Foster Care

This is the first of three articles about the foster care system.

Each article will focus on three main subjects within foster care:

article one - improving the children's experience
article two - helping the parents more
article three - focusing on the foster family/counseling

In the Ohio foster care system, children are taken from their homes, immediately put through a series of tests, including lice checks, questioning, and clothing inventory. They then get sent to a respite provider for the length of time it takes the agency to find a suitable home.

As soon as they're placed in a foster home, they children are thrown into a whole new school system with people they don't know, meanwhile begging to see their parents.

There are many foster parents who heard that there's a job that you can get a couple of kids, send them off to school, and get paid for it. They rape, neglect and abuse children of all ages. The people need to be screened more..and the agency should check up on homes more often.

Lets use my friend Shirley as an example. When I met her she was seventeen, but she'd been tossed around through so many homes that she was held back in ninth grade. She wasn't stupid or unintelligent in anyway, it was just the lack of stability in her life that messed with her grades. She told me that in most of her families she had either been raped, molested, or physically abused by the mother, father, or brother. So she acted out...she yelled and hit back. She ran away from home and skipped school. What happened? She became a delinquent, a "bad teenager." The one who didn't know what was best for her. That doesn't seem real fair, does it?

Another thing that messes with the kids' schooling is the fact that the agency is willing to take them out of school for just about anything. Every week our foster kids get out of school over an hour early to go on their visit with their parents. The visit is definitely extremely important...but so is school.

Now, I'm not a believer in public school. I think that homeschooling is the ideal schooling situation for most children, but its illegal to homeschool foster kids. So if you're going to force the kids to go to school, at least let them be there. They already get made fun of for being foster kids, why give their classmates more ammunition by taking them out of school weekly?

I feel that counseling should be made much much more accessible to the foster kids. Your foster parent has to request a counseling session before they even consider it. These children are dealing with SO much and they deserve a little help from an outsider, just like the rest of us.

The agency should also provide tutoring and alternatives to public schooling. They should at least consider online schooling. Schools such as OhDela still have structure like public schools, but when a child gets transfered to another home, they can continue with their school work and they won't fall behind.

I know that there's a lot to be done to improve the children's already difficult experience in foster care, so why doesn't the government focus on that a little more?