For my first update, I wanted to talk about education and its role to children who are in foster care. This update is coming from a personal perspective, as my professional life revolves around every single complexity that stems from being in the foster care system in Illinois (and nationwide). It is incredibly difficult to not get heavily involved in the lives of these children and I never realized the enourmous role that education can have in the life of a child whose life outside of school in turned inside out and unside down.

The educational statistics surrounding children who are in foster care are troubling. When a childs life is completely unstable, school NEEDS to be consistant. It NEEDS to be a space place where the child can express his or herself and it NEEDS to be a place where the teachers/staff/social worker are all involved in the child's day to day learning expiereince.

The material differences will be the focal point for this update, though many other differences can be elaborated on here as well. Children in foster care are overwhelmingly from lower class families. Mix that with an unstable nuclear family, poverty, addiction, lack of community resources, and patterns of abuse, and you've got, for lack of a better expression, the face of our child welfare system nationwide. The implications that the above mentioned attributes have on a child and the way they learn is EVERYTHING. ALL of these factors influence the way he or she learns and everything, I believe, can be traced back to their home life - with the expection of physical or mental abilities that require a different kind of attention.

Take a look at the visual graphics below:

I have a kid who I love to brag about. He was 14 when I met him and had every single odd against him. He was a victim of incredibly horrific physical and sexual abuse. He was neglected medically which led to a brain bleed that required a tube to be placed into the base of his brain. He has a learning disability. He was exposed to drugs. He was a kid in 'modern day slavery.' He was diagnosed with PTSD. He was in 8 different schools in one year. Add all those things up and you quickly realize all the odds are against you. The reason I bring up this particular kid is because it was incredibly important for me that I follow his education very, very closely. I did this as well with my other kids, but he was different. He was my very first kid on my caseload and I couldnt help but make sure he had the best learning experience possible.

That 14 year old kid is now a proud freshman at a major university, heavily involved in their ROTC program, and turning 20 tomorrow. Sometimes I tell him, "do you know that only 2% of kids in foster care go on to get their bachelors degree?" His smile and the nod of his head made all the school check ins worth it. Even when I first began working with him when I was only 22, I understood the importance of the DIFFERENCE a positive learning enviornment can have on a kid. School became his safe place - and it saved his life.