Homeless Children In The Foster Care System

The Higher Education Access and Success for Homeless and Foster Youth main goal are to remove the barriers to educations and increase the amount of access to resources for this population. According to the Massachusetts congresswoman, Katherine Clark, more than 1.3 million students are homeless and nearly 428,000 are in foster care across the United States1. Many of the youths are unable to enroll in colleges or universities because they lack the necessary tools and support needed to navigate through the financial aid process and higher educational system. In a personal interview with Latoya Young, a guidance counselor for senior at Oracle Charter High School reported that in the eight years that she was working for the educational system she

In America it is stated that 1 in every 84 children live in foster care circumstances via "Statistics on Foster Care". There is a numerous amount of contrasting children from various backgrounds and ages living within these special housing homes, and many are repeatedly in and out from unstable circumstances. As children grow and mature into the new faces of the world, they face many obstacles and tribulations that will alter their lives. Living in fostering homes is a substantial example and the effects of living in these institutions can truly be great.

The chosen population of interest for the course project is children who are placed in foster care. Children in foster care are considered vulnerable due to a variety of reasons for which they are taken away from home and placed in the child welfare system. Foster care children are often removed from their home due to physical abuse, drug exposure, or in some cases due to parental inability to fulfill the child basic necessities. Foster care children are at greater risk of mental, health, and behavioral problems (Lovie, Beadnell, & Pecora, 2015). Case management is an essential part of the care plan to improve the outcomes of the population of interest. Foster care children face additional problems when the health care system is inadequate.

In today’s society Fostering Children has become a form of employment, and too many Foster Parents consider fostering to be nothing more than just a job. Agencies are considering the hiring process as an urgency to match staff with cliental; considering families as just another case to fill their homes and keep their agencies up and running instead of taking time to match families according to the needs of the children and qualifications of the foster parents.

In the United States 21% of all children are living below the federal poverty line. 2.9 million cases of child abuse and neglect are reported every year in the United States. 428,000 children are in the foster care system, and 107,918 foster children are waiting to be adopted. The foster care system is temporary out of home care for neglected, abused and impoverish children under 18. While the foster care system has all positive ideas, they fall short in providing certain needs for these children. Kids not only in America but all over the world that are living in poverty, are abused, neglected, and have an unstable home life. Nobody wants to live a life like that, especially not a child. They don’t know how to support themselves on their own, they need a family and a guardian that will take care of them, support, and love them.

As of 2016 there were nearly a half million children in the foster care system, with roughly 25,000 “aging-out” each year (Ahmann, 2017). Most adolescents “age out” of the system with no one to mentor or serve as a caring parent figure. Foster youth are in dire need of long-term adult role models to guide them to achieve success. According to Ahmann, 50% of foster youth left “the system” without a high-school degree, as well as with having higher rates of PTSD, and depression (p. 43). Ahmann presented that research has proven teenagers, in general, that have quality relationships from adults able to provide support, do better than those that do not. If research has shown efficacy in supportive adult figures in a teen’s life then one can conclude that foster youth would also benefit. Foster children are at a disadvantage a soon as they enter “the system” so giving them resources proven positive is vital to their future success.

According to the 2015 Adoption and foster care Analysis and reporting system (AFCARS), 427,910 children were in the US foster care, making foster care one of the social issues in the USA. The US Department of Health and Human services (HHS) is working on this social issue for past few years, but is still not getting positive results — every year population of Foster care is increasing by 50,000 youths. The statistics about the Foster care system is changing every day. Some things that people don’t know about foster care is that they will not only lose their children—they had lost parental rights and had broken the laws, therefore this can lead to a punishment. Foster care has many laws related to it.. Once the parents had lost the children,

I bet you've never seen what happened to kids in foster care. Some children need different care than others, and might live a better life if they could get care that meets their needs. This information allows this paper to state that foster care systems have some major issues that need to be fixed. This can be supported because the children in foster care that are running away, the many deaths and abuse of children, their futures being affected, and lastly, i'm going to talk about a way to solve some of these problems, or at least how you can prevent them. First topic is going to be about the children that run away from foster care.

With the thousands of children in foster care, there is “an enormous financial and human cost” (Nakyanzi). The parents may want to get these kids the necessary things for school or their development, but cannot afford to get them; the kids will then not receive these necessities. If there were not so many children in the foster care system, it would not be such a huge expense and the children would receive the attention and necessities they need to develop. It does not help that the “federal foster care financing policies have created an imbalance in the funding of foster care over other child welfare approaches, resulting in children languishing in foster care unnecessarily” (Atwood). In doing so, the federal foster care financing policies are supporting a system that does not work for all the children causing them to be placed into a system for no good reason. If the federal foster care financing policies were to replace foster care with family preservation programs they would not lack with funding and the children would have everything that they would need. Even if they

For years there have been an excessive number of children in and out of the foster system. Quite a few children have succeeded; however, other children have not. A few children have looked to drugs, alcohol and violence to cope with what they have gone through and/or what they are currently going through. A number of those children ended up in a juvenile detention center or prison for breaking the law. Foster parents are desperately needed to help these children succeed in life and make it through this terrible time.

In the United States there are over a half a million children in the foster care system. (AFCARS Report, 2015) The foster care system is a temporary arrangement for children whose parents are not able to care for them. (adopt.org) Foster care can be arranged through the courts or a social service agency. The goal for a child in the foster care system is usually reunification with the birth family, but may be changed to adoption when this is seen as in the child's best interest.

Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (AFSA) clearly and unequivocally establishes three national goals for children in foster care: safety, permanency, and well-being. ASFA was in part “a response to the fact that more children were entering the foster care system than were exiting.” Five principles underlie the ASFA and apply to professionals working with families through public and private agencies as well as state courts. These principles are:

Foster youth has long been thought of as an at-risk population, often failing the educational system. In her dissertation on foster youth and secondary education, Brenda Morton writes, “Foster children are an invisible population. Teachers and administrators often do not know that a student is in foster care” (p. 1). There are just under half a million foster youth currently residing in the United States, many will fail to graduate from high school, and only a few will graduate from college. California has the largest population of foster youth with approximately 56, 138 youth (Children’s Bureau, 2014). It is estimated that foster youth high school graduation rates are near the forty sixth percentile and college graduation rates are near two percent for former foster youth, making this at-risk population is in need of more support (Friends of Foster Families, 2014).

There were 4 million reports of child maltreatment in the United States involving more than seven million children. (child abuse and neglect) There are different types of neglect/abuse. The three main types are Physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse. Foster children tend to come from broken homes.

More than 5,000 minor children of deportees live in foster homes in the country and the number is increasing, so experts urge parents prone to deportation to appoint legal guardians so that children do not enter a system of which it is not known when they will be able to leave. According to a national study conducted by the Applied Research Center (ARC), the number of children in foster care (Foster Care) can reach 15,000 in five years. An example of this is the state of Arizona where temporary households are 29% more likely to have a father in detention centers or deported. Nearly 6 million US citizen children live with at least one family member as undocumented, according to the 2009-2013 Census. Between 2010 and 2012, the Immigration and