The Hutchinson Correctional Facility in Kansas.

  * * *

In the American foster care narrative, prison is where the story leads for many kids like Williamson

  * * *

Roughly 23,000 kids across the country are churned out of the system every year, and their lives highlight a distinct path traveled by many:

• Taken from an unstable home.
• Terrified by their first contact with the state.
• Emotionally and cognitively damaged in care
  as they are moved from home to home.
• Robbed of an education equal to their peers.
• Turned out to the streets
  unprepared to stand on their own.
• And changed for life.

* * *

“We are sending more foster kids to prison than college,” said Brent Kent, who spent the past 3½ years helping Indiana foster children transition into adulthood. “And what do we lose as a result? Generations of young people.

“I think as a society we view foster children the same way that we might view offenders coming out of prison or addicts in recovery. We forget that they are just children, that they were put in foster care and removed from their families through no fault of their own.”

* * *

As part of its investigation, The Star surveyed nearly 6,000 inmates in 12 states — representing every region of the country — to determine how many had been in foster care and what effect it had on their lives.

Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care.

Some spent the majority of their childhood in strangers’ homes, racking up more placements than birthdays.

The Star's survey results “make it clear that fumbling foster care has dire consequences,” said Kevin Smith, a district judge who handles family court cases in the Wichita, Kansas, area. “So many of society’s problems are directly linked to foster care outcomes, it is shocking.”

* * *

The investigation found:

• Most states spend a fraction of their budget dollars on family preservation efforts, even though more kids are removed for neglect than abuse.

  Most of the $30 billion spent on child welfare annually is funneled into foster care or adoption services, despite a 40-year-old federal man that prioritizes family preservation. More dollars are spent on investigating families than on trying to keep them together.

• Emerging science... suggests multiple foster care placements can actually harm a child’s brain.
  Some kids are moved dozens of times — a few as many as 100 times — over several years.
  Foster children are diagnosed with PTSD at a rate greater than Iraq war veterans.

• Foster children are failed in the classroom, the least successful of “special population groups” in high schools, (including homeless students and those with disabilities).
  In Oregon, alone, [in 2017],
  just 35 percent of foster kids earned a high school diploma
  compared to more than 77 percent of their peers.
  As for college, fewer than 3 percent across the country will get a bachelor’s degree.

• More than 4,000 former foster care kids every year end up homeless after leaving the system, a conveyor belt that deposits some into sex trafficking and drug addiction. Within four years of aging out, the homeless number doubles in some parts of the country. One center for homeless youth in Indiana reported that nearly 70 percent of the young people it has served so far this year had spent time in foster care, a 36 percent increase over last year.

• Completing the cycle, many come back into the state’s care as adults -- this time as inmates. Said one convicted murderer from Texas death row: “The state that neglected me as a kid, and allowed me to age out of its support, is the same state that wants to kill me.”

  * * *

The dysfunction of America’s foster care system goes back decades, but the situation has become more dire in recent years, The Star found.

More states are under fire and facing lawsuits for how they treat foster children as the number of kids in care has grown. In 2017, 443,000 U.S. children were in foster care, a 12 percent increase from 2012.

Several states — including Indiana and West Virginia — have seen significant surges, some blaming the rise of adult opioid addiction. The rate of kids in Kentucky foster care has hit an all-time high, according to a report released last month. That has created a shortage of suitable foster homes.

* * *

Jess McDonald took over Illinois’ child welfare system in the mid-1990s and was credited with turning around the troubled agency in his nine-year tenure.

The state, however, has since returned to high-level dysfunction, including a recent case in which foster kids were being transported in handcuffs and leg shackles — a practice that has now been prohibited by the agency.

  * * *

No doubt, some kids do OK in foster care. Thrive even.

But for many, the experience only adds to the trauma they have suffered.

The majority of inmates who wrote messages on their surveys, or who spoke with The Star, said being in the system, and aging out with few skills or support, changed them forever. Those changes made the transition to crime easy.

  * * *

...an Arizona inmate wrote... “I believe it directed me more towards the prison/jail system than setting me up for success. … I would give absolutely anything to take a correct step in life, to get help, really anything to get my life right, but I’m still digging myself out of this state-raised pit that I am in.”

Another Arizona inmate was in foster care for 14 years. He was moved more than 100 times.

  * * *

FROM FOSTER CARE TO PRISON:

Texas lawmakers recognized the existence of a possible foster-care-to-prison pipeline several years ago.

That’s when they passed a law requiring that offenders be asked during the intake process whether they had ever been in foster care.

The bill’s sponsor said many [foster] children “have experienced significant trauma, including violence, neglect, abuse, threats, humiliation and deprivation.”

Not only do most states fail to track that information, many refused to allow The Star to distribute its survey in their prisons.

In the past year, The Star contacted every state requesting their participation in the survey.

The first to sign on was Kansas, a state whose child welfare agency has been under siege for years and where many young people like Williamson struggle in care, then age out alone. Wardens in all eight prisons distributed the survey, and the state [of Kansas] ended up having the largest number of inmates participate -- with nearly 1,200.

“I think it brings strong value,” said Laura Howard, secretary of Kansas’ Department for Children and Families, who has recently started programs to focus on older youth and keeping families together. “We can learn from this.”

Of the 1,174 responses in [Kansas], 382 inmates said they had been in foster care. That’s 1 in 3, which is among the highest percentages of the states that participated.

  * * *

[THE BUREAUCRAT'S RESPONSE:]

The results, for Kansas and the 12 states overall, show the trauma kids suffer when coming into care, and [show] the need to emphasize “trauma-informed services,” said [Ms.] Howard, [Kansas] DCF’s third leader in as many years.

“I don’t sit here and say, ‘Gosh, that’s a failure of the child welfare system,’” she said. “I think what that tells me is as a society, a state, community, we need to do a better job of wrapping services around vulnerable youth.”

* * *

[Hutchinson prison inmate] Williamson was one of the Kansas inmates to complete a survey.

“I was thrown out into the world with nothing at 18 and was homeless,” he wrote. “So I did what I had to do to provide for myself and make do. Ended up with 6 felony charges at 18 years old.”

  * * *

Overall, 5,889 inmates [nationwide] responded to The Star’s confidential survey.

Of those, 1,446 -- [(1 out of every 4)] -- said they had been in foster care.

While the results are not scientific, experts who reviewed them said they offered rare insight into the backgrounds and challenges of former foster children who end up behind bars.

Of the inmates who responded:

• 54 % ... said they had been convicted of a juvenile crime when they were younger.
• Nearly 60 % said they had experienced homelessness.
• Only 16 % said they earned a high school diploma,
  and another 29 % said they had gotten their GED.

* * *

A female inmate in Kansas said she was in 21 different homes in her six years in foster care, and was told “how worthless I was and no one would ever love me.”

“I moved homes every two weeks with hope the next home would be better and I would be loved just for who I was. But my hopes were always crushed.”

* * *

Clark Peters, a professor of social work at the University of Missouri, said the survey results are alarming. And show that the country has to do better to help the kids it vowed to protect.

“We knew their parents failed them, and we didn’t do any better,” Peters said. “We have failed as parents.”

  * * *

Kisa Van Dyne, 32, served five years at the Topeka Correctional Facility (Kansas’ only prison for women). She was one of the more than 400 inmates who completed the survey at that facility.
Of that group, 39 percent said they had been in foster care.

In a prison interview, Van Dyne said her time in foster care changed her.

“I have always felt like a throwaway, like I am unworthy of the effort to be loved. I felt like just a number in the system, and as if I was disposable,” she said. “Due to that, I learned early on how to be completely indifferent to others. ... I learned how to not care.

“I learned how to make sure that the only person I ever needed to rely on was myself and that I could never trust anyone to care enough about me to take care of me.”

  * * *

LAWSUITS TARGET STATE SYSTEMS
  ACROSS THE U.S.:

The extent of the foster care crisis can be measured in court records across the nation. Since the 1980s, nearly three dozen states have faced lawsuits asserting that they were further harming children they were supposed to protect.

“Once children enter government custody it is difficult for them to escape without being further damaged by their stay in state custody,” said a suit filed in Wisconsin more than 25 years ago.

In the past two years alone, at least five states have been sued.

The Star reviewed four decades of lawsuits and found some states are being sued today for the same issues that plagued other systems 15 to 20 years ago.

Lawsuits, and the combination of nonprofit legal child advocates and private law firms, are the only voices these foster children have.

“Look who the plaintiffs are — highly vulnerable kids in government custody,” said Ira Lustbader, an attorney who has traveled to more than a dozen states [including Kansas] in the past 20 years to represent children. “They are poor, they don’t vote, they don’t have all the powerful interest groups.

“I certainly didn’t realize how deep the structural problems were and how devastating they can be to both children and families. Once you see that, you can’t look away, you have to keep fighting it.”

* * *

This fall, a lawsuit filed on behalf of 12 West Virginia foster children said the state’s child welfare agency was in “a perpetual state of crisis” trying to find placements for kids.

The suit detailed roughly a dozen systemic breakdowns, leading to kids... being abused, overmedicated and moved multiple times, including to institutional and hospital settings.

* * *

At least eight suits, including one filed in Kansas last year, allege that multiple placements are causing children further harm.

A 10-year-old Kansas boy, known only as C.A. in court records, had been in DCF custody for six years. During that period, he was passed around 70 times between foster homes, group homes and agency offices, according to the suit.

In 2018 alone, C.A. suffered through three months of continuous night-to-night stays that contributed to the disruption of his treatment for Attention Deficit Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the lawsuit alleged.

The litigation states that the plaintiff children have been moved 10 to more than 100 times while in state custody.

In their April 29 response to the original complaint, the defendants denied that they had caused injury to any of the plaintiffs.

“Plaintiffs have suffered no actual injury as a result of the actions or inactions of Defendants,” the document said. It added that “Plaintiffs’ own conduct was a contributing cause of injury alleged by Plaintiffs.”

  * * *

In Rhode Island, two brothers were kept in institutions simply because the state had nowhere else to put them, according to a lawsuit filed in 2007. The brothers, ages 9 and 13, were among 10 children named in the suit filed against state officials and Rhode Island’s child welfare agency.

“Abuse and neglect of children in foster care in Rhode Island has been so pervasive,” the lawsuit said, “that children in Rhode Island are more likely to suffer abuse or neglect if they are in foster care than if they are not.”

* * *

Lawsuits continue to be necessary, said Lustbader, because there’s no accountability when the systems fail.

States have a “constitutional, statutory obligation” to provide a web of care for those they bring into the system, he said.

“If your system is literally re-victimizing them, reharming them, you as a government are contributing to their negative outcomes,” said Lustbader, litigation director for New York-based Children’s Rights, a national advocacy organization that represented children in the Kansas and Rhode Island lawsuits.

“Being removed from the family you know -- and then being harmed by the system that was supposed to protect you -- certainly stacks the odds against anyone trying to make their way in the world.”

  * * *
(click here for full article)

Many states have lost sight of that edict.

Sitting inside the Topeka Correctional Facility in her prison-issued navy blue shirt and olive pants, Voorhees said the state could have done more to keep her with her mother.

“There’s all this money to pay to foster homes and all this money for adoptions and what-not,” she said. “I don’t understand how there is so much funding to rip us away, but no funding to keep us there.”

* * *

In recent years, as the number of kids in foster care increased, the dollars used to prevent them from entering foster care were significantly reduced.

From 2006 to 2016, Title IV-B funding — much of which goes toward in-home preventive programs — decreased nationwide by 29 percent, according to the Child Trends survey. Nebraska cut its expenditure by 71 percent, joining Hawaii (49 percent) and Georgia (43 percent).

Congress tried again to step in and send states a message. A new federal law went into effect in 2018 that, for the first time, allows states to use money on in-home prevention that was previously earmarked for foster care.

“Early intervention and family support are two primary areas where having better policies and resources in place would go a long way toward improving outcomes for adults who were in the foster care system,” said U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

But the majority of states didn’t sign on for the first year. Instead, many delayed implementation of the Family First Prevention Services Act, which requires states to provide matching funds.

The cost -- of neglecting in-home preventive services -- is a clogged and crowded system.

Kids who could have stayed in their homes [must, instead] take up beds in good foster homes -- [homes] that are needed for severely abused and neglected children whose safety is in jeopardy. Because of that, kids [across the U.S.], are forced to sleep in child welfare offices or homeless shelters.

Tim Gay, founder of YouThrive, which helps Kansas foster kids transition into adulthood, said he’s worked with many older teens who “would have experienced less trauma if they would have stayed at home.”

“We have this Utopian view that we’re going to remove them from an unhealthy environment and we’re going to put them with this wonderful family that lives out in the suburbs. And they’re going to love them and care for them for the rest of their life,” Gay said.

“That’s the view — and that’s not what happens.”

* * *

Removed for neglect, not abuse:

The merits of removing kids from troubled homes versus trying to maintain families have been debated since 1909, when President Theodore Roosevelt convened the first White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children.

“Surely nothing ought to interest our people more than the care of the children who are destitute and neglected but not delinquent,” Roosevelt said at the time. “The widowed or deserted mother, if a good woman, willing to work and to do her best, should ordinarily be helped in such fashion as will enable her to bring up her children herself in their natural home.

“... Surely poverty alone should not disrupt the home.”

But often, it has.

'Neglect' — not physical or sexual abuse — was given as a reason for removal in 62 percent of the cases nationwide.

“If you lock a child in a closet and starve him, that’s 'neglect,'”
said Richard Wexler, of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.
“If your food stamps run out at the end of the month, that’s 'neglect.'
Which do you think happens more often? …

“There is hardly a poor child in America that couldn’t, at some point, be labeled 'neglected.'

“The biggest single problem in American child welfare is the confusion of poverty with neglect -- compounded by the racial bias.”

“She can see the mess and the chaos — she can’t see the love,” he said. “So you see what’s in front of you, and the gut reaction is, ‘I just have to rescue this kid.’ You’re not thinking: ‘What’s going to happen 10, 15, 20 years down the line?’”

* * *

Government statistics show that black children are overrepresented in foster care compared to other races. According to an annual report published this year, black children account for 23 percent of the children in foster care across the country. [Yet only] 14 percent of children in the U.S. are black.

* * *

Many prison inmates who completed The Star’s survey said they believed they were removed from their homes because of poverty. They said their families would have been stronger with a little support.

“This country has a hesitation for providing anything that looks like welfare to families,” said Clark Peters, a professor of social work at the University of Missouri. “So it is really the animus against poor families that drives this.

“We can all get behind saving the innocent kid with tears streaming down their cheeks. But when that kid becomes a 19-year-old who has a cigarette in his hand, a few tattoos that are far less appealing to many people but just as needy and deserving of love, it’s a harder sell.”

* * *

One inmate in the Upper Midwest said he went into foster care after being molested by a babysitter when he was 10.

“They did not have to take me out of my home,” he wrote on the survey. “We were poor and couldn’t afford a lawyer.”

* * *

An inmate from Hawaii said when she was moved into foster care, she felt like she lost her identity.

“I felt abandoned not just by my parents but by the same system that was created to protect,” she wrote.
“The whole foster care system needs to be
broken down, reconstructed on the principle of
Children first Family is Everything.”

* * *

Lori Ross, a longtime advocate for children in Missouri, said foster care works well for some kids and “they end up in a good place.”

“But for way too many, it fails.
  I’ve said for decades:

‘If we can’t do better than
the situation they are currently in,
then why are we taking them away?’”

* * *

The pain of separation:

All Michelle Voorhees ever wanted was to be home.
Her home.

But the state decided in the mid-1990s that her 21-year-old single mother, with three children and another on the way, wasn’t emotionally or mentally fit to care for them. The young mom was struggling. Eventually, all three daughters were put in foster care.

“And I just remember crying, crying for my mom and wondering where she was,” Voorhees said. “I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I needed my mom.”

“More Kansans experiencing poverty or hardship will fall through the cracks,” the report said, “and children will continue to be removed from their homes at dramatically heightened rates.”

Keeping families together costs less:

In 2016, nearly half the $30 billion in federal, state and local funds spent by child welfare agencies went toward out-of-home placements, according to the report by Child Trends, which conducts biennial national surveys of agency expenditures.

A relatively small number of states focus their prevention spending on substance abuse and mental health services, the report found.

“This finding is important given the need for these services among families involved in the child welfare system, as well as the ongoing opioid crisis that is straining many child welfare systems,” the report said. In fiscal 2016, it noted, more than a third of child removals were associated with substance abuse.

Not only is in-home prevention preferred in some cases, it’s cost effective.

The total estimated cost for foster care per year is roughly $25,000 per child, according to the National Council for Adoption. For three siblings, that would be $75,000.

The cost for services to preserve a family could run between $5,000 and $10,000 on average per year.

Bass, president of KVC Kansas, the nonprofit child welfare agency, told a legislative task force, last year, that by increasing funding for in-home prevention, “we can help additional families who are experiencing challenges.”

“This would help reduce child welfare costs overall by preventing mental/behavioral health, substance use, or conduct situations from escalating to child removal and foster care.”

She said efforts to keep families intact are almost always effective when they are willing participants.

“When they enter family preservation services,” Bass said, “we are really successful at keeping them at home — about nine out of every 10 children.”

Swing of the pendulum:

Deciding whether to remove a child from a home is not easy, especially as overwhelmed and understaffed child welfare systems must ensure children’s safety is not compromised.

Judgment calls are made, sometimes based on the philosophy of current agency leaders or the subjective perception of how bad the living conditions are in the home. Decisions can even be driven by headlines and public outcry over a tragedy.

In two instances, a decade apart, Missouri’s foster care kids felt the impact of a mighty — but invisible — pendulum swing.

Often, when a child known to the system is critically injured or dies at home, more kids are taken.

Then, when a child dies in foster care, and missteps in the system are revealed, the tendency is to keep more kids at home.

Ross, the longtime child advocate in Missouri, calls it a game. All involved are “pawns in a system that is way bigger than them. … And it screws the whole system up.”

* * *

Trauma of being removed:

Voorhees uses an analogy to describe what it’s like when a child is removed from her home:

Imagine, she says, that you’re at work one day. The morning starts out normal enough. You feed the dog, drink your coffee and tell your kids goodbye before you leave home.

Then, while at work, everything changes.

“The police show up at your job and they say, ‘OK, we’re moving you to a totally different city,’” she says. “And you don’t know anybody, and you can’t call your family and you can’t call any of your friends and you need to leave your phone here and you can’t take any of your stuff with you. We’ll figure that out later.”

The police then take you to a different location.

“And then tell you to ‘Just wait in this room for a little while, because we’re gonna figure things out,’” she says. “... And then they send you to these really well-meaning people, but you have no idea who they are.’”

Everything there is different. All you want, Voorhees says, is to contact the people you have a bond with — but you can’t.

“It’s a very disrupting experience,” she says. “And in a lot of ways, it’s a traumatic experience, because all of these things are unexpected. And suddenly, everything in your world that you felt was safe and secure and concrete is not.”

And, she says, “It starts to make you question, well, what can you believe? Who can you trust? You begin to stop valuing certain things. You stop valuing relationships, because they’re not concrete, and they’re not going to be there forever. And you stop investing yourself in certain things.

“And all of a sudden, stability isn’t really important to you. Having goals isn’t important to you. Doing a simple thing like taking a shower in a stranger’s home is a very disconcerting experience. So the more that you get moved around, the more trauma that you endure.”

Eventually, Voorhees stopped trusting people. That disconnection increased as she grew older.

“I had some really antisocial behavior,” she said. “I also had a deep dislike for government agencies — for the police, for social workers. I did not believe that they were on my team.”

In 2014, when she was just 22, she was convicted of aggravated arson, aggravated burglary and second-degree murder in the death of a southeast Kansas woman whose remains were found in the rubble of a burned-out home.

Prosecutors said Voorhees and a 26-year-old man went to the house to retrieve property that had been stolen from Voorhees, and the man put a pipe bomb on a mattress and lit the fuse. The pipe bomb did not explode, but set the house on fire. Voorhees and the man said they thought the house was empty at the time.

Voorhees was sentenced to nearly 24 years in prison. The earliest she could be released is 2033. The man received a life sentence with a possibility of parole after 20 years.

Through it all, Voorhees and her mom have stayed connected.

She often thinks of how life could have been different if she were able to stay with her mother for all of her childhood. To know that she was always safe and loved.

“Had my mom just had a little bit of help, had she had enough money to buy her own vehicle, had she had enough money to relocate herself from an abusive situation, had she not had to have been dependent on men in the first place for any kind of financial stability, ..."

(click here for full article)

“I remember as a kid wishing I could cement myself down so I didn’t have to go somewhere else with someone else,” Henderson said. “Most of these houses look relatively OK on the outside. . . . But you never know what goes on behind closed doors.

“I attempted suicide in two of these houses. I dealt with self harm in five. I had a gun held to my head in one. I was sexually assaulted in two. But I was loved and cherished in six of them. I had a family in six of them.”

* * *

While Henderson wound her way through a chaotic life -- vowing to prove wrong all those who predicted she would turn out like her mother -- researchers across the country had been looking into both the behaviors and brain development of foster kids just like her.

What they are discovering, in ever-emerging research, is just how much damage is being done to foster kids [who are] forced to go from one to two, to 10, to 30, to -- as an investigation by The Star has found -- up to 100 different placements in childhood.

Perhaps most intriguing is what researchers are seeing unfolding in their brains.

In an effort to stop child welfare agencies from putting foster kids through multiple placements, attorneys in at least two class-action lawsuits — one in Kansas, another in Florida — seized on a 2013 paper published in Child Welfare on more than a decade’s worth of broad research.

In the paper, University of Oregon psychologist Philip Fisher, director of the university’s Stress Neurobiology and Prevention Lab, states directly:

“The available empirical evidence suggests that placement instability, and other family chaos, is associated with disrupted development of the brain’s prefrontal cortex.”

• focus,
• attention,
• planning,
• managing emotions,
• short-term memory, and
• controlling impulses
  (like acting rashly on a thought or emotion).

Scientists so far have not established a precise cause-and-effect relationship that says X number of placements alter the brain by X amount. Because abuse-and-neglect and foster care are inseparable, it is still debatable how much of the problems scientists are finding come from the placements, and how much from the abuse, neglect, and what collectively are known as "adverse childhood experiences," or ACES.

For some 20 years, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente published the first major ACES study in 1998, it’s become ever more clear that the higher one’s ACES score (meaning the more adverse and traumatic experiences one has as a child), the worse they tend to do as an adult.

In 2005, researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Michigan and the Seattle-based Casey Family Programs
interviewed close to 500 former foster kids, and found
25 percent suffered post-traumatic stress disorder
-- outpacing the
20 percent suffered by veterans of the war in Iraq,
-- and more than double the
11 percent suffered by veterans of the war in Afghanistan.

The latest research on foster children
takes foster care research steps further, showing that
-- no matter what crisis thrust a child into foster care --
forcing that child to endure multiple placements is, with little doubt, adding brain insult to injury.

The implication already is that the repeated unpredictability and randomness of the lives of foster kids who are shuttled to a different place by the week, month or year is hurting the normal development and thus function of the prefrontal cortex.

The result, researchers suspect, is foster kids are put at greater risk of:

• post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
• disruptive behaviors,
• drug & alcohol abuse, and
• a range of psychiatric disorders
  -- from acting out to depression.

When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, there were some struggling children it did leave behind.

And it would be another 14 years — when that landmark education measure was replaced — before lawmakers would notice the nation’s most at-risk students:

Foster children.

“It’s terribly ironic,” said Phillip Lovell, of the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance for Excellent Education. “These are our children. They are LEGALLY our children. The least that we could do is report on their progress in school. We should know it, and do something about it.”

* * *

The Star spent the past year examining the long-term outcomes for kids who age out of foster care. It found that many will end up homeless, jobless and in prison because, in part, they were shortchanged on education. Shuffled from home to home, often sent outside their original school districts, they fall behind early and don’t catch up.

In every pocket of the nation, the graduation rates for foster children are significantly lower than for all other “special population groups,” including homeless students and those with disabilities.

Most years, a little more than half of the country’s foster kids will graduate from high school.

“People just don’t think about them — they are lost,” said Lori Burns-Bucklew, a child welfare law expert who has been advocating and representing children for more than 30 years. “It is neglect. Horrible neglect.”

* * *

As part of its investigation, The Star surveyed nearly 6,000 inmates and found that:

• [only] 16 percent of those who said they had been in foster care got a high school diploma.

• Another 29 percent said they got a GED.

• Only 3 percent said they had a college degree
  (matching the national numbers in other studies).
  [By comparison, about 40 percent of American adults, in general, have a college degree.]

“They bounced me everywhere and made me know I didn’t belong anywhere,” an Oklahoma inmate who received her GED wrote on her survey. “I got a horrible education due to always bouncing around.”

* * *

In Kansas, education outcomes have been tracked for many years in the fully privatized system. The numbers vary widely, which has caused some to wonder if they are completely accurate.

For fiscal year 2019, only about 39 percent of Kansas kids in foster care graduated from high school — dropping from 68 percent the previous year.   In 2012, just 20 percent graduated.

Zachary Lawrence, a special education teacher in south-central Kansas, told members of a legislative task force last year that many foster kids live such unstable and unpredictable lives that it’s tough for them to be able to learn each day.

“They are literally packing a suitcase and moving every morning, after which they are transported, sometimes for an hour or more, to school and participate in learning activities,” he told the task force. “They frequently have no idea where they will be sleeping that night, only that it will likely be in a different and more distant town from where they are asked to attend school.”

Current research, Lawrence said, shows that each time children change foster homes, it sets them back academically four to six months.

* * *

BEHIND in CLASS,  LOST for YEARS:

Foster children who move often get lost in the classroom — especially in math, said Burns-Bucklew, the Missouri lawyer.

“It’s almost impossible to catch up if you miss a piece,” she said. “Math is a subject that is foundational. If you miss some essential math concepts in second grade and go on to third grade, you can’t do third grade math, unless someone figures out what you missed in second grade.”

And teachers may not be able to spend enough time with the student to understand where the child is academically. If they are able to work with foster children for awhile, it’s often inevitable that the students will be moved again, and have to start over.

Natalie Zarate was determined not to let that happen to her. The former Kansas foster youth said she attended more than six schools -- three of them in a two-month period.

“It was hard keeping up, because every time I got moved, every school was at a different lesson,” she said. “But I knew I couldn’t give up. And so I just tried to focus on getting good grades and getting my education.”

Others aren’t as fortunate.

“So many foster kids lose track,” said Zarate, who got her high school diploma and started college -- but dropped out after a year. “They don’t know how many credits they have, they don’t know what they’re learning. I’ve just seen so many kids not go to school, so many kids fail or just because of moving around, they don’t understand anything.”

(click here for full article)

Every year, roughly 20 percent of the young adults who age out of foster care in America — more than 4,000 — immediately become homeless, studies show.

And thousands more — rising to as much as 40 percent in some parts of the country — are homeless within four years of aging out.

* * *

For too many, living on the streets starts them down a path of desperation that often includes sex trafficking and crime in order to eat or have enough money for a safe place to sleep.

In an investigation of the long-term outcomes of kids placed in the country’s broken foster care system, The Star found many kids once raised by the state now on their own and struggling to survive.

The Star surveyed inmates in 12 states, and nearly 60 percent of those who said they had been in foster care also had been homeless at some point in their lives.

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“We think foster care ought to be a protective factor for children and it’s not — foster care is a risk factor,” said Sean O’Brien, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who has represented many former foster children.

“They take the kid in, and then almost every adult beyond that point that touches this kid, they’re like, ‘What is the matter with you? They treat them like little criminals.”

Many go on to earn the title.

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Inmates responding to The Star’s survey shared various reasons for why they were removed from their homes.

Some said it was for neglect, poverty and parental drug addiction. For others, it was for abuse and family violence, or a parent going to jail.

“Because my relatives were poor, I was unable to live with them, according to CYS (Children and Youth Services),” said a 38-year-old Pennsylvania inmate, who was in foster care for nine years before he aged out. “I feel this is wrong. Being in the foster care system, I feel, made me into a monster. I craved to be with my family.”

Of the survey respondents, 34 percent said they aged out of the foster care system without a permanent home.

A 39-year-old Kansas inmate who went into state care when she was 8 years old said she wasn’t given any preparation for the real world.

“I was never told I was going to be put out,” she said. “Nor was I helped with getting a place to live or told about any resources available to me. I did have a job, but I was young, and was not prepared to hold it properly, so lost it quickly. I was never taught any skills to prepare me for adulthood.”

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