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  • Two types of housing vouchers for foster youth | Quick Guide

    Two types of housing vouchers for foster youth | Quick Guide


    Credit: Lisa Fotios/Pexels

    In California, where affordable housing is increasingly difficult to find, youth exiting the foster care system disproportionately face higher rates of homelessness, according to CalYOUTH, a study on foster youth conducted from 2012 to 2022.

    Two federal programs, the Family Unification Program (FUP) and the Foster Youth to Independence Initiative (FYI), work to reduce these rates of homelessness by providing targeted housing vouchers commonly referred to as Section 8.

    But FUP and FYI vouchers go largely underutilized in California, according to a recent report from John Burton Advocates for Youth, or JBAY, a nonprofit focused on supporting California foster and homeless youth.

    According to the authors of the report, child welfare agency representatives from 37 of the state’s 58 counties responded to the survey, and the counties that responded are in charge of 93% of the state’s FUP and FYI vouchers for eligible young people.

    The results from the survey provide critical insight into these two housing vouchers for former foster youth, such as how often they are being distributed and various challenges with more widespread issuance. Some of those challenges include a lack of awareness regarding recent policy changes that simplify the voucher distribution process and insufficient funding for the supportive services offered in coordination with the voucher.

    This quick guide provides insight into what the FUP and FYI programs are, how the housing vouchers can be accessed, the challenge of California’s current housing climate, and where additional information can be found.

    What do the FUP and FYI housing vouchers provide?
    Both the Family Unification Program and the Foster Youth to Independence Initiative vouchers provide eligible youth with up to three years of housing assistance, plus additional support such as locating available housing and covering some move-in costs. The housing vouchers, known commonly as Section 8, pay for all or part of the youth’s rent.

    A three-year voucher can be extended for an additional two years if the youth meets certain criteria. Those criteria include opting into a Family Self-Sufficiency program if one is offered by the local public housing authority issuing their voucher. In an FSS program, these youth can receive additional support services, including child care, job training and transportation. If a family self-sufficiency program is not offered, or if it’s impacted, youth can also meet the criteria by fulfilling education or employment conditions.

    More detailed information regarding those education or employment conditions can be found on Page 9 of this report.

    Who is eligible for the FUP and FYI?
    The Family Unification Program, or FUP, was established in 1992 and provides housing vouchers for families involved in the child welfare system and for transition-age former foster youth.

    The Foster Youth to Independence Initiative, or FYI, launched nearly three decades later in 2019, is specific to transition-age youth leaving the foster care system.

    In order to qualify for both programs, transition-age foster youth must be between the ages of 18 and 24 and cannot have reached their 25th birthday. Additional eligibility requirements include having exited the foster care system or being about to do so within 90 days and being homeless or at risk of homelessness at age 16 or above.

    It should be noted that transition-age foster youth age ranges might be different for other services, depending on the specific resource and the person’s location. In Santa Clara County, for example, some foster care transition services are available for 15-year-olds, while the city of San Francisco offers support for some former foster youth up to age 27.

    How many youth have been administered housing voucher?
    There has been a 54% increase in vouchers administered in the past two years: from 870 in 2021 to 1,341 as of Oct. 1, according to the JBAY report.

    Why don’t more eligible California youth have a housing voucher?
    There are multiple reasons for these housing vouchers being largely underutilized in California.

    One key challenge is that not every county chooses to participate in the FUP and FYI voucher programs. While those youth may likely still be eligible for other state or county-funded housing support, such programs are hard to get because they are utilized at higher rates.

    Additionally, the FUP and FYI vouchers are linked with offering supportive services and, despite new designated allocations to cover those supportive services, the costs remain prohibitive.

    Some county representatives are also unaware of key details that would facilitate the issuing of more vouchers. For example, about 65% of county child welfare agencies remained unaware that vouchers can be extended from three to five years for all youth with a voucher. Plus, recent federal policy changes have simplified the process that county agencies must follow when requesting certain vouchers, but many of the county representatives interviewed in the JBAY survey were unaware of those changes.

    How long does it take for youth to find adequate housing if they are administered a FUP or FYI voucher?

    The length of time for identifying housing ranges from less than one month to over six months, with 45% of California counties that responded to the survey indicating that the average search was one to two months. The range includes the beginning of the housing search to the moment the housing is secured.

    Finding adequate and affordable housing in California is increasingly one of the most significant barriers to using or even issuing the vouchers. Transition-age foster youth are particularly susceptible to this challenge, as they often have little to no income to rely on, no rental history and are less likely to have a co-signer to rely on.

    How can transition-age foster youth apply for FUP and FYI housing vouchers?
    If a transition-aged former foster youth thinks they might be eligible for a FUP or FYI voucher, they should connect with their child welfare or independent living worker. A direct point-of-contact for their county, if they offer vouchers, can be found at this link.

    Their local public child welfare agency makes the referral to the public housing authority and certifies whether the youth is eligible, based on their history in the foster care system.

    If the youth is eligible and the housing authority has FUP vouchers, that’s the type of voucher offered to the young person. Otherwise, an FYI voucher is requested from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Once housing is secured, the FYI voucher is administered to the landlord.

    Where can additional resources and information be found regarding housing vouchers for transition-age foster youth?

    Those potentially eligible for a FUP or FYI housing voucher can find contact information for their county on this spreadsheet compiled by JBAY.

    This fact sheet by the Youth Law Center provides an overview of the housing resources available in California for current and former foster youth.





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  • Advocates warn against cutting housing subsidy for former foster youth

    Advocates warn against cutting housing subsidy for former foster youth


    Jovenes Inc., a Los Angeles-based organization, supports transition-age youth in accessing housing.

    Credit: Courtesy of Jovenes Inc.

    The lack of stable housing is often cited by researchers as a significant barrier for current and former foster youth to continue attending school, and studies have shown that those exiting the foster care system face disproportionately higher rates of homelessness in California.

    Even so, two reductions totaling millions in funds targeted toward preventing homelessness and housing instability among youth exiting the foster care system are detailed in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2024-25 state budget. The governor’s cuts to extended foster care housing programs would help close only a sliver of the state’s projected $68 billion budget gap.

    “It’s unclear to me why programs that help support the housing needs of some of our most vulnerable residents would be singled out for elimination,” said Debbie Raucher, director of education at John Burton Advocates for Youth (JBAY), a nonprofit organization that advocates for homeless and foster youth.

    Among the proposed cuts is $18.8 million from the general fund that’s intended to help youth (ages 18-21) in extended foster care with supplemental funding to cover their housing costs. Those millions were approved last year to be implemented in 2025-26; the governor’s latest budget proposal, however, eliminates them before they go into effect.

    There is also a proposed cut of $13.7 million from the Housing Navigation & Maintenance Program, formerly known as the Housing Navigators Program, effectively eliminating the program whose entire annual budget in the past two years was $13.7 million.

    This program, often referred to as HNMP, offers supportive services to current and former foster youth ages 18-24 who receive a federal housing voucher. The vouchers are funded by the federal government, but participating states are mandated to provide supportive services for young people who are granted a voucher.

    The services vary by region but could include recruiting landlords who might be open to renting to someone with no rental history, help with security deposits, answering questions the foster youth tenants might have about their lease, and more.

    “It’s important because you almost can’t make use of their voucher without support. These are young people that have no rental history. They are at an age where many landlords are not excited to rent to them. They’re college age, they don’t have co-signers because they don’t have families that are supporting them, and they have no experience finding housing on the private market,” said Simone Tureck Lee, director of housing and health at JBAY. “So to expect them to just take a voucher and sort of turn it into housing is largely unrealistic.”

    The proposed budget cuts seem to ignore the housing needs of this population of California’s youth and their vulnerability to homelessness, say Tureck Lee and other advocates.

    The distribution of two foster youth-specific housing vouchers — the Family Unification Program and the Foster Youth to Independence Initiative — increased by 54% in the past two years, from 870 in 2021 to 1,341 as of last Oct. 1, according to a recent report by John Burton Advocates for Youth.

    The increase, according to Tureck Lee, is in part due to changes in federal policies that made it easier for the housing vouchers to be distributed to youth and in part due to an increase in state funding toward supportive services — the very services now at risk of being eliminated.

    “The end game here is to keep people stable in their housing,” said Tureck Lee. Without this funding, she added, the vouchers would still be available, given that they are federally funded, but the growth they’ve seen in voucher distribution will likely be curbed.

    Lillee Taylor, 21, is one of the 1,341 California youth in extended foster care who received housing vouchers and found some stability. She received her voucher just under one year ago.

    Today, Taylor, majoring in psychology at Cal State Fullerton and a single mom to a 4-year-old, also works full time for an Orange County organization as an outreach and engagement coordinator, providing resources for youth and adults leaving incarceration.

    Only four years ago, however, she was 17 years old and sleeping in a 1999 Toyota Corolla she bought on Craigslist for about $1,000.

    She was living there despite having been placed in a foster home. Taylor said she isn’t sure how the foster parent’s home was approved for fostering, given that the woman was uninterested in housing Taylor. So she made a deal with the woman: She could continue receiving the payment she’d get for housing Taylor if she at least took in Taylor’s dog.

    This was the arrangement until Taylor graduated high school and found out she was pregnant. She told the foster mom that she couldn’t live in her car any longer. The woman refused to take her in, so Taylor picked up her dog.

    She continued living in her car, now with her dog, while working full-time as a veterinary technician and saving money. On her 18th birthday, she applied for two apartments in Phoenix and moved there two days later. The apartments were not subsidized, but she moved there because it was what she could afford.

    “There was no possible option that I could find anything in California, it was just super unrealistic, so Phoenix was a lot easier to rent in,” she said. “It was also really close to California so it was easy to come back and forth to see friends.”

    Her daughter was born in Arizona and Taylor relied on funding from a federal program for foster youth to sustain them both, while attending community college remotely.

    Taylor eventually made her way back to Orange County, where she was born and eventually returned after being taken from her mother and placed in foster care, two days before her 10th birthday. It was also the area she spent her teenage years — moving in and out of foster homes and group homes.

    The housing voucher, which she received last year, is perhaps the most critical resource that makes it possible to now live more comfortably with her daughter.

    Without the voucher, she wouldn’t be able to afford her current neighborhood in the southern part of the county — the area she wants to live in because it has good schools for her daughter and is close to her small support system of friends.

    The voucher has also given her the opportunity to choose her living environment. “After living so many years in places you have no choice of being, like foster homes and group homes and just not great situations, when it comes to where we live, I’m pretty picky,” she said.

    Taylor is not alone in her pursuit of a safe and stable home. Of all youth who experienced homelessness in 2022, 29% were former foster youth, says a report from Children Now, an organization that evaluates progress made on California policies and investments.

    “If the foster care system is supposed to do one thing, it’s supposed to ensure that every youth in the foster care system has a roof over their head,” said Raucher of JBAY.

    What would become of Taylor and others in her situation if the voucher is discontinued? Taylor said she’d figure out a way to find stable, safe housing for herself and her daughter. She is resourceful and has, for years on end, found safety for herself and her daughter — first as she navigated the foster care system and then as she fought to place a restraining order on an abusive ex-boyfriend.

    And even though the voucher has not come without obstacles — Taylor has found it incredibly challenging to find new housing even with a voucher, something she’ll be doing once her current lease is up — she’s relieved she has it.

    “Having the support of the voucher gives me the opportunity to be able to go do fun things with my daughter because I do have a little bit of extra money,” she said. “She actually has a pretty decent-sized savings account right now because I’ve been able to save some extra money from what I’m not paying in rent, so that would definitely not be a thing if I had to do everything completely on my own.”

    It’s that support that might be reduced if the governor’s proposed budget cuts are ultimately approved later this year, said Tami Di Paolo, director of youth support services at Orangewood Foundation, which provides support services for youth who might be exiting foster care, experiencing homelessness, or at risk of being trafficked in Orange County.

    “Young adults like Lillee and other youth coming out of the foster care system, they’re able to secure housing, and now they can take a moment to focus on other needs because they feel safe and secure in their home,” she said.

    The elimination of state funds might sunset certain services that Orangewood provides, such as support paying for utility bills, groceries, and hotel stays in between leases, or might lead to a reduction in their staff, said Di Paolo.

    If any of their programs have a gap in funding, Di Paolo said they look to fill it as soon as possible to prevent service interruptions for youth.

    “But that also means that we would not be able to increase other services because we needed to fill this gap,” she added. “We know this is working for the young adults, but that funding needs to come from somewhere.”





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  • Q&A: Centering the college aspirations of foster youth

    Q&A: Centering the college aspirations of foster youth


    As California expands services needed to grow the number of foster youth enrolling in college, more work is needed to help those students graduate.

    Julie Leopo/ EdSource

    Foster youth are seldom top-of-mind in efforts to promote broader college access, but many would aspire to attend and have the skills to thrive there, argues Royel M. Johnson, a tenured professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, in his forthcoming book.

    The book, “From Foster Care to College: Navigating Educational Challenges and Creating Possibilities,” features the stories of 49 current and former foster youth nationwide who have enrolled in college, often by relying on the skills they gained while navigating the foster system.

    The idea for the book developed when Johnson was a professor at Penn State University, where his research largely focused on youth impacted by the foster care and criminal legal systems.

    Royel M. Johnson is a tenured professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, with a courtesy appointment in the Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
    Photo Credit: Royel M. Johnson

    “I’d been building an area of work, a program of research around system-impacted populations who are not always thought of as college material, and not always even just centered in national efforts to promote college access and post-secondary success,” he said in a recent interview.

    Johnson was raised on the west side of Chicago in the Garfield Park neighborhood. It is a predominantly Black community with a decadeslong history of disinvestment that has resulted in high unemployment and shorter life expectancy rates.

    “By way of that, you get exposed quite early to systemic inequities, whether it be policing, child welfare policies, education,” he said. “My own lived experience became the lens through which I developed my curiosity for research and trying to understand better the pathway and structural disadvantages and opportunities that some folks have and other folks do not.”

    While studying political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Johnson met and studied alongside graduate students enrolled in the university’s doctoral program for educational policy.

    They inspired him to remain at the university to pursue educational policy. He earned a master’s degree in the subject there and, ultimately, a doctorate in higher education and student affairs from Ohio State University.

    Johnson, whose book will be published in October, recently made time to discuss how the book project came together and what he learned from the foster youth he interviewed. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

    Where did the inspiration for this book come from?

    Too much of the work on young folks in foster care is sort of around, ‘What explains the failure?’ We need to understand why some students don’t succeed. But there’s also a lot that we can learn from young people who do succeed, and that becomes the model we sort of move from. I wanted to do asset-based work and resiliency-based work versus deficit-oriented work.

    Your book features the stories of 49 college students and graduates with experiences in the foster care system. How did you meet and interview them?

    Around 2019, I launched a national study working with folks who run programs for young people in foster care at colleges and universities. We contacted administrators at universities and asked them to recommend students to participate in the study, we shared fliers and recruited on social media.

    We paid students a stipend to participate. My team and I interviewed them, on average an hour or so each for two to three interviews, to get really comprehensive insights, from their time in foster care to their preparation and transition to college, to the realities of what it’s like to be a college student in foster care. Many of them were young people who were currently in college. Few had graduated, even fewer were graduate students.

    We wanted to cast a wide net of folks who were diverse in racial and ethnic backgrounds because it’s mostly youth of color who are disproportionately impacted, specifically Black youth and native and Indigenous youth. We wanted to oversample those who identified their sexual orientations beyond heterosexual. And diversity in the time spent in care: we know that those who age out of the foster care system are most vulnerable to experiencing homelessness, contact with the criminal punishment system, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, etc. We were really intentional in building a robust cohort of students to learn from.

    Once we started interviewing, many of them recommended their peers to participate in the study, in part because, for so many of them, what they shared is that they have so few opportunities to give voice to their own experiences.

    What did you learn from the students you interviewed?

    One of the things that we learned is that many of the young people in the book choose college through a framework of belonging: ‘How do I identify in institutions that demonstrate value for me and my identity as a young person in care?’ Institutions that have college access and support programs for young folks in foster care — they see that as a signal that that’s a place that they might be able to find community and belong.

    We also see that navigating the transition to college can be difficult, especially when you don’t have familial support moving you in and buying you all the things that you need, so they rely on a really broad constellation of kinship networks — their chosen family. They’re savvy in developing supportive and authentic relationships with not just their peers who become family, but former social workers, former teachers and educators. That familial capital becomes a resource for them in accessing college.

    What did you learn about students in California?

    Going Deeper

    Guardian Scholars is a chapter-based organization on college campuses that helps support former foster and homeless youth. The program supports students with financial aid, basic needs resources, mentorship, career advising and more.

    Guardian Scholars was founded at CSU Fullerton in 1988 and has since expanded to all CSU campuses in addition to community colleges and other universities statewide.

    The national recognition of the Guardian Scholars program and that being so visible is an attractive motivator for young folks in care because it signals to them that that’s a place where there’s going to be people like me and that I won’t be stigmatized in the way that I might be at a different place.

    Most student affairs administrators who work at a college or university may not know about federal funds or state-specific policies and resources that young people in care might qualify for. Those who work in and lead Guardian Scholars programs are keenly aware of those kinds of resources and of many of the challenges that young folks in care experience.

    You include concepts such as “aspirational capital” and “resistant capital” in your book. What do these terms mean in the context of youth in foster care?

    One of the frameworks that I draw on is what’s called community cultural wealth. This is a framework that Tara Yosso wrote about in 2005. What she argues is that people of color naturally have what she says is community cultural wealth, and these are the various undervalued, underrecognized forms of capital that we often use to navigate systems that weren’t designed for us.

    One of those forms of capital is aspirational capital: How is it that people of color are able to maintain such high aspirations in the face of such structural failures?

    Navigational capital is where the experience that we get navigating systems that weren’t designed for us becomes a resource to us, whether it’s navigating the bureaucracy of the welfare system or local politics, or even inequities in school. Being able to strategically manage and maneuver across these systems becomes a resource to us as we get into different situations, like applying to college and persisting in college.

    Community cultural wealth is a framework that lots of scholars of color who are doing work on communities of color have found a lot of value in trying to contextualize the experiences of people of color in education.

    How is it that we successfully navigate this system and structure that isn’t designed for us and that continues to fail us? I think community cultural wealth offers some language for the strategies, resources and work repertoires we draw on in order to maneuver.





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  • Leader steps down from foster youth advocacy group

    Leader steps down from foster youth advocacy group


    Amy Lemley, right, at an April reception for John Burton Advocates for Youth.

    Photo Credit: John Burton Advocates for Youth

    Amy Lemley was still a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the late ’90s when she founded First Place for Youth, the first housing program for former foster youth in California.

    The daughter of a large-animal veterinarian and a hospice nurse, Lemley has long been a force in policy advocacy for system-impacted youth. After First Place, she joined John Burton Advocates for Youth, or JBAY, an influential nonprofit that advocates for California’s homeless and foster youth.

    Amy Lemley

    Lemley joined as JBAY’s policy director at its inception in 2006 and went on to become its executive director, a role she has held for the past eight years.

    A handful of the policy actions led by Lemley during her tenure as executive director include establishing the nation’s first tax credit for foster youth, the extension of foster care from age 18 to age 21, and increasing state funding for housing for former foster youth.

    Lemley, who will be leaving JBAY on Oct. 1, recently sat for an interview with EdSource about her work and what’s ahead. The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

    Early in your career, you worked at a group home in Massachusetts for pregnant and parenting youth. What led you to work at the group home?

    I did what I thought you were supposed to do when you left college, which is to go into management consulting. My parents had paid a lot for that degree, and I felt like I was supposed to go get a big, fancy job. I was miserable, and then I remember breaking down with my mom. She’s like, “Why are you doing this job, honey?” And I said, “Because you guys sacrificed so much for me to have this education.” And she said, “You don’t really get what parenthood is. We want you to be happy.” I just remember the weight of the world coming off my shoulders, and I knew what I wanted to do is what both of my parents had done, which is to try and help people.

    I really had to make a hard sell to this nonprofit where I worked because I, clearly on paper, was not qualified. Whether that was responsible to the young people in their care is another question, but it opened my eyes to a whole world of young people who have had this very unfortunate circumstance and kind of set me forth on my career.

    What was your role in the group home?

    I was a case manager, so I had 14 pregnant and parenting young people on my caseload. I remember thinking at the time, “This shouldn’t be hard. I just have to keep them enrolled in school, and make sure they know how to parent, and help them get a job, and help them navigate public benefits, and how hard could it be?” My eyes were opened very quickly about the complexity of their lives. I had young people who would run away from the group home because their younger siblings were at home and they were trying to protect them. There were so many young people who were victims of intimate partner violence, and their lives were extremely complex. I did my very best to help them make progress in these different domains.

    Why did you pursue the path of founding First Place for Youth as a student at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy versus a different path of support for this particular group of young people, foster youth?

    I definitely have an entrepreneurial temperament. I also really deeply believe, as many others do, that with safe, stable housing, anything is possible. It’s the foundation on which lives are built, and without it, very little is possible. And so seeing the young people who I worked with in the group home age out of care, become homeless and then tragically lose custody of their children, it was clear to me that it’s completely unreasonable for an 18-year-old to be independent. I certainly wasn’t.

    So the creation and opportunity to create something with my very dear friend Deanne Pearn, to do something right, to do it well, to meet the needs of these young people, was very appealing.

    At the time, there was this kind of story we told ourselves, that young people don’t want a program; they want to be free; they just want to do their own thing. But in my experience, when you give young people something of value, something that’s actually helping them meet their practical needs, they’re very receptive to it.

    I’m curious about the transition from First Place for Youth to John Burton Advocates for Youth. Why transition over to JBAY at the time that you did?

    We co-founded First Place and got it to a certain size, and you can really only scale a program so far with private funding. And then I happened to have been introduced to John Burton after he was termed out of office (as a state senator) and really pitched to him taking the First Place program and funding it with public funding. He’d done that a hundred times over. What to me seemed like an impossibility, he had 40 years of experience doing it. So that’s why I left.

    Once an organization gets to be a certain size, as the executive director, you’re not running around doing advocacy. Your whole job really is to manage and maintain the existing organization. I felt like First Place needed an executive director that wanted to do that, and that wasn’t me. I had a different mission. I had the good fortune of meeting John Burton and having the opportunity to kind of pursue that mission together.

    How do you maintain your policy focus when there is so much need and a constantly changing landscape?

    Whether it’s inflation, unemployment during the pandemic or the housing crisis, whatever larger kind of macroeconomic developments occur, these young people feel it the most deeply.

    I think a really important part of our success has been to not try to be experts in everything. We have a specific kind of set of policies that we’re deeply informed about, and that we keep revisiting. We try to be very disciplined in terms of really knowing the body of policy, the public agencies that administer it, the details about the implementation, the different actors that implement it, so that we can develop really smart, strategic approaches that are based not just in a conceptual knowledge, but in a deep practical knowledge of how these programs are implemented in communities.

    I always say we don’t want to be an inch deep and a mile wide. It really means saying no when it’s appropriate and continuing to dig deep into those issues and figure out what is the most pressing need of young people and then how to marry that very pressing need with what is practically possible in today’s economic and political environment.

    What does the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last month in the Johnson v. Grants Pass case, which upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors, mean for youth in California and nationwide?

    Unaccompanied homeless youth are less likely to be sheltered than the general population of homeless individuals. And we know that young people who are unsheltered, even for a very short amount of time, are more at risk of violence and exploitation because of the vulnerability of their age. And so every night that they are unsheltered, they’re in danger. The optimist in me hopes that the ruling can be a catalyst for a more coherent, statewide approach, assuming the federal government isn’t going to provide the level of coordination and funding we require.

    What comes next for you?

    I am going to kind of take a couple months off and then I’m going to raise my head and think about whether I want to try my hand at consulting, potentially working with those high-quality local nonprofits who are doing very high quality service to young people and helping them match that with public funding and public policy, and taking what can be a really wonderful intervention and broadening applicability to all young people.

    I’ve promised my husband I will not found another organization. I already had my wheels turning, and he’s just like, “No, Amy, no.” And I was like, “Well, I’ll try my best.”





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  • My life as a foster youth includes dreams of college

    My life as a foster youth includes dreams of college


    First Star, Inc., guides high-school-aged foster youth through their journey to college, filling in for the support from family and friends that most young people take for granted.

    Credit: Courtesy First Star, Inc.

    From the time I was 8 years old, I lived in countless homes and attended more than five different elementary and middle schools combined and four high schools.

    To say my upbringing was different from the norm is an understatement. But I’m not alone. In California, 68,000 young people moving in and out of foster homes are currently experiencing the same challenges I faced.

    As a former foster youth, my college journey was not easy. Living in so many different foster homes, frequently changing schools, feeling isolated and disconnected, and falling behind in school were just some of the hurdles I faced daily. When you are in foster care, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and abandoned because you don’t have a family to pick you up when you fall down. No one is around to offer comfort or gently push you in the right direction when you need it most.

    I went to a public high school for my first year and then moved to a Catholic school as a sophomore — and would attend two different public schools after that. Because I moved so much, my school transcripts often got lost. For example, in my sophomore year, I attended one school for just two weeks before switching again because it didn’t work out with the foster family. When I started the new school, they enrolled me as a freshman until I advocated for myself and got placed in the sophomore classes where I belonged.

    This constant upheaval left me feeling isolated and disconnected. Each move meant a new beginning, new people and a new environment to adapt to. Even support services from the state, like social workers and lawyers, were constantly changing, leaving me with no stable adult figure to rely on.

    The impact was devastating academically. My struggles went beyond the frustrations of lost paperwork and transcripts. Schools ignored my request to be evaluated for an individualized education program (IEP), which I knew I needed. Despite obvious academic difficulties, like poor spelling and grammar, teachers simply passed me along. As a college student, I continue to face the consequences of these educational gaps.

    The turning point came when I was introduced to First Star, a community-based organization supporting high-school-age youth in foster care by guiding them to college. They provided more than just hope; they offered tangible support that assisted me with the college application process. Even when I moved out of the Los Angeles area, they ensured I had transportation to attend meetings and access to mentorship. They taught me about the real costs of college and how to budget and navigate financial aid applications. I finally had the supportive relationships I needed with caring people I could trust and rely on to prepare me for life beyond foster care. With their guidance, I was able to apply for college instead of giving up on my goals.

    I know my experience is not unique. There are many other youths like me, striving for a better future, aiming for college, and working hard to beat the stereotypes of youth in foster care. This sense of community was invaluable and gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams. Now, I’m attending college while working with children with special needs. My goal is to someday become a schoolteacher.

    A recent report from the Foster Youth Pre-college Collective, “Destination Graduation,” underscores the need for more support for students in foster care. It highlights a stark reality: Nearly 37% of California’s foster youth do not complete high school within four years, and fewer than half enter postsecondary education within a year of graduation. The college-going rate for foster youth is 25% lower than that of the general population.

    This disparity isn’t due to a lack of ambition or desire to learn. We have the same dreams and potential as any other young person. I speak from personal experience when I say what young people in foster care lack is stability and the nurturing attention that many kids growing up with traditional family support take for granted. However, students like me can achieve great things once we receive the proper support.

    My purpose in sharing my story is three-fold:

    • I want other youth in foster care to see that there is a pathway to college and independence. I am an example of that.
    • I want child welfare and education leaders to recognize that foster youth are not just products of their systems. We are young people who require more than odd-fitting clothes and toiletries sent yearly. To achieve our goals and dreams, we need extra help to heal from trauma, focus on our studies, and reclaim our ability to become accomplished young adults.
    • It’s time for public systems to deepen partnerships with community-based organizations who understand us and offer the individualized support, coaching and encouragement we need to get to graduation day and prepare for the future.

    Improving educational attainment for foster youth will change the course of their lives.

    •••

    Andi Mata is a foster youth ambassador and advocate for educational support programs for foster youth.

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • What schools should know about the liability insurance crisis in foster care

    What schools should know about the liability insurance crisis in foster care


    Koinonia Family Services is one of the foster family agencies that received a letter of nonrenewal. Their policy expires in 2025.

    Credit: Ourpromiseca/Instagram

    A seismic disruption of the foster system is underway in California, with no clear solution in sight for the 9,000 school-aged children whose lives and schooling may be severely impacted.

    Most foster family agencies in California either lost liability insurance coverage on Sept. 30 or will lose it once their current policies end after their insurer pulled out of the market.

    “A blanket non-renewal would cause a collapse of the California foster family system,” the company, Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California, acknowledged recently.

    The agencies cannot remain open without liability insurance, and few companies offer the required coverage for the agencies, which manage thousands of foster families caring for roughly 9,000 foster children statewide.

    Some agencies that managed to acquire coverage in recent weeks complained that the premiums are exponentially higher than what they paid previously.

    The insurance crisis currently affects only the foster families managed through the state’s more than 200 agencies, not those managed by their local counties. The impact may be far-reaching, however, especially if counties have to take on a significant number of foster families from agencies.

    Families are screened and certified to foster in two ways: directly by their local counties or through private nonprofits that counties contract with called foster family agencies.

    No matter how a foster care family obtains its certification, it must retain insurance to protect against potential liabilities.

    As agencies decide on their next steps, advocates say educators should keep in mind that some of their students might be part of the foster youth at risk of being displaced from their homes.

    This guide explains how the crisis occurred, what it means for foster youth, and what school staff can consider as it unfolds.

    What do foster family agencies do?

    Agencies are known for providing 24/7 support to foster families, which can include, but is not limited to:

    • Training foster families to advocate for children’s educational rights, such as establishing individualized education plans
    • Facilitating reunification visits between the foster youth and their biological family
    • Providing tutoring services
    • Providing transportation to and from extracurricular activities that the foster parent might not be able to work into their schedule
    • Supporting foster families as they become mentors for biological parents reunified with their child

    Families fostering through agencies often expect to receive a higher degree of support than a county might be able to offer.

    Why is this happening?
    Nonprofit Insurance Alliance of California previously insured 90% of foster family agencies in California, but they issued letters of nonrenewal to all of those agencies in late August.

    The company said foster family agencies are “uninsurable” because they are “being set up as scapegoats” and “held accountable for the wrongful acts of others beyond their scope of control” in cases where children are harmed.

    The nonrenewal letters came less than a year after a jury awarded $24.8 million in December to three siblings who were sexually abused in a foster home certified by a Northern California foster family agency that failed to complete many of the required screenings and assessments prior to placing children in the home.

    The nonprofit insurance alliance insured the agency and initially rejected multiple settlement offers from the three siblings. The insurer instead took the case to trial, where the jury awarded a settlement higher than the siblings’ initial offers.

    The non-renewal decision also came after recent legislation extended the statute of limitations for reporting child sexual assault and provided a three-year window for victims to sue in cases where the statute of limitations had expired. The changes also allowed for damages to be tripled in certain cases.

    Who is impacted by the insurance challenge?

    The challenge affects foster youth and families whose lives are in limbo as their agencies confront the issue, agencies that are ending services in the face of sudden increased insurance costs, counties that might be managing greater caseloads amid their own staff shortages as foster families potentially transfer under their care, and the people whose jobs might be on the line if foster cases are transferred from agencies.

    Roughly 9,000 youth out of over 41,000 total foster youth in California live with families overseen by agencies.

    They are some of the highest-needs children and teens within the foster system, said Christine Stoner-Mertz, CEO of California Alliance of Child and Family Services, which represents foster family agencies. Many are medically fragile, identify as LGBTQ+, are older and sometimes have other teenage siblings, or they have significant behavioral challenges.

    The families who foster them are burdened with uncertainty as they figure out if their agency will remain open and if their foster children will remain in their homes.

    Counties are verifying the scope of the problem, at times transferring families into the county foster system to avoid displacing children. They are checking in with local agencies to ascertain if they received a notice of non-renewal and how long their policies are in effect, said Eileen Cubanski, interim executive director of County Welfare Directors Association of California.

    But counties are rife with problems as it is, with shortages of staff and foster homes.

    Tiffany Sickler, executive director of a foster family agency called Koinonia Family Services, received a notice of non-renewal, but their policy doesn’t expire until next year.

    Even so, some of her agency’s families have transferred to counties, believing that is their only option for keeping their foster children at home.

    Agencies sustain themselves by taking on foster cases; losing a foster family leads to a reduction in revenue and caseloads. If this continues, Sickler said it could ultimately lead to staff layoffs.

    What happens to foster youth?

    Many children’s lives are expected to be disrupted, particularly those whose agencies are shuttering or losing coverage before they can transfer families to counties or another agency.

    In those cases, foster youth might be moved to placements far from their schools of origin, requiring them to transfer and lose connections they may have developed at school.

    Some may be moved to placements that allow them to remain at their school of origin, but advocates say the disruption in their home lives is likely to impact their education.

    “If you’re worried about where you’re going to sleep, how well do you show up? Even if you’re physically present, how well do you show up to learn in the classroom?” said Cubanski. “It’s those added traumas and stressors, I think, that really play a significant role in the educational trajectory of these youth.”

    Some agencies whose insurance policies ended Sept. 30 got coverage with other companies. In such cases, foster youth remain in their current homes with no disruptions. But agencies are reporting increased premiums anywhere between 30% to 400% from their previous coverage.

    “Many (agencies) are saying, ‘We don’t know exactly how we’re going to get the money, but we’re going to do this at least for a year’ in hopes that maybe there’s a broader solution that gets put in place to keep kids and families stable,” said Stoner-Mertz. “At this moment, that’s the best case scenario because people are concerned about kids’ stability on a very broad level, and certainly education is a component of that.”

    Advocates are hopeful that some relief might come their way via the state. The state’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, issued a notice in August “encouraging all property and casualty insurance companies licensed or doing business in California” to offer the coverage that agencies need, but it remains unclear how many companies have heeded the call.

    “What we need is the state to really step in to really stabilize the market,” said Stoner-Mertz, who said her organization is discussing solutions with the Department of Social Services and the Department of Insurance.

    What should educators know?

    Advocates say educators and school staff are likely unaware that foster youth may be displaced due to the insurance crisis. They suggest checking in with youth and their foster families to better understand what might be happening with their placements.

    On a larger scale, advocates are looking to build a coalition to focus on the insurance issues — and they are hoping that schools will join.

    That’s because “schools are facing this exact same problem” of insurers seeking to exit their market due to increased settlements related to child sexual abuse cases, according to Stoner-Mertz and Adrienne Shilton, vice president of public policy and strategy at the California Alliance of Child and Family Services.

    “It’s a huge issue far beyond these very niche organizations,” Stoner-Mertz said.

    The starting point would be to ensure children are not hurt, she added. If they are hurt, they should have their day in court.

    In that process, Stoner-Mertz said the challenge for a coalition would be: “How do we ensure that they’re getting their needs met and that there are systems that are not destroyed in the process that they also need?” she asked.

    Can families transfer to their local county or another agency?

    They can, but one challenge with transferring to counties is that the families certified through agencies are accustomed to a higher level of support, said Shilton.

    Additionally, agencies can work with families who live across the state, making transfers more complex than they may initially appear.

    Stoner-Mertz provided the following example: Some families have foster children from different counties. If that family transferred from an agency to a county, “then how does that get sorted out in terms of what county takes on that placement?”

    Advocates also have significant concerns about counties’ capacity to take on a currently undetermined number of youth and families.

    “It’s a big lift for some counties. … We’ve certainly heard from LA that they are not equipped to take on the number of families that could potentially end up having to be transferred,” Stoner-Mertz said.

    Advocates say staffing shortages play a role in that diminished capacity, but often, there is also a difference in philosophy.

    County child welfare programs are “very child-only focused” and agencies are family-focused, said Sickler, meaning that counties often provide services solely for children, while agencies often provide services for the entire foster family.

    “You can’t just leave the foster families kind of out in the wind and just offer services and programs to the kids that are in their home,” said Sickler, whose agency works with families across 11 California counties. “You have to support the family — I mean, if you want a successful outcome anyway.”

    Families can also transfer between agencies, a process recently streamlined by legislation.

    Assembly Bill 2496 was initially championed by the Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California. Its original text included provisions that limited the insurer’s liability, which advocates said deteriorated victims’ rights to sue.

    The bill’s text was amended at the eleventh hour, removing the provisions and instead streamlining the transfer of families between agencies by removing administrative burdens.

    The company responded to the amended bill by announcing the non-renewals and stating that “foster family agencies are being set up as scapegoats” in claims of child abuse.

    They also announced they will immediately terminate coverage, rather than non-renew, of agencies that take families from an agency utilizing the new streamlined process.

    The bill will “substantially increase the risk to California FFAs and the children they serve,” the company wrote in the announcement, stating that the bill allows for “transfers with a less-rigorous vetting process.”

    The announcement threw a wrench into an already complex series of events, advocates said. “Frankly, what has been the bigger burden has been the insurer itself,” said Cubanski.

    “They’ve asserted that the bill makes those families riskier, makes the children less safe,” she continued. “I cannot vehemently enough object to that characterization. It really is about trying to streamline some of the administrative paperwork burden — there is nothing different about the risk or the level of safety of these families.”

    A previous version of the story incorrectly noted that the non-renewal decision came after “recent judicial changes” and misquoted the insurance company regarding the agencies’ insurability. The story has been updated to reflect that the non-renewal decision came after recent legislation signed into law in 2019 and to correct the company’s statement on agencies being “uninsurable.”





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  • For former foster care students, college help exists long after exiting the system

    For former foster care students, college help exists long after exiting the system


    Deborah Vanessa Lopez, left, is a program manager that works with students formerly in the foster system at Rio Hondo College. She has worked with Faylen Bush, right, who is set to transfer out of Rio Hondo College this year.

    Credit: Faylen Bush and Deborah Vanessa Lopez

    When Faylen Bush returned to college in 2023 after being laid off from work, he planned to pursue construction management to build on the skill set he had acquired over several years in that field as a concrete carpenter and protect himself from future layoffs.

    He was married and had three young children, and he had little time to spare as he pursued a more stable future for his family. He knew that to succeed in college, he needed to remain more focused on his career goals than he was when he had been in college about a decade earlier, when he was first entering adulthood after leaving the foster system amid a cycle of housing instability and juvenile detention.

    Faylen Bush

    And so, when a program at his school, Rio Hondo College in Los Angeles County, reached out to Bush with resources for students with experience in the foster system, he paid little attention. He was unsure that the resources would apply to him at all because he was in his early thirties.

    But the program, Guardian Scholars, was persistent. They tried to reach him multiple times until he finally decided to go to their office and learn more. He learned that Guardian Scholars is a chapter-based organization across California’s college campuses that supports students who have foster care experience. It is an organization that, since its inception in 1998 at Cal State Fullerton, has sought to increase college enrollment, retention, and graduation rates among former foster youth as a pathway toward overall stability in their lives.

    “I can honestly say that stepping into the office, sitting with Deborah, and having that conversation opened up a whole world of opportunities for me,” said Bush of his first meeting with Guardian Scholars staff.

    “Deborah” is Deborah Lopez, a Guardian Scholars program manager. She and her team connect students with access to counselors who are trained to support former foster youth, grants to purchase textbooks, meal vouchers, on-campus jobs, access to conferences to further students’ professional networks, and more.

    “Our students experience a tremendous amount of trauma even if it was one day or 15 years of their life” in foster care, Lopez said. This thinking serves as the foundation for their program: They extend support to every single Rio Hondo College student with experience in the foster system, no matter when or how long their experience was.

    Bush said he is aware of the statistics he is up against given his upbringing. According to a national 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, far fewer students with experience in foster care have a bachelor’s degree — nearly 5% for men and about 9% for women, than students without foster experience, about 31% for men and close to 36% for women.

    Deborah Lopez

    These rates persist despite several studies showing that the majority of current and former foster youth report an interest in attending and graduating from college.

    But Lopez knows the statistics of the students who have received support targeted to their foster care background. For example, across the California community colleges, students are more likely to enroll in credit-bearing courses and to remain enrolled in school if they are enrolled in foster-specific support programs, according to a 2021 report from John Burton Advocates for Youth, an influential nonprofit that advocates for California’s homeless and foster youth.

    “One of the things that has worked for us as a program is consistency,” said Lopez, who has worked with the program for nearly a decade.

    While many of their students have graduated and transferred from Rio Hondo, some have needed to cut back on classes or drop out altogether. “But eventually, they come back, and we’re here,” said Lopez.

    With the support he has received, Bush has not only remained on track to transfer to a four-year university later this year — he has applied to several Cal State and University of California schools, though he is particularly interested in UCLA. His career goal has also changed in the year-and-a-half since he returned to school. He is now pursuing psychology and a career in counseling, and, while the career change might seem abrupt, it’s a return to the goals he had about a decade ago.

    Foster youth also need a blueprint

    As Bush tells it, the consistent instability throughout his childhood played a critical role in how his life unfolded as he entered adulthood.

    “The system is trying to help … and it’s providing homes, but I still feel like a necessary component is to provide that blueprint for success after you age out,” said Bush of the foster system.

    He went on to describe the blueprint that a teenager without foster experience might have: If their parents went to college, they might also attend college; if their parents were part of the workforce, they might decide to pursue a similar path after high school.

    “Someone who has experienced the foster system, they don’t have that blueprint and, sadly, the statistics show there’s a small percentage of success stories,” he added.

    He was around 10 years old when both of his parents died, leaving him and his sister in the foster system. Their maternal grandmother was near them in Lancaster, a city in northern Los Angeles County, but she was caring for her own young children plus some of her grandchildren and couldn’t take them in.

    They remained in foster placement for two years until an aunt in Louisiana reached out and requested they be placed with her.

    Thus began Bush’s experience with kinship in which a child in foster care is placed with a family member. He was living with family once again, but his life was no more stable than before.

    “I can honestly say she tried her best, but she didn’t really have the resources to fully cater to our needs. To her it was more like, OK, you guys live with me now,’ and that’s it,” Bush said. “But there was trauma that needed to be addressed. There was, for both of us, abandonment issues that needed to be addressed.”

    By the time he was 14, Bush was regularly suspended from school, eventually missing enough days to become truant and land in juvenile detention.

    “That set a course for me, going in and out of juvenile corrections,” he said. He continued getting into trouble, eventually spending over a year inside.

    Once released at 16, he returned to his aunt’s home, but he had developed resentment toward her because she had not visited him during his time inside. He learned that she continued receiving payment as he was still officially under her care, and so began a cycle of housing instability as he began to stay at friends’ homes and hotel rooms rather than sleep at his aunt’s home.

    To route the payment to himself and pay for housing, Bush figured out how to emancipate himself at 17. It’s a process that Lopez noted few of their students go through given its difficulty.

    Bush knew he had a path forward: football. After his time in juvenile detention, his football coach continued to invest in him, sending him to university training camps. But his behavior landed him in trouble again, and he was in a fight so bad during the summer going into his senior year of high school that the coach ended the relationship.

    “I would always wind up in situations where I’m in trouble. I always used to ask myself when I was in front of the principal, when I was in front of the judge, ‘Why am I here?’ said Bush, reflecting on his youth. “And then I learned over time, it’s the decisions that I’m making.”

    “Before, there were a lot of things that were happening that were out of my control,” he continued. He slowly learned there were things he had control over, such as his path toward emancipation, but without the proper, stable guidance of an adult through his upbringing, he was often unclear on how to properly use that newfound power.

    Unable to play football after the fight, he reached out to a former foster parent in California who agreed to take him in so he could start fresh in his home state.

    With his high school requirements complete, he attended Southwest College in Los Angeles, playing football for the team and eventually landing a scholarship to continue playing the sport in Oklahoma.

    He had dreams of continuing his studies in psychology, eventually earning a doctorate in the field and becoming a school counselor.

    But the pressure of supporting his family took center stage once he and his now-wife had their first child, so he declined his university scholarship. “It was such a big transition at that time, and I felt the need to support my family,” said Bush.

    From then through the fall of 2023, Bush worked odd jobs and eventually secured stable work in the construction industry as he and his wife had two more children. His return to school was prompted by his layoff, but he was also keenly aware of the harsh reality of working in such a physically demanding field.

    “The longevity for a Black carpenter isn’t that long. I have to figure out how I’m going to maneuver within this industry so that I can make it for at least 15 years,” he said of his thinking at the time.

    It wasn’t long after landing in the Guardian Scholars office that he began thinking more deeply about his goals. What began as a return to school to secure job stability in a field he’d entered solely to provide for his family has since become a path back to the goals Bush had long before he had the level of support he has found with Lopez and her team at Guardian Scholars.

    “My daughters and my son,” he said. “I feel they are the best thing out of my whole life. I’m trying to put myself in a position where I can be the best example and the best provider for them. I know now, at 33, with all my life experiences, this is what seems clearest to me.”





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  • The community college creating a home base for transition-age foster students

    The community college creating a home base for transition-age foster students


    Sky Celine Page, 20, in her subsidized home, which recently opened as part of a collaborative effort between Pasadena City College, Pasadena Community Foundation and First Place for Youth. “If I wasn’t here, and I didn’t have the opportunity to not pay rent, I probably wouldn’t be in school,” she said.

    Credit: Betty Márquez Rosales

    Sky Celine Page was not so sure that school was for her. She had spent the end of middle school ditching class and high school catching up on assignments as she moved between foster homes, and she was ready to quit college after performing poorly her first two semesters.

    “There was so much going on in my mind, and I was always so stressed out that I couldn’t just sit there and focus on schoolwork,” Page said.

    Nearly three years ago, she was couch surfing after leaving a foster home, and with nowhere to sleep consistently, school was placed on the back burner.

    Page is one of Los Angeles County’s transition-age youth — a term used to describe young adults aging out of the foster system. About 1,000 young people, 18 to 24 years old, age out in L.A. County each year, according to a 2024 report from the California Policy Lab. The same report also found that, in Los Angeles County, about 500 housing slots, including 206 housing vouchers, are available at any given time for youth who are no longer in care and have a closed case with the Department of Family and Child Services. This availability is likely insufficient to meet housing needs, and it doesn’t account for the challenges with accessing such resources, such as the difficulty of navigating complex public agencies.

    Studies have shown that transition-age foster youth have a higher risk of homelessness, but there is no reliable count of how many currently are. Housing instability, which at times includes changing schools often, disrupts relationships that students may form with classmates and educators, all of which has been linked to negative impacts on test scores and high school graduation rates, according to multiple studies, including a 2015 brief from the National Education Policy Center.

    A collaboration between Pasadena City College, Pasadena Community Foundation and First Place for Youth, an organization that supports successful transition of foster youth to adulthood, is providing housing to transition-age foster youth like Page, 20, who now lives in one of their units.

    A six-unit rent-subsidized apartment complex near Pasadena City College, where Page is now a student, opened last August. Ten additional units are being built next door.

    “Many of our students were going from group home to group home, carrying their stuff in a trash bag,” said David Sigala Gomez, educational adviser at the college’s program for students with experience in foster care, who provides case management to Page and her neighbors. “A lot of our students didn’t have much because they were moving around so much. So having the means to now buy new clothes, wear new shoes, it just brings a whole different perspective.”

    Page’s new, fully-furnished studio apartment is decorated in various shades of pink, with books and school supplies spilling out of her desk that doubles as the dining table where she enjoys journaling. She lives a short drive from her college campus, where she will soon earn an associate degree in health sciences as she pursues nursing.

    Page is finally stable and, as she put it, she is healing. Her life now is a paradigm shift from her life just a few years ago, when she was 18 and couch surfing. It is even further from her life at 14 when she first entered the foster system.

    ‘If I wasn’t here … I probably wouldn’t be in school’

    Page was 6 when her mother died. She and her brother were sent to Palmdale in northern Los Angeles County to live with their father and stepmother, whom Page described as “a horrific person.”

    Page tried to ignore both how her stepmother would lash out and make inappropriate comments about her and the silence from her father, who most often “turned the other cheek” during arguments, she said.

    At 14, Page hit a breaking point. She was in school, but would ditch class often and walk the hallways “trying to make sense of everything that was going on” at home. She made the decision to open up about her disruptive home life to a teacher, who called the Department of Family and Child Services.

    “After that, I never went back home,” Page said.

    A series of short-term placements later, she was living in a foster home in the Pasadena area, the city where she still lives. She struggled with the transition into foster care and with every move from one placement to another.

    “I look at that time and my heart was so broken … because I didn’t understand. I felt like I was being punished; I was trying to get help and now I’m around all these people I don’t know,” Page said. “I just didn’t realize at that time that it would be for the better, but it was hard. It was definitely a hard transition.”

    The constant moves also weighed on her academically.

    It’s an experience that Sigala Gomez, the educational adviser at Pasadena City College, noted is common among foster students. “I have really high-functioning students; their goal is a master’s degree, I have students who struggle just because of instabilities, moving from different schools,” he said, referring to the students he supports through the Next Up and STARS programs, both for foster youth. “For them, we really have to break it down: ‘Hey, you went to class two weeks in a row. That’s success. That’s a goal.’”

    Page enrolled in high school but felt self-conscious about how often she moved and because she “didn’t have the nicest things,” she said. So, she opted to enroll in Pasadena Unified School District’s virtual academy.

    It was there that she developed an interest in the sciences after completing an internship with the Huntington Medical Research Institute. When she fell behind on assignments in school, her teachers allowed her to catch up by turning in items late.

    Despite the disruptions to her education, Page knew she wanted to graduate from high school. She was aware of the stigma that some foster youth feel when they are unable to complete high school, and she was determined to avoid giving “anybody more of a reason to make them think that I was uneducated,” she said.

    It was around this time that she could no longer stay at the foster home where she had been living, so she put her items into a storage unit, and for the next half-year, couch surfed and worked two jobs.

    The social worker she was assigned to didn’t appear to understand that she needed help urgently, Page said, so Page reported her — the first time she had taken such an action.

    The next social worker quickly connected Page with First Place for Youth, an organization that seeks to break cycles of poverty among young adults aging out of foster care by providing housing.

    Page was housed in Alhambra within weeks of making that connection. By this time, it was the fall of 2022. She decided to continue her studies, leaning on her love of learning that she couldn’t tap into for so many years. She struggled, but still enjoyed learning. The commute to Pasadena City College wasn’t helping, especially using public transportation.

    She was unaware at the time that the same organization that had housed her was working on a collaboration to convert existing structures into housing near her campus.

    The effort included an initial $2 million housing loan agreement with Heritage Housing Partners, the project developer, approved by the City Council’s finance committee in 2022, upped to nearly $2.4 million in 2023, plus $200,000 from the Pasadena Community Foundation and $10,000 from California Community Foundation.

    The conversion was completed in August 2024, with First Place for Youth and Pasadena City College providing case management. The college also subsidizes the rent cost via Lancer Care, which is their basic-needs department, in conjunction with Extended Opportunity Programs & Services’ foster programs. The amount subsidized is $1,000 per unit, per month, said Sigala Gomez, and students must be transition-age nonminor dependents to qualify for a unit.

    Since moving into her new apartment, Page is feeling more confident, her grades have improved, and she now has the freedom to reflect on her childhood.

    “I’ve lived double the life experience,” said Page, contrasting herself with the average 20-year-old. “I’m figuring out, ‘OK, this is what 20-year-olds do. This is normal … this was not normal … this is part of my trauma.”

    Page has spent the past two years adjusting to life on her terms. She sees her current housing as her chance at being able to focus solely on school without the burden of unstable housing or the high cost of living in her neighborhood. And that was precisely the point of these housing units, Sigala Gomez said.

    With rent, utilities and most school costs covered, Page and her new neighbors have just one primary task: focusing on themselves as they enter adulthood.

    “It allows me to go to school without having to worry and stress about cost,” said Page of her housing. “If I wasn’t here, and I didn’t have the opportunity to not pay rent, I probably wouldn’t be in school.”





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  • After the fire: Former foster youth attributes recovery to unconditional support

    After the fire: Former foster youth attributes recovery to unconditional support


    Wildfire smoke fills the air over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles.

    Credit: AP Photo / Etienne Laurent

    Before the Eaton fire this January, Alexander Ballantyne lived in Altadena, just a few minutes away from his Pasadena City College campus.

    That all changed on Jan. 7 when the fire reached the home he’d lived in the past three years with his aunt and uncle, forcing them to quickly evacuate. He left with only the clothes he was wearing and the school backpack he had left in his car.

    The home burned down later that day, and he was suddenly homeless, a situation he’d been in just a few years prior.

    Among the people who lost their homes, livelihoods, and lives in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles early this year is a subset of young people who are in the foster care system and already knew the trauma of losing a home.

    Ballantyne’s recovery from the devastation of the fire has not been easy, but it has been remarkably quick, a feat that highlights how imperative it is to pair stable housing with consistent, individualized support.

    “I had stable housing with my legal guardians (in high school) and I had stable housing with my aunt. If it was just the stability, theoretically, I should have gotten through all of high school amazingly, flying colors,” he said. “I think it’s more so the type of support you get — you know it’s unconditional.”

    Ballantyne, 25, was in the final stretch of transfer applications as the Eaton fire started. He was preparing the supplemental application for UC Berkeley’s business school, a highly competitive program. Less than 24 hours after it became available, however, he was fleeing from his family’s home, pushing finishing the application down his list of priorities.

    Alex Ballantyne is a student at Pasadena City College, where he’s finishing his last semester before transferring to a four-year university.

    “I almost felt like I was in my element, in the sense that it really wasn’t the first time I had nothing,” Ballantyne said in a recent interview. “And even though I say it feels pretty similar to how it was when I was homeless at 18, just having the support of my family … I feel like I landed on my feet.”

    As soon as his friends and network found out that he had lost his home, they stepped in to help him rebuild. A friend started a GoFundMe donation page for him, and it quickly reached its goal. One Simple Wish — an organization that directly funds any need or want a foster youth might have — crowdfunded additional money to replace the school and office supplies he’d lost.

    This quick support came from networks that Ballantyne had built over the years. He’s been part of organizations like First Star, a college readiness program for foster youth, where he met people like the founder of Jenni’s Flower, an LA-based organization that organizes events to empower foster youth. He is part of the foster youth programs at Pasadena City College, and he’s on the board of two nonprofits.

    What mattered to Ballantyne, more than anything else, was that the support he received came with no strings attached and from people he knew truly cared for him.

    “It’s really not the money that will get a foster kid through school or training or whatever they want to do,” Ballantyne said. “It’s the support, it’s the human connection, and it’s the feeling like they have somebody to lean on. That’s the most important part.”

    In the months since the fires, One Simple Wish has provided thousands in funding to 12 foster youth in Los Angeles alone, including Ballantyne.

    “Especially for minor children moving through the system, there’s not a lot of choice. You don’t often get to choose the neighborhood or the church you go to, the school you go to, the friendships that you can or can’t maintain, whether or not you get to stay with siblings; there’s just so much choice already being removed,” said Danielle Gletow, founder of One Simple Wish.

    Her organization’s mission is to fill the gaps that other groups might leave: Instead of asking someone if they need a backpack, her team leaves the question open-ended, asking, “What would you like to put your belongings in?”

    “Our goal is to just make sure that … what an individual needs in a time of crisis or challenging times, we put that power back in their hands,” said Gletow, who said the majority of funds come in as donations from supporters across the country.

    Ballantyne knows that lack of choice firsthand. He entered the foster system during middle school after an unstable childhood, andmoved through four placements during his freshman year of high school, before being placed with a family who became his legal guardians until the age of 18. He said that despite having housing stability through most of high school, he earned a 2.9 GPA.

    Today, weeks after his home burned down along with all of his belongings, coupled with the stress of waiting to hear back from colleges he applied to as he finishes his spring semester, he has maintained a 3.6 GPA.

    It’s all in the support

    At 18, shortly after graduating from high school, Ballantyne said he was kicked out of his foster home of three years and was homeless, couch surfing and working four jobs to get by, until he landed in transitional housing.

    He enrolled in community college shortly after, but left before the semester was over, right as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting. He fell into a deep, long-lasting depression, and for the next three years, he spent most days playing video games, drinking, smoking weed and taking pills, he said.

    His “wake-up call,” as he calls it, came in March 2021, when he received a text notifying him his grandmother was dying in the hospital. “I just remember feeling so helpless. I didn’t have the money to get an Uber to go see her,” he said. “I didn’t drive. I was doing nothing with myself.”

    Ballantyne’s grandmother had been like his mother, he said, and she’d just died in the same hospital he’d been born in about two decades earlier. She was his champion, always reminding him how much she loved him.

    While in the foster system, he had been estranged from his family for years, but as he helped his aunt prepare his grandmother’s home for sale, he told her about his living condition.

    It was around this time that Ballantyne’s life started turning around. His decision to get a job at a Best Buy “changed everything.” He initially wanted the job just for the discounts on video games, but he came away with companionship, which he needed after having been isolated in his depression for years.

    His aunt soon invited him to move in with her rent-free as long as he worked or attended school full-time and helped out around the house. He grabbed the opportunity and enrolled at Pasadena City College, where he is now just months from transferring to a four-year college.

    He learned what it was like to receive unconditional support when he moved in with his biological family as an adult.

    “I don’t think I was ever dumb,” he said, referring to the many years in which he didn’t excel academically. “I just don’t think I ever was in a situation where I truly, 100% felt comfortable and secure with where I was at.”

    Ballantyne is currently living in Burbank, renting a room in a classmate’s apartment, while his uncle and aunt are staying with family farther north in Los Angeles County.

    He’ll be there through the end of the summer, at which point he’ll be moving to whichever university he chooses among the four that accepted him so far. His rent is paid through August, thanks to the funding he received after the fires.

    The network of friends and resources that stepped up to support Ballantyne is there for all other foster youth, both he and Gletow emphasized.

    “We really do stress the importance of making connections wherever you can because it will matter as you get older. And as you become an adult, you have less and less of a network or safety net,” said Gletow, whose organization also has an educational wish fund where school staff can submit requests for flexible funding to use as needed.

    Ballantyne did eventually submit his supplemental application to UC Berkeley’s business school on time when he was sheltering at a family member’s home. The application had a video component requiring applicants to record themselves answering prompt questions, but the desk in the room he was staying in was inside a closet — not an ideal setting for such an important video.

    But Ballantyne knew he had everything he needed, including a newly replaced laptop, thanks to his friends and network, so he hit the record button and got to work making his goals a reality.





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  • Districts should target funds to foster youth to improve progress, report says

    Districts should target funds to foster youth to improve progress, report says


    As California expands services needed to grow the number of foster youth enrolling in college, more work is needed to help those students graduate.

    Julie Leopo/ EdSource

    California’s foster care students have improved their high school graduation rates since 2013, but have barely improved, or even lost ground, in rates of suspension, attendance and prompt college enrollment, according to a new report.

    And, in the 10 districts with the most foster students, only a fraction of 1% of the targeted money was directly spent on that group. The report, by WestEd, a nonpartisan education research agency, attributed the discrepancy to a disconnect between the administrators who drew up the spending plans and the staff who work directly with students, the report found.

    Published this week and titled “Revisiting Californiaʼs Invisible Achievement Gap: Trends in Education Outcomes of Students in Foster Care in the Context of the Local Control Funding Formula,” the report details how state policies have affected outcomes for foster youth over the past decade, at times positively, but often in ways that limit their ability to succeed.

    The authors conclude that while those changes facilitate school stabilization and other educational supports, challenges remain, including ensuring that planned school expenditures dedicate some funds to foster students’ unique needs.

    “The report suggests that the implementation of foster care supports remains difficult and that funding for tailored interventions to the unique situations and challenges of students in foster care is not yet a common rule even for districts with large numbers of students in foster care,” said Vanessa Ximenes Barrat, WestEd senior research associate and co-author of the report.

    Tailoring support to specific student populations

    The report’s authors noted that tailoring support to each student group is critical given their varying needs.

    For instance, in the school year immediately preceding the pandemic, which erupted in March 2020, foster students’ chronic absenteeism rate was 28% versus 12% for the overall student population across California. The rates sharply rose during the pandemic and have since steadily decreased. But data from 2022-23, the most recent school year included in the report, shows that discrepancies remain: 25% of all students were chronically absent versus 39% of foster students.

    The wide gaps indicate to school staff that foster youth might need stronger interventions than other student groups in addressing why they are missing so much instructional time.

    Similarly, suspension data shows continuing disparities, despite policy changes in recent years. Whereas suspension rates for all students have largely lingered between 3% and 4% since 2014-15 and through the pandemic, the rate for foster youth was between 13% and 15%.

    “All the things that make students in foster care have all the worst outcomes across the board — their instability, their trauma, etc. — means that they need more of the interventions than everyone else, and they need different interventions based on their unique needs,” said a child welfare and education professional who was interviewed for the report.

    Improved graduation rates, but concerns remain

    One area where foster students have slowly made strides is with graduation rates. Rates have steadily increased for high-needs students, including foster youth, since the 2016-17 school year. That year, 51% of foster students graduated from high school in four years. By 2022-23, 61% were graduating.

    A possible reason for the improvement, according to the report’s authors, is the passage in 2013 of Assembly Bill 216 which allowed some foster students to graduate after completing the state’s minimum requirements.

    School staff who were interviewed for the report said that the law prevented some students from dropping out as they were moved from one placement to another, and encouraged them to complete high school even if they had fallen behind in some courses.

    Other staff noted that the extension of foster care services to age 21 occurred during the same period in which graduation rates improved. The extension, they said, probably prevented students from leaving school because they were receiving added support to avert homelessness and other instabilities common among youth leaving foster care.

    But even with that improvement, school staff interviewed for this report saw areas of concern. Of those foster students who graduated, for example, less than one-fifth had completed the A-G coursework required to qualify for admission to one of the state’s public four-year universities.

    Other takeaways from the report include:

    • While dropout rates among foster youth remain higher than their peers’, they have lowered by 5 percentage points since 2016-17.
    • More foster youth are attending only one school each year, rather than moving between schools, which advocates say causes personal and academic instability — 66% in 2022-23, up from 62% in 2017-18.
    • More foster students are attending high-poverty schools — up from 56% in 2014-15 to 59% in 2022-23.

    As California’s general student population has dwindled, so has the state’s foster student population. State data shows that nearly 45,000 foster students were enrolled in the K-12 grades during the 2014-15 school year on census day, the first Wednesday in October. Eight years later, the state enrolled about 31,700 foster students.

    About a quarter of the state’s foster care students attend school across just 10 districts: Los Angeles Unified, Fresno Unified, Lancaster Elementary, Long Beach Unified, Antelope Valley Union High, Palmdale Elementary, San Bernardino City Unified, Moreno Valley Unified, Kern High, and Hesperia Unified.

    Local-control dollars rarely targeted solely to foster students

    The dip in enrollment of foster students in K-12 coincided with the state’s overhaul of the school finance system and the implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula, commonly referred to as LCFF. One of the changes under LCFF was that districts receive supplemental grants based on the number of high-needs students, which includes foster youth, English learners and low-income students.

    Each district must also complete a Local Control Accountability Plan, known as an LCAP, and provide details on how it intends to help students succeed, including actions and expenditures related to the three groups of high-needs students.

    Equity across the state’s student population was part of the intent of implementing LCFF.

    But the report showed that of WestEd’s review of the 10 LCAPs, only 10 of 482 anticipated actions to support overall student populations were specific to foster students. Over half of the actions referenced foster students in some way, but mostly lumped all high-needs students together.

    Foster youth, for example, have alarmingly high rates of chronic absences and increased school mobility. If a service offered by a school requires students to be present in class, foster students may not always benefit; they might instead need greater access to transportation to help them travel to school regularly.

    The question of whether to target more funds specifically to each student group, rather than combining them, persists, given changes at the federal Department of Education and how they may impact foster students.

    Ximenes Barrat said, “As a relatively small and highly vulnerable population with distinct needs, there is a real risk that their concerns could be overlooked amid broader policy shifts.”

    WestEd CEO Jannelle Kubinec is president of the EdSource Board of Directors. EdSource’s editorial team maintains sole editorial control over the content of its coverage.





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