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

Post-Partisan; the Power of Foster Care Politics

While the nation bemoans a “gridlocked” Congress and Comedy Central’s Messrs. Stewart and Colbert aptly ridicule both Presidential candidates for a disregard of specificity on one hand and hubris on the other, I have borne witness to a very different vision of our elected leadership.

2012 Foster Youth Intern R.J. Sloke with Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.). Sloke played a key role in a collective effort to maintain momentum behind the Uninterrupted Scholar’s Act.

Instead of obstruction and partisanship, at least around one issue – foster care – I have seen members of Congress from both houses and sides of the aisle move at notable speed to introduce important, thoughtful legislation; respectfulness between ideologically disparate leaders; and an ability to transform the recommendations of experts in child welfare and foster youth themselves into cogent policy.

This story begins in Miami on March 31, during the second stop of the Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth’s National Listening Tour. Caucus co-founder Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) sits aside Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) and Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) at an enormous rectangle of tables peopled with Florida’s child welfare leaders. Mary Cagle, Director of Children’s Legal Services for Florida’s Department of Children and Family Services, describes how the Family Educational Records and Privacy Act (FERPA) – intended to protect against disclosure of student records to parties other than school officials or biological parents – creates difficulties for foster children, who are no longer in the custody of their biological parents.

Amending FERPA would allow social workers access to student records, she says, helping them make critical decisions in how to best mitigate foster children’s educational challenges and celebrate their successes.

“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 says to the assembled members of Congress.

Two short months later, on the last day of May, National Foster Care Awareness Month, Rep. Bass and Foster Youth Caucus Co-Founders Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) and Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) introduced a bill that would eliminate that tension by allowing child welfare agencies direct access to the records of students in foster care, and allow for aggregate data to be used in studies intended on improving educational outcomes for students in foster care.

“This was an issue waiting to be resolved,” Rep. Bass said in an interview on the eve of the bill’s introduction, which would eventually take the name of the Uninterrupted Scholars Act. “The thought had already been put in, all we did was take advantage of the thinking and the work that was in place.”

Through the summer, foster care advocates and hill staff worked behind the scenes to elevate the issue and make sure it carried momentum through an increasingly static legislative season. As is so often the case with child welfare issues, it was a combination of expert analysis and foster youth perspective that moved the Uninterrupted Scholars Act into the Senate, increasing the likelihood it will become law before the end of this Congress.

On July 20, R.J. Sloke sat down with Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) to tell the lawmaker his story of growing up in foster care. It was the last day of Sloke’s internship through the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s Foster Youth Internship (FYI) Program, which places foster youth in the offices of Members of Congress.

The 2012 Foster Youth Interns immediately following their briefing on July 31, 2012.

“It felt really good,” Sloke said after a briefing in the Senate Visitor’s Center where he and 12 other of this year’s Foster Youth Interns released a report entitled “Hear Me Now” filled with their policy recommendations. “I told him about my high school situation and how the bill [Uninterrupted Scholars] would have helped me.”

According to the report he contributed to “Hear Me Now,” Sloke lived in 25 foster care placements in the five years he was care before his 18^th birthday. All the bouncing through foster homes and group homes resulted in his attending a dozen different high schools.

“My caseworkers and schools failed to communicate with each other as I would transfer schools resulting in my not receiving credits to go on to the next grade,” he wrote in the report. Despite taking ninth grade three times, Sloke managed to graduate at 19.

Sloke’s story touched Blunt, who signed on as a co-sponsor of the Uninterrupted Scholars Act. On August 2nd, Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Mark Begich (D-Ala.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced the law into the Senate.

In an interview just minutes before the bill was run to the Senate floor, Sen. Landrieu, Co-Founder of the Senate Caucus on Foster Youth, described just how important hearing from youth like Sloke is to legislators.

“This kid, even after having to go through ninth grade three times, not because he couldn’t do the work but because the system had lost his records, now he’s gone on to graduate…. He will be a phenomenal leader in our nation but you know this is just way beyond what should be required. That is R.J.’s situation and there are thousands of other cases like it.”

Much like the House bill, Uninterrupted Scholars will: give child welfare agencies access to foster student records; allow for the use of educational records in studies related to promoting the educational success and stability of foster youth; and eliminate the need for duplicative, time-consuming notice when transferring records.

On August 3^rd, the day before Congress took its summer recess, I had a chance to sit with Congressional Caucus on Foster Youth co-chair Michele Bachmann. After explaining her experience as a foster mother to 23 foster children and five “biologicals,” Bachmann took a moment to explain the significance of having caucuses on Foster Youth in both houses.

“A lot of people think we can never talk about anything in Congress, that everything is gridlock and everything is partisan, and it isn’t at all. So both Congresswoman Bass and myself have come together. We created the Foster Youth Caucus, a bi-partisan caucus to elevate the issue of the problems and challenges that families deal with, with foster care, because we want solutions. That’s what we are about. Positive solutions to actually help the life situations for families in challenging situations.”

While Bachmann — like Landrieu had the day before — repeatedly referenced the goal of finding “forever families,” she noted the importance of Uninterrupted Scholars.

“We filed our bill in the House, now we see the Senate’s followed suit. We do have time yet in the remainder of this year to advance the cause of children in challenging circumstances that is what we are here to be about…. Our goal is to place children in forever families, but along the way, along the path of that journey we want them to have the best possible educational [opportunities], because if there is anything I learned personally as a foster mother its that our foster children needed a leg up.”

Congress will reconvene in early September, just as hundreds of thousands of American students start a new school year. If momentum carries Uninterrupted Scholars through, students in foster care may have that much needed leg up on the road to educational success.

Daniel Heimpel is the Executive Director of Fostering Media Connections and the Publisher of the Chronicle of Social Change. 

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.”