foster families and social workers is often weak,” the analysis filed in the statehouse reads. “Therefore it can be cumbersome to obtain student records, transmit them to the agency who then transmits the foster family.”

Roberto Favela, Vice President of a large California Foster Family Agency, says that this information is critical to ensuring that school records follow the child. “His personal life is traumatized by a living change,” Favela says, “and now you have an educational change that doesn’t facilitate or accommodate his needs.”

This was one of many examples of California’s progressive policy on the education of foster youth, which in 2003 culminated in landmark legislation to ensure foster youth had at least a fairer shot at at an education. A key mandate embedded into the broader law (AB 490) compelled Local Education Agencies to transfer a foster child’s school records within “two business days” of being moved. The common sense idea of timely transfer of records has since been engrained in federal child welfare policy as well as proposed federal education reform.

Despite a report from the California State Controller in 2011 that this mandate costs nothing, it still ended up on the Brown Administration’s chopping block, leaving advocates like Faer incredulous.

But for Cohen and the Administration, block granting and the subsequent elimination of code sections — which were created through thoughtful consideration and deliberation — is a win-win. “The block grant offers an opportunity for everyone to win by saving the administrative effort and providing flexible funding within the broad parameters of the state’s requirements,” Cohen said in the June 12^th budget hearing.

While in agreement with some aspects of Cohen’s argument, Senator Mark Leno lead the Budget Review Committee in a 10-5 vote modifying the Administration’s block grant scheme, setting the stage for a state-level drama with national implications.

In Washington D.C., the attitude towards the education of foster youth is markedly different.

On May 31^st, the last day of National Foster Care Awareness Month, Representative Karen Bass (D-Calif.) introduced the A Plus + Act, alongside co-sponsors Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.). A + would loosen federal rules on who can access educational records, easing foster care agencies’ ability to get their hands on important school information.

The irony is not lost on Danielle Mole, a Policy Advocate for the Alliance of Children and Family Services, who has been lobbying to save the imperiled educational mandates back in California.

“One of the authors of the A + Act is Karen Bass who not so long ago was an Assembly member here in California,” Mole says. “We have a major California leader moving forward on providing increased collaboration between agencies, while California is potentially putting up addition barriers.”

A + currently sits in the House Education and the Workforce Committee, where staffers are unclear of when it will move forward. But co-sponsor Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) is clear about wanting to see that happen.

“It’s a bipartisan and commonsense bill and it costs nothing,” Stark said in a written statement provided to The Chronicle.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-Sc.), attended the May 31^st press conference when the bill was announced. As a member the Education and the Workforce Committee, Wilson is in a position to move A + to the floor.

“As an adoptive father, Congressman Wilson understands the importance of this issue and plans to review legislation pertaining to it,” said Wilson Communications Director Caroline Delleney in a statement provided to The Chronicle.

So as Washington presses forward on the education of foster youth, Sacramento may be rolling back.

Youth Services Insider: Foster Care Month Goes Out with a Bang in Washington

Former foster youths shadowed local Congressmen in the morning before attending a press conference for the A+ Act and a town hall on foster care in the afternoon

Note: This column was updated on June 7

The Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth brought National Foster Care Month to an end with a day of events yesterday:

-Foster Youth Shadow Day, during which about 40 “alumni” of the foster care system shadowed a member of the House of Representatives that hailed from their state.

-A press conference to announce the introduction of the Access to Papers Leads to Uninterrupted Scholars Act (A+ Act), which would amend the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) in an effort to speed up the transfer of education records for children who need to change schools after being removed from their homes.

-A Foster Youth Town Hall, held at the Capitol Building, where Congressional members and staffers were invited to listen to and ask questions of former foster youths who had moved on to college and the work force.

A few thoughts on each event:

Shadow Day

Foster alums and some staffers donned electric blue Foster Care Awareness month t-shirts, and the design was a really compelling concept that other organizers should take note of.  The top half of the shirt was a big white space that took a shape somewhere between the event name-tag you get at fundraisers and a thought bubble in a cartoon.

Below the white space in black graffiti-style writing was scrawled: “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Shirt-donners all wrote a child welfare issue into the white space with a black sharpie: “Future Foster Parent,” “Domestic Human Trafficking,” “Child Welfare Finance Reform,” were the first three I spied.

Other foster youths chose to dress in the more traditional Capitol Hill attire of business suits; all of them were dressed better than this reporter.

A+ Act

We covered the act all day yesterday on The Chronicle website, including pieces on what the legislation says,  its origins, and some local examples of how FERPA had served as an obstacle for caseworkers in child welfare proceedings.

YSI has a few additional musings on A+:

-Obviously, it will need to be paired with Senate legislation to get to the president’s desk. Would President Obama sign it? It seems likely. There did not appear to be any Administration on Children, Youth and Families officials at the event announcing the bill, but two did show up for the Town Hall later: ACYF Deputy Commissioner Clare Anderson and Sonali Patel, a senior policy advisor to ACYF Commissioner Bryan Samuels.

-There is absolutely no doubt that foster youths are getting a raw deal because child welfare systems and school districts do not share records well. The foster alums on hand spoke out ardently for this, and it was not a lot that took the rights of biological parents lightly. By far, the issue most written into the Shadow Day t-shirts was “Family preservation and reunification.”

How much of the problem is due to FERPA protection, versus simple incompetence, is difficult to parse.

Carmen Miranda, a soft-spoken Hill staffer and foster youth alum, told press conference attendees that she spent

Before the event, YSI got to sit down to lunch with Rep. Bobby Schilling (R-Ill.) and two alums from his state, Michael Simelton and James McIntyre. Simelton was moved from his home in Cairo to a shelter in Carbondale, and could not attend school because his records were impossible to find.

McIntyre was adopted, but when the adoption failed and he returned to state custody, nobody could find his academic records or information about his immunizations, which most schools require in order for a student to enroll.

Miranda was held up from attending school because of privacy rights, which is what Bass and the caucus hope to address with A+.

The act will not directly help address the fact that school districts lose records though, although simplifying caseworker access to the records might make it more likely that records would survive and make the trip from school to school with foster youths. There is also the hope that between some requirements the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, along with the looming rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act, foster youths just won’t be moved from school to school as frequently.

-If it passes as presently written, ACYF will have at least one definition to make through guidelines: “a child welfare court proceeding,” in the context of the following change made by the act:

“When a parent is a party to a child welfare court proceeding, and the order is issued in the context of that proceeding, additional notice to the parent by the educational agency or institution is not required.”

It seems to YSI that how one chooses to view a “child welfare court proceeding” dictates the universe of parents who would lose the right to protect their children’s educational records.

Does an investigation of abuse/neglect by child welfare constitute a court proceeding? Would it need to rise to the level of substantiated abuse/neglect before the exemption kicks in? Or even more narrow: Would a FERPA exemption only kick in when a motion is made for removal from the home for any amount of time?

***UPDATE, JUNE 7:
After reading through the bill again, the above clause simply refers to the process of schools notifying parents after a court orders the school to turn over records. There is a bigger amendment to FERPA in the bill that actually creates an outright exemption for child welfare agencies.

State or local child welfare agencies could access records without court orders or parental consent under the law “such agency or organization has responsibility for the student’s placement and care, provided that the education records, or the personally identifiable information contained therein, of the student will not be disclosed by such agency or organization except for the purpose and to the extent necessary to address the student’s educational needs.”

Same deal here: HHS will have some defining to do if the bill passes as it is. “Responsibility for the student’s placement and care” will be the big one: does that mean children who must be actually cared for by the state through an out-of-home placement, or any child for which an abuse/neglect case is substantiated? Many of those youths remain in their homes, but if it’s an open case the agency would have some responsibility for placement and care.

***

-ACYF would be wise to instruct systems on what to do with the education records after use by a child welfare caseworker. Researchers that use personally identifiable academic records have to destroy identifying information as soon as they no longer need it. Would the same apply here, or would the agency get to retain records, even if the child was reunified and the case was closed?

Town Hall
The previous town hall, hosted by Reps. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) and Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), led directly to the A+ legislation (click here to read how in a piece by Chronicle publisher Daniel Heimpel). What themes prevailed at yesterday’s meeting?

Fostering for profit
More than one alum made the point that for every good foster parent, there are many in it for a paycheck. Not the most comfortable topic for the caucus, whose members heavily lauded the work of foster parents at the press conference earlier in the day.

Laughable legal help
“How many of you had a lawyer or a guardian ad litem?” Hastings asked the alums on hand.

“Had one, or met them?” someone shot back almost immediately.

Enough said. Improving legal services for youths in the juvenile justice system is part of the larger Access to Justice Initiative of the Department of Justice, a project conceived of by Attorney General Eric Holder.

A Justice Department solicitation went out in fiscal 2010 for a grant to start the Juvenile Indigent Defense Clearinghouse, but it appears that a winner was never selected.

Hastings could look to make legal assistance for dependency court-involved youths a legislative issue. It would likely have to be a scenario where some portion of federal funds are tied to meeting certain guarantees of public defenders for children in child welfare proceedings, perhaps with a caseload maximum included. It would be a tough legislative sell at the moment, because it’s essentially passing more costs onto states and counties who are in no fiscal mood to receive such news.

Into Adulthood with Money

Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) is an adoptive parent, and said his teenage son arrived to their home with a small bag full of belongings and no money. He asked the alums whether any of them were provided any sort of account or money when they aged out.

The vast majority on hand shook their heads “No.” Simelton, the young man who trailed Rep. Schilling earlier in the day, said Illinois did start to set aside funds for older foster youth, a “couple thousand dollars,” he told Marino. It was not nearly enough to meet the bills and costs of adulthood, he told Marino, but crucial nonetheless.

John Kelly is the editor-in-chief of The Chronicle of Social Change

Connecting Data to Improve Education Outcomes for Foster Youth

by Stephanie Ludwig and Anna Jacobi

Despite bureaucratic roadblocks, states and counties across the United States are managing to broker two unwieldy systems- foster care and education- to mine data that will clarify the educational status of children and youths in foster care.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) restricts access to educational records to parents and legal guardians. Researchers attempting to gain access to these records, to determine foster youths’ strengths and deficiencies, often face bureaucratic roadblocks due to privacy concerns.

Some states, such as Florida and Illinois, have succeeded in linking education data to other large systems such as social services, higher education and juvenile justice, while California has begun to catch up with state and county level projects that will match and compare educational and social services data.

Having completed a four-county pilot project, researchers from the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for Social Services Research are now working on creating a statewide social services data link with CAL-PASS (the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success), which uses data voluntarily uploaded by school districts.

Kristine Frerer, a research associate for the California Child Welfare Performance Indicators Project, says that the project hopes to answer some of the many questions about education for foster children that have been unanswered until now due to lack of data.

“We don’t really know how foster kids are doing educationally on a state level,” says Frerer. “We don’t know strengths and weakness of different programs.”

She said that FERPA posed a challenge to getting the project off the ground.

“It was kind of a nightmare,” says Frerer.

Because of FERPA restrictions, she said, they will not be able to update the data on a regular basis because the process of extracting and re-matching the data sample is too time-consuming and labor intensive.

After the process of de-identifying the data to preserve foster youths’ privacy, the project will link social services’ data on foster youth to educational data such as standardized test data, California High School Exit Exam results, free- and reduced-lunch status and post-secondary level coursework and graduation.

“States are mandated that they have to do longitudinal education system data and, even though it’s a federal mandate, they’re woefully behind,” says Frerer. “I think it’s a big effort, Los Angeles for example has 81 school districts that keep their own data.”

Another large project linking data from the California education and social services systems is also underway. The project is a partnership of the West Ed Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, the California Department of Social Services and the California Department of Education.

Beth-Ann Berliner, Senior Research Associate at West Ed, said the agreement took two years to come together in order to ensure the information was kept secure.

“All of the data transfer was done through a secure server,” says Berliner. “We are currently working with personally identifiable data from both services with the sole intention of making a match and finding every single student in foster care.”

Her partner on the project, Senior Research Associate Vanessa Barrat, says it has been a tricky process that has been eased by a shared commitment from the Department of Education and the Department of Social Services.

“The goal is to be able to report on the achievement of children on foster care compared to the achievement of kids not in the foster care system,” says Barrat.

The project proceeded with few FERPA-related obstacles, according to Barrat.

Other states have used data exchange to implement programs to enable foster youth to succeed in their schools. Illinois uses a system known as SchoolMinder to enable child welfare workers to find children foster homes near their school or district. After implementing SchoolMinder, the average distance of foster home changes dropped from 22.5 to 11.4 miles. Pennsylvania has designated education liaisons in each child welfare office and provides child welfare workers with an educational screening tool.

Some say the future of information exchange lies in creating large state databases so that agencies serving vulnerable populations like foster children can communicate more effectively.

Lawmakers Aim to Help Foster Youth Earn an A+

3/31/2012: Representatives Karen Bass (D-Calif.) and Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) – both members of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth – during Florida stop of the National Listening Tour.

The recently formed Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth introduces legislation critical to unleashing the educational potential of students in foster care. 

By. Daniel Heimpel 

 As the country braces itself for election season’s pitched partisanship, a group of federal lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have found common ground on critical legislation that promises to streamline information exchange between education and foster care. 

The Access to Papers Leads to Uninterrupted Scholars Act (A+ Act), introduced today by U.S. Reps. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Tom Marino (R-Pa.) and Jim McDermott (D –Wash.), would eliminate longstanding tension between the protection of personal student records and federal mandates on public foster care agencies. The aim: to help ensure educational stability and success for foster youth.

For experts, advocates and administrators, the new legislation is an opportunity to change the way foster care and education work together towards the shared goal of improving educational outcomes for foster youth. Further, the A+ Act would allow for inter-agency data sharing, which experts agree would increase the chance of successful interventions to improve the dismaying educational outcomes students in foster care face.

A comprehensive fact sheet on educational outcomes for foster youth, compiled by the National Workgroup on Foster Care and Education, provides a clear picture of just how poorly these students perform compared to their peers. About half of students in foster care completed high school by age 18, compared with 70 percent of the general population, according to a review of multiple studies.  And research shows college completion rates for foster youth range anywhere from one to nine percent, far lower than the census estimate of 28 percent of people in the general population who hard earned at least a four-year degree by age 25.

“When are we going to quit talking about stats and start implementing the solutions that put our [foster] kids on par with their peers,” says Mary Cagle, the Director of Children’s Legal Services for Florida’s Department of Children and Families.

It was only two months ago that Cagle had an opportunity to make the case for doing just that. During a roundtable discussion organized by members of the recently launched Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth in Miami-Dade County on March, 31^st, she argued for amending the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to allow child welfare administrations easier access to educational records.

“I know we are here to talk about all of the positive things we are doing in the foster care system and share best practices,” Cagle said while seated alongside leaders from Florida’s child-serving agencies and Congressional Caucus Members Karen Bass, Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) and Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.). “But I really asked to be put on the agenda because you have the federal laws and there is a conflict really between FERPA and the Social Security Act.”

FERPA requires parental consent before any release of educational records and has strict protocols on when that information can be shared. On the flip side, you have Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, which dictates the responsibilities of foster care.

In 2008, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act stiffened mandates on child welfare administrations to ensure, whenever possible, foster youth are not bumped from school to school as they bounce from home to home, and that — if a move is in the best interest of the child — his or her records are transferred in a timely manner.

As foster care agencies across the country tried to live up to the law’s mandates, they kept bumping up against FERPA, which compels schools and school districts to jump through time-consuming hoops before releasing data critical to social workers.

“Education is one of the biggest indicators for the happiness of our kids, so we really want the federal government to take a look at the tension in this law,” Cagle said during the Florida meeting.

Gesturing toward the binders sitting in front of each of the assembled Members of Congress, she added, “you will see there is a draft of legislation and it is so simple, so easy and so clear, all it does is put the child welfare agency into FERPA as one of the exceptions they already have.”

Rep. Hastings then interjected, saying, “Let’s file it when we go back,” igniting a round of applause in the crowded room.

“That would be…” Cagle started. “You all will have changed the world for us, let me tell you.”

Beyond the delays to the practical information that can inform casework and improve children’s lives, the robust data sharing that fuels deep, policy-changing research is also often slowed down, said Teri Kook, Child Welfare Director or the California-based Stuart Foundation, which has funded numerous projects and research focusing on the intersection of foster care and education. The Foundation is currently supporting a huge data match between California’s Department of Social Services and the Department of Education, which will reveal yet-unknown nuances in how students in foster care are faring. 

Kook said that FERPA has delayed the process by 18 months. “If FERPA were changed we would have the data in our hands and would be using it to improve the situation on the ground for students and their families,” she said.  

Cheryl Smithgall, a research fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, has conducted some of the most widely disseminated and detailed research on the education of foster children and other at-risk youth. Under FERPA, records can be released to researchers studying ways to improve instruction, administration of student aid or predictive tests. The A+ Act would expand the research exception to, “child welfare agencies for the purposes of assessing policies and practices intended to improve educational outcomes for students in foster care.”

Until now, researchers have had to “work around” FERPA by either tailoring their requests to the educational exceptions laid out in the law, or by having social workers manually input data they collect into separate data sets.

“The change in this language in FERPA is essential in being able to develop the right interventions,” Smithgall said.

In the two months since the Florida event, the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth has been hard at work drafting the A+ Act that – if passed – will resolve the tension between FERPA and the Social Security Act highlighted in Cagle’s plea. 

Rep. Bass said that the Caucus moved so quickly on this legislation because Cagle’s remarks provided a “specific solution.”

“This was an issue waiting to be resolved,” Bass said. “The thought had already been put in, all we did was take advantage of the thinking and the work that was in place.  I think congressional members are always interested in removing barriers, especially with something like this that does not cost.”

Building off a body of published work largely produced by individual member organizations under the umbrella of the National Working Group on Foster Care and Education, the Act proposes three key changes to FERPA.

- Currently, child welfare agencies have to produce a court order to access a foster child’s educational records. The act would eliminate this hurdle by giving the agencies the same access as parents.

- Additionally, the act would allow child welfare agencies to conduct studies related to the implementation of federal mandates concerning the educational stability and success of students in foster care.

 - Finally, A + would eliminate the need to give parents duplicative notice when records are released. Currently, child welfare workers need to provide a court order to have educational records released by schools. As biological parents are parties to the case, such a notification becomes duplicative. More importantly it creates an additional barrier to accessing records, further slowing down the process and thus affecting children.

“I’m proud to join my colleagues from both sides of the aisle on this common sense legislation to promote educational stability among foster youth,” said A + co-sponsor, Rep. Bachmann in a statement provided to The Chronicle. “Long before I was a member of Congress, I was advocating for educational stability for foster children. Over the years, my husband and I cared for 23 foster kids, and we witnessed serious weaknesses in the educational system as it applied to them.”

Co-Sponsor, Rep. Marino has deep personal experience with foster care, having recently taken a foster youth into his home.

“To put it succinctly, this law un-complicates an already complicated system,” Marino said. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” he said of the Caucus’ work. “We have to let the public know how the foster care system is working and how it is not working, and that fixing it is not all that complicated.”