ESEA

Despite a long history of supporting foster youth’s academic success, California failed to comply with a federal deadline requiring all states to submit plans on how to pay for those students’ transportation to school.

Numerous studies have shown that low-income parents tend to participate less in their children’s educational experience than parents with higher incomes. For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has been trying to change that by offering funding to increase parent involvement in low-income schools.

After years of trying, the Senate and House passed a rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the legislation that drives federal policy on schools. Child welfare and juvenile justice are hardly central issues of federal education reform.

The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2008, updated federal child welfare law in several ways. Among those was a mandate for local child welfare agencies to give children placed into foster care the opportunity to remain in their school of origin.

Foster Youth Written into Elementary and Secondary Education Reform (ESEA) bill. An initial overture this year to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would require schools to work with child welfare systems to ensure educational stability for foster youths.