(NAME-MCE) Reaching Out to Students in Foster Care

[Anselmo Villanueva]

Reaching Out to Students in Foster Care

Community colleges consider how they can enroll and graduate a
particularly vulnerable population.

For related stories, go to http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/07/foster

April 7, 2008

Reaching Out to Students in Foster Care

At 21, Bill Cunningham should be considered a success story. Living
nearly half of his life in a series of foster and group homes, he
attended five different schools and struggled with behavioral
problems. Statistically, he had almost no chance of earning a college
degree or to rise above employment at the minimum wage.

He needed, he said, to "change my behaviors in order to move to a
better place. At the age of 12, I moved to my first foster home. I
like a foster home a lot better because you have more freedom than
being in a group home in a hospital." By the time he had graduated
high school, he decided to go to college so he could "get a better job
than working minimum wage so I could have a better life for me and the
family I want to have.

"In order to go to college, I realized I needed to work on my reading
and spelling and other things I have difficulty with, such as
understanding what I read. My junior year in high school I had great
foster parents and they helped me reach my goal. That's the reason why
I got this far. Now I'm at [Austin Community College], I am
comfortable being around people and I know my way around this campus.
I have very good instructors teaching me what I need to know to keep a
job and get ahead."

The automotive technology major was telling his story to a group of
community college leaders and instructors interested in replicating
his success and that of ACC's program for foster care alumni. The
session, "A Tale of Three Cities: Three Community Colleges' Approach
to Providing Campus-Based Services to Students from Foster Care,"
constituted part of the annual American Association of Community
Colleges convention, in Philadelphia.

The participants highlighted a unique set of challenges for a group of
students that often gets overlooked among the many at-risk subgroups
that tend to be disproportionately represented at community colleges.
Youth in foster care have typically been removed from their birth
parents and often live from foster home to foster home, navigating a
maze of state agencies in disruptive, unpredictable environments.

According to John Emerson, director of education at the nonprofit
foster care improvement organization Casey Family Programs, the leader
of the discussion on Sunday, the high school graduation rate of such
students is under 50 percent, while 30 percent are in special-ed
programs of some sort. A majority — 65 percent — change schools seven
or more times before finishing the 12th grade. The statistics get
grimmer as students go farther down the education pipeline: under 10
percent of youth who grew up in foster care enroll in college. For
two- and four-year colleges, the completion rate is about 2 percent.

Several of those who spoke noted that a central issue for youths
raised in a foster environment is a reluctance to place trust in
others; at the same time, many have never had particularly high
expectations set for them. "I just needed to hear somebody tell me I
could do it. I had never heard that before," said a college student
quoted in the presentation. That attitude, plus the "survival mode" of
teenagers who have recently emancipated themselves legally from their
foster parents, often means a lack of guidance and resources to pursue
the longer-term goal of earning a college degree.

An oft-noted scarcity of resources plagues community colleges, too,
which often don't have coordinated efforts in place to reach out to
foster care alumni. Emerson noted a number of policies that
institutions could adopt, or take advantage of, to encourage such
students to make the leap. The federal Education and Training Vouchers
program, for instance, provides up to $5,000 per year for students out
of foster care in all states pursuing postsecondary education.
Seventeen or more states additionally offer tuition waivers or
need-based grants for such students, Emerson added, while other states
have Medicaid extension programs to provide health insurance to youths
out of foster care.

What can community colleges do? As some programs are already
demonstrating at places like ACC, the California Community Colleges
System, the City College of San Francisco and Seattle Central
Community College, they can work with existing organizations and
agencies such as school districts, social advocacy groups and
nonprofits. Emerson noted that the Free Application for Federal
Student Aid specifically asks if applicants are orphans or wards of
the state — a status that colleges can pay attention to when targeting
potential beneficiaries of outreach programs.

Austin's program offers personalized help; financial assistance for
tuition, textbooks and housing; and access to specialized counseling.
Officials at the college found that from fall 2006 to spring 2008, as
the program was getting off the ground, there was a 24 percent
increase in the enrollment of foster care alumni, with 40 percent
needing remedial training. Another program, at City College of San
Francisco, is used in the financial aid office itself, so that the
process of applying for the education vouchers is seen as an extension
of its existing mission.

Seattle Central's program, a more top-down effort that initially
responded to community concern about foster alumni, received outside
funding (unlike Austin) from Casey and other groups. "We have money
and we're very lucky for that, but it's still hard for us," said
Sarahfina Aldeane, a student there who spoke at the session, one of 38
in the program.

— Andy Guess  andy.guess at insidehighered.com