The Education They Need

Nearly 30,000 children in Los Angeles County live in foster homes with strangers or relatives, and the odds aren’t good that they’ll make it through high school. A bill in the state Assembly, introduced by Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), would cut through some of the red tape that can cause these children to fall behind and then fail.

Chaotic homes and poverty often give these children a bad start in life, and to become productive adults they need more than teachers alone can give them. Many require therapy to heal the emotional scars left by a mother’s drinking or a father’s violent temper. And a permanent home with loving parents never hurts.

A good education is also critical to success. Yet disorganized child welfare agencies often cement children’s educational failures. Social workers abruptly hustle foster children from one home to another, forcing them to change schools and friends each time. Transcripts and credits get lost. Reading ability tops out at “See Spot Run.” Mastering 9 times 7 becomes an impossible goal.

So it’s no wonder that one-third of foster youth are behind grade level, more than 35% require special education and nearly 40% fail to graduate from high school.

Based on the premise that children in local foster care deserve the same opportunity to succeed academically as other California students, Assembly Bill 490 attempts to cut through a sometimes stupefying bureaucracy. State law, for example, makes social workers responsible for transferring a student’s transcripts from one school to another but confidentiality laws make schools balk at releasing those records to anyone but the child’s parents. Students sometimes chill for weeks with “SpongeBob SquarePants” before frazzled school clerks send on their records so they can enroll at their new school.

Steinberg’s bill would eliminate this delay and confusion, letting social workers acquire and quickly transfer a child’s records. Other provisions would let children finish the term in a school they liked even if they had moved to a new home; would establish educational standards for the private schools that some group homes operate for their foster wards; and would ensure that all these children, no matter their educational deficits, have access to a full range of academic classes and extracurricular activities.

School buddies and caring teachers are important in any child’s life. They become even more vital -- as does education in general -- to the survival and success of children whose parents were unwilling or unable to provide a loving home. Steinberg’s bill goes a long way toward filling that void.