Too Many Foster Youth Enter The Adult World Without A Safety Net

Too Many Foster Youth Enter The Adult World Without A Safety Net

By: Brandon Crawford
Via OK Policy Blog | Oklahoma Policy Institute

For most Oklahoma teenagers, turning 18 is an uncomplicatedly exciting time in their lives. However, for foster children, turning 18 means exiting the state’s foster system – and that can mean transitioning to a world fraught with intense uncertainty and anxiety, including a significant risk of experiencing homelessness. Through federal funding, a new program in Oklahoma is identifying the factors that place former foster youth at risk of homelessness.

Most Oklahoma foster youth exit the system with a support network servi­­ng as a safety net. Between 2009 and 2012 in Oklahoma, nearly 90 percent of youth exiting care were reunified with their family, adopted, or had someone other than the state step forward as their guardian. This is referred to as “achieving permanency,” and these placements provide a safety net for these young adults as they transition to adulthood.

However, within that period, 7.4 percent of youth exited without permanency. These young adults had no family or guardian to go to after leaving foster care. They may not have had the opportunity to find a job, learn to drive, or learn to make simple decisions – such as whether to get a haircut, or how to stock a refrigerator – on their own. Aging out of the foster system leaves them without any help to learn these skills that so many of us take for granted. And for a variety of reasons, pre-exit planning with a caseworker may insufficiently equip foster youth for the future.



Although these young adults should be eligible for Medicaid and have access to some support services through the Oklahoma Independent Living program, these programs can be cumbersome to use, especially without a caseworker to help them navigate the processes. And in addition to a lack of permanent connections, former foster youth frequently still carry the traumas of the abuse and neglect that led to their entry to foster care in the first place, making the transition even more difficult.

From 2009 to 2013, 1,639 young adults in Oklahoma aged out of foster care without permanency. At least one in four went on to experience at least one episode of homelessness within 1-5 years of aging out of care, although due to difficulties in identifying youth experiencing homelessness, they are likely undercounted. Young adults who age out of foster care without permanency may be one of the most at-risk populations for experiencing homelessness while at the same time having the least amount of support. In 2014, Oklahoma Department of Human Services (DHS) established The Road to Independence (RTI) Network to identify youth most at risk of experiencing homelessness, as well as a variety of other poor outcomes, including low educational and job skills attainment.

RTI identified risk factors both while in care and within five years of leaving care that are associated with a greater likelihood of a former foster youth experiencing homelessness after aging out of care. Among other factors, RTI found that former foster youth who access safety net services such as SNAP and TANF after exiting care are more likely to experience homelessness. The fact that those young adults who are accessing services are more likely to experience homelessness does not mean that these services are causing homelessness, nor does it mean that these services are ineffective. What it means is young adults in need are reaching out for help – but the services available to them aren’t designed to prevent or alleviate homelessness. Young adults who are transitioning from foster care to adulthood need services that focus specifically on housing. They need services that not only provide housing but also the skills necessary to retain that housing and achieve self-sufficiency there.

The RTI team will continue compiling data from a variety of state and local agencies to inform how we combat homelessness among young adults formerly in foster care. With the data collected, the RTI team is preparing an intervention strategy to provide youth with housing-specific services to alleviate their risk of homelessness.

When children enter foster care, they become the responsibility of the state. However, too many former foster youth are falling through the cracks. These former foster youth need more support in their transition to adulthood, and the Road to Independence Network is developing solutions to provide it.

This article is what our advocacy is all about. Over 18,000 youth age out of the foster care system each year in the United States.  There is no place to call home for very many of these youth.  Oklahoma has no housing options for the general foster care population.  We want to be the solution.

When There's No Going Home

 By: Susan Kools  --Via Huffingtonpost.com

It's that time of year when many young people head back into the comforting orbit of their parents' home -- home for the holidays, home from college, home from work, back into old rooms, clean laundry and the protection of family, food and familiarity.

But for some young people, there is no going home, not ever. For them, the place just doesn't exist. And their ranks increase every year, when


some 23,000 foster children become too old for our social services system at age 18 without ever having found a secure place to call home.

What happens to this group -- nearly a quarter million individuals over the past decade alone - should concern the lot of us. These are children that we as a society have decided can have a better chance away from their family of origin, but the fact is when they don't have meaningful and sustained social connections during their adolescent years, things don't go well as they emerge into adulthood.

Everyone should know and care about this, because like it or not, we all pay for it. And there are incredible and disquieting costs -- social, financial and human -- as a result.

A Midwest study found that of 600 young adults who'd aged out of the foster care and child welfare system, less than half were employed by age 24 with an annual income of just $8,000. More than a quarter had been homeless. Twenty-five percent had no high school diploma and just six percent had earned either a two- or four-year degree -- educational attainment thought to be the entry ticket for a decent-paying job and a chance at a financially stable life. The majority of these young women and men had already had children and received needs-based government assistance. Forty-two percent of the young men had been arrested and 23 percent had been convicted of a crime.

The costs of aging out of foster care drain our collective, taxpayer-funded coffers, too. The Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative found that taxpayers and communities pay roughly $300,000 for the public assistance, incarceration and lost wages for each young person who ages out of the foster care system. That's close to $7 billion spent every year on this group of vulnerable adolescents in the U.S.

With National Adoption Day soon to arrive, we'll hear a lot about American families that generously open their hearts and doors to children in need, as well as heart rending statistics about how many more children are still waiting for a permanent home. But behind the gleam of adoption lies a darker truth about its sister social program, foster care, and the often debilitating results of children who -- most often plucked from their biological families for a host of good reasons -- never find a place to call home, the right kind of support, or a level of stability and constancy and end up 18, on their own, and entirely lost right at the moment when they're supposed to be finding themselves.

These are young people who are bright and open and determined but wholly unprepared for life in ways that the average, family-fortified youth cannot fathom. Without connection to one or two -- or more -- consistent, positive, connected adult role models in their communities, these adolescents will continue to flounder.

It's high time that we understand the lost human capital of this group and be proactive in our approach to to usher them into adulthood -- really, just another three to five years -- the right way. That means fostering meaningful social connections with supportive adults, facilitating their educational attainment and job training, and providing transitional housing, health and mental health care.

Of course having a family matters. It shapes the raw, malleable stuff in us that lies between our genetic material and our circumstances. But where one's family comes from, and who can comprise it, is truly open and diverse. If we rally to support children aging out of foster care with the kinds of support they need, they will flourish as those with permanent and stable families have had the opportunity to do.

The great Nelson Mandela asserted that "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." In our celebration of National Adoption Day, let us not forget society's children -- our children -- those who grow up in foster care.

Susan Kools is the Madge M. Jones Professor of Nursing at the University of Virginia School of Nursing. A long-time advocate of adolescents, she has studied the health and development of adolescents in foster care, and aims to improve the outcomes of young people aging out of foster care.