Barack Obama

Just hours after the announcement of new charges against the four officers involved in the killing of George Floyd, former President Barack Obama praised the work of young people in the recent days of protest and sought mayoral commitments for safer policing strategies.

Yordi, 20, is wan after a harrowing escape from horrors in his home country, Honduras. It is mid-July. He sits in a corporate ICE detention facility in rural Folkston, Georgia, staring into a computer screen that connects him to his 29-year-old brother Suamhirs Piraino-Guzman, thousands of miles away in Seattle.

On February 9, President Donald Trump signed into law the most significant reform to foster care since the federal government got into that business. This fundamental re-ordering of the government’s role in child welfare extends far beyond the 437,000 children living in foster care today.

In the age of “zero tolerance,” even the family members of America’s most dedicated citizens aren’t protected. Take the case of a 28-year-old American citizen from Honduras named Suamhirs Piraino-Guzman and his little brother Yordi.

The Every Student Succeeds Act gave school systems across the country until December 2016 to  transport foster youth to school. Nine months later, implementation is wanting. For the roughly 270,000 school-aged children living in America’s foster care system, educational success can be elusive.

President Donald Trump is the third president in a row, in the humble opinion of Youth Services Insider, to make an interesting and exciting pick for Surgeon General. Jerome Adams, the former health commissioner for Indiana, is a young choice at age 42 with bipartisan plaudits for his connection to the community.

Today, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a pilot program to ensure that students in foster care have transportation to their so-called “school of origin.” The stopgap measure was designed to bring the county’s 81 school districts into compliance with a federal education law aimed at promoting the educational stability of children in foster care.

California fails to implement federal education law, denying students in foster care their right to school transportation. At least 35,000 school-aged California children live in foster care today. Entering the system is, invariably, traumatic.

When it comes to their children’s education, Donald Trump and Barack Obama are in lockstep. Both understand that uprooting a child from school can impede educational achievement, and disrupt fragile social and emotional development.