Permanency Tip of the Week: Permanency Work AFTER the Family is Formed
A great deal of funds, effort and attention is focused on the search for and establishment of Permanency for our Youth in foster care. Some of the most critically important work to sustain this new found Permanency needs to occur AFTER the new / expanded family is formed. Once the novelty of the new relationships wear off, some of the core issues of loss, attachment and trauma can come into play and can jeopardize the chances of the Permanency truly becoming permanent. The Youth and families may feel like they have everything under control and initially rebuff offers of post-Permanency support. We need to continue to provide these collaborative services (behavioral health, child welfare, education, etc.) to maximize the chances of success.
Permanency Story of the Week: From foster care to Miss Alabama’s Outstanding Teen: Kaitlynn Campbell’s inspiring trek
You would think that winning the title of Miss Alabama’s Outstanding Teen might be the only highlight of Kaitlynn Campbell’s week. But ask the 17-year-old Hayden High School junior, and she’d probably tell you something else.
While her friends are getting ready for the prom this weekend, Campbell will be settling into a home with a bedroom she can call her own for the first time in nearly a year. A ward of the state of Alabama, Campbell has been living in a group home and in foster care for the past eight months, but this week, she’ll start moving in with a Hayden family.
Current Permanency related articles:
California Foster Youth Education Task Force Releases New Fact Sheets
The California Foster Youth Education Task Force recently released an updated series of fact sheets designed to provide easy to read, concise summaries of policies designed to support foster youth educational success. These fact sheets contain information and legal citations to the key provisions of various bills and laws impacting education rights, early care and education, special education, non-public schools, functional behavioral assessments, behavioral intervention plans, school discipline, special education discipline and educationally related mental health services. The menu of topics also includes a fact sheet on education services for transition aged youth, which provides an overview of provisions related to high school enrollment, higher education and support services for transition aged youth. Click here to download the fact sheets. To order hard copies of the document, contact Lacy Lenon-Arthur at llenon-arthur@rcoe.us.
Birth certificates and court decrees – some sealed for 51 years – will become available to adoptees or their direct descendants for the first time without a court order. It remains to be seen, however, whether the papers that many adoptees have longed to hold in their hands will contain the information they’ve wanted.
Save the Date: Blueprint for Success Conference
The 2015 Blueprint for Success Conference will take place on Tuesday, October 27 at the Westin LAX in Los Angeles. The conference is a dynamic one-day event that includes a networking reception on Monday, October 26, the evening prior to the event. The conference, sponsored by the John Burton Foundation, combines meaningful engagement opportunities with in-depth workshops presented by professionals with a passion and aptitude for supporting foster youth to achieve their higher education goals. Stay tuned for a Request for Workshop Proposals in early April and registration details in July.
| Supporting our Family Connections
As young people transition out of care and into post-secondary education, a lack of permanence often drives youth to salvage a relationship with members of their birth family. Young people often kick-start these reconnections with family members with a search on Facebook, out of sight from social workers or other supportive adults provided by the child welfare system. Finding and reconnecting with birth family can be confusing, anxiety-raising and chaotic for youth. Sometimes, the reconnected family provides great support for a young person launching into adulthood. But often, without support from caseworkers or other supportive adults, these attempts at re-connecting with birth family backfire with heart-wrenching results. Desperate longing for family may end with young people being rejected, re-traumatized, or even victimized. It’s easy to see where a young person’s educational trajectory could be thrown off-course as they struggle to connect or re-connect with family. |
Covenant House – Annual Young Professionals Sleep Out
Youth Homelessness is an epidemic. Over 200,000 youth up to age 24 experience some type of homelessness every year in California, according to the California Homeless Youth Project. And recent reports show that homelessness has increased by about 12 percent among transition age youth, meaning 18-24-year-olds which is demographic served by Covenant House California. California attracts many youth due to the allure of stardom coupled with the warm weather. Estimated 15,000 youth are homeless every night in the Los Angeles area.
In Focus: Foster Youth Fall Prey to Traffickers
At 18, Crystal had already experienced a lifetime of pain. She was molested by her mother’s boyfriend and spent the rest of her childhood being moved between foster homes, enduring more sexual abuse, beatings, a failed adoption and a stint in a residential treatment center. She had just escaped a violent boyfriend when someone recommended a woman who would take her in.
Crystal said that, after growing up in foster care, she was coerced into the sex trade. Crystal is one of the countless young people in the United States swept into the foster-care-to-sex-trafficking pipeline every year. In 2012, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 67 percent of young people reported missing and likely trafficked were in the care of social services or foster care at the time. And in 2013, 60 percent of the over 100 child sex trafficking victims recovered in an FBI raid of more than 70 cities had been in foster care or group homes at some point.