LeBoeuf: Legislation vital to fix problems with foster children’s care

David Almond’s death is nothing less than horrific. He was a young kid with a bright future ahead of him, yet he starved to death surrounded by fentanyl and feces. The greatest tragedy is our constant failure to protect Massachusetts’ most vulnerable children, a failure that rests at the feet of the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families. Sitting on the Children Families and Persons With Disabilities Committee at the State House, I see children like David come across my desk every day, repeatedly falling through the cracks in our system.

“How does this happen?” is the question asked time and again in tragedies like these. How was this child returned to his father, already deemed unfit to be a parent? How did they not check in on David in person at least once over the year?

The reasons — currently at the DCF, there is still no centralized standard on how to care for children or prepare foster parents. There is no procedure for establishing whose obligation it is to check on grade level, accompany the children to pediatrician appointments or send information from one school to the next. I will never forget the 10-year-old twins that showed up at school with no records after a parent’s suicide. Xavier and Juan went missing a week later. The school only later learned that they had been transferred. Karla was always smiling and wore her hair in two pigtails, until she started having outbursts. The principal learned directly from the 8-year-old that the reason for her unruly behavior was that she was being “hotlined”: spending every day in a different home for two weeks because DCF could not find her stable foster care placement. Speechless, the principal was not even aware the young child had been removed from her biological parents’ home.

Thirty four percent of Massachusetts foster youth are too old for their grade level. As the grade level increases, this share grows higher. More than half of our foster youth are enrolled in special education services, and one third of foster youth experienced school changes during the year, many of which coincided with a DCF placement change. It has been reported that youth are set back six months on average in their academic progress each time a move occurs. There has been a 15% increase in 6- to 11-year-old children in out-of-home placements since 2015, and Latinx youth account for a staggering 82% of the increase of these removals.

I have put forward two pieces of legislation that are critical to fixing these issues. The first, “An Act Creating an Electronic Backpack for Foster Children,” will make sure students’ information stays with them. Students show up to school with no background record of their past traumas, their academic needs or their experiences within the system. Schools are not adequately able to meet the complex social and emotional needs of students because our educators are not provided the proper resources to do their jobs.

The second, “An Act Relative to Educational Support for Children in Foster Care” will streamline responsibilities, policies, agreements and procedures relating to foster care in Massachusetts. Our foster parents are given very little training and guidelines from the state. I’ve received countless calls from foster parents, wondering why sometimes they’re allowed into parent-teacher conferences and other times not. When faced with education decisions, Massachusetts’ teachers, foster parents and medical professionals are forced to navigate an almost impossible bureaucratic system whose answers vary depending on the area office. This lack of recognition of the central role a school system plays in a child’s life, particularly a foster child’s, is why we fail children, like we failed David Almond.

Legislation alone cannot solve all of our problems in the child-welfare system, nor the gaps in educational experiences of students in foster care. Social worker caseloads, inequitable classroom resources and complex transportation funding challenges are some of the many factors that stand in the way. However we must reaffirm a core Massachusetts value: Education is a constitutional right regardless of zip code or welfare status. Failing to recognize the intersection between our public schools and the protection of our most vulnerable children defies the sense of morals that bring us together as a commonwealth.

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State Rep. David LeBoeuf  represents the 17th Worcester District. 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3cPMuM3