foster

Mike Jones, center, a resource teacher in the Elk Grove Unified School District, talks to foster youth. Credit: Kathryn Baron, EdSource Today

Shuffled from dwelling house to home and schoolhouse to schoolhouse, often with no ane to turn to for guidance and support, foster youth can finish up feeling isolated, alienated and without purpose. A simple simply effective plan at Elk Grove Unified is helping to restore a sense of normalcy and stability to the lives of foster students, assuasive them to connect to their schoolhouse and customs.

The abstraction of commune resource teacher Mike Jones, the programme brings together all the foster youth at a loftier school for a weekly "advocacy" class where the students can back up each other and develop a feeling of family and a want to succeed.

On one spring morn at the advocacy class at Monterey Trail Loftier School, Jones leaned on a bookcase, relaxed and joking with the students. He started the form by request 1 boy, "What's your waist size?" The boy didn't know. "How tall are you? What's your pants size?"

Jones was sizing up the youth so he could find the right tuxedo for him to clothing to the senior ball. He so asked for a show of hands of the girls who needed their pilus and nails washed – provided for gratis by customs volunteers. It seemed like about every senior and some younger students were planning to get to the dance, with some students in the form going with each other, emphasizing how tight-knit the grouping has become.

1 measure of success for Jones is that normalcy – how many kids volition go to the prom or sporting events or participate in other later on-school activities.

"Since the advocacy program began, we've seen a tremendous increase in extracurricular participation, wanting to be part of the school, part of the community," Jones said.

That fear, that abiding knowledge that at whatever given moment everything that they've tried to build up for themselves could exist ripped away – that plays heavily into how a kid acts at school." – Mike Jones, Elk Grove Unified Resource Teacher

Frequently foster youth modify homes and schools far besides frequently, Jones said. "Students can cease up in five or 10 unlike schools by the time they're in 7th course. That mobility plays into low graduation rates, low course bespeak averages, and higher expulsions and suspensions."

Nationally, simply 45 percent of children in foster care graduate from high school, co-ordinate to a 2012 report past the California Section of Educational activity.

"That fear, that constant knowledge that at whatsoever given moment everything that they've tried to build up for themselves could be ripped abroad – that plays heavily into how a child acts at school," Jones said. "For this population, a lot of times information technology'south easier to surrender than bargain with one more disappointment."

'I've grown'

Ella, an approachable, confident eighteen-twelvemonth-sometime, is a prime instance of the bear upon the program can have on students. She entered foster intendance at age 5 because, she said, her younger sister was born addicted to drugs, and the children were taken away from their parents. (By police force and for their own protection, foster students cannot requite their full names unless they are 18 or over and are emancipated – legally responsible for themselves.)

Although at first she didn't take the advocacy class seriously, Ella, now in her senior twelvemonth at Monterey Trail, has get a role model for the other foster students. She has joined California Youth Connexion, which writes and promotes legislation to aid foster youth. She has given speeches on foster youth issues and has lobbied legislators in Sacramento.

"I never idea I would make it this far," she said. "I've grown through this advocacy with Mike Jones."

Jones started the program at Laguna Creek Loftier School five years ago. Now in 5 of Elk Grove'due south nine comprehensive high schools, the advocacy form gives foster students a hazard to build friendships and discuss bug that are unique to them. A teacher or ambassador who acts equally the school's foster youth adviser leads the class and also makes sure students have what they need to fully participate in high schoolhouse: Practice students have formal clothes for the prom, for instance, or student activeness cards for high school athletic events, which foster children are frequently unable to afford.

"If we need something, they're always there," one freshman at Monterey Trail said about the adults involved in the advancement course, such as Jones, the principal, the vice main and the librarian, who brings homemade cookies in one case a month for the kids.

"A lot of people, they'll guess yous," he said. "Simply in hither, they understand what you lot're going through."

What they have gone through is often difficult to hear.

A slight, shy teenage girl says she ended up in foster care after she turned in her stepfather for sexually abusing her and her younger sis even though he had threatened to kill her if she reported him.

"My sister was so young. She was simply 6 years sometime," she said, pausing to gain control of her feelings. "I couldn't protect myself, and I couldn't protect her and my brother. I was eating myself upwardly, blaming myself considering I couldn't protect them."

The stepfather is in prison, and she was separated from her siblings, the girl said. Struggling with the loss of her family, the teenager began to human action out and constantly got into fights with other students at her last high school.

Her foster mother applied for her to transfer to Monterey Trail. "In one case I got here I was like, 'Oh, I'm non alone,'" she said. "And so information technology made me feel good that I had someone to talk to if I needed to." The girl now has a 3.0 GPA and plans to study medical assisting in higher.

"I don't want what happened to me to define my future," she said. "I don't want to exist that girl I used to be. I desire to make my siblings proud. I want to make myself proud."

Providing a stable environment

Jones works with the youth and their social workers to ensure students tin can stay in their schoolhouse, which is their legal correct, even if their foster family moves or changes.

"Knowing the transience of the population, I actually desire to keep the freshmen here for four years," said David Byrd, chief of Monterey Trail. "If they are here longer and we can provide some stability, they have a shot at college, career and beyond."

Dissimilar many other districts, Elk Grove has been proactive in its efforts to place and rails its students in foster care. Many districts accept no idea how many foster children they have, and are fifty-fifty less aware of how well they are doing. Of the country's 6.2 million students, simply about 42,000 are in foster care, making up a small percentage of students in any one district. Gov. Jerry Brown's budget proposal, if passed, would for the first fourth dimension require districts to go along rails of the academic performance of students in foster care, and would hold schools accountable for their progress. Districts might well look to Elk Grove for inspiration.

Since introducing the foster advancement classes and making efforts to work more than closely with foster kids' social workers and attorneys, Elk Grove "has cut our suspensions of foster youth exponentially," Jones said.

Located in southern Sacramento County, Elk Grove serves more than 62,000 students, including almost 500 foster children each year. In 2009-10, the commune issued suspensions to 1,504 foster youth, an boilerplate of about iii suspensions for each foster child. (Students who are suspended multiple times are counted as multiple suspensions.) After instituting the foster advocacy classes and the other measures, the number of suspensions fell to 464 in 2010-xi – a 69 percentage plunge. The subtract has continued, with 362 suspensions in 2011-12.

Principal Byrd said the program was easy to implement in his school because there already was a half hour each Thursday set up aside for advocacy classes for all students. Elk Grove high school students attend advocacy class by grade level, so they can larn what they demand to know during each twelvemonth of high school, such equally how to write college essays for juniors.

The foster advancement course includes all grade levels. Foster students can bring together if they want, simply they can too get to their regular advocacy class. The vast bulk cull the foster advocacy class.

The older students help the younger ones, who also witness what foster youth must practise when they become emancipated. They can run across that doing well in schoolhouse will give them more possibilities, Jones said.

The class "builds within the kids a level of self-respect and self-confidence," he said. "They can sit down every week and know that they have this family."

A special report on this program by EdSource Today senior reporter Kathryn Baron was featured on The California Report on KQED.

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