Fostered or Forgotten is a Teen Vogue series about the foster care system in the United States, produced in partnership with Juvenile Law Center and published during and after National Foster Care Month. In this op-ed, freelance writer Lara B. Sharp explains some of the lifelong educational struggles faced by former foster children.
I entered the foster care system in 1979. At the age of nine, I officially became a ward of the state. For me, and for many other children who have been lost by the Administration for Children and Families in the United States, there were no globally publicized hashtags calling for our return. We were not even visible to the local populations that we lived among.
When I was in foster care, there was no law stipulating that foster youth must be placed in school. (As part of 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act and 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), children in foster care are now required to be in school.) And, many of us weren’t. Our school records would get lost in the mail, and then schools would say we couldn’t be enrolled without them. It is now illegal to do that: Schools must accept foster kids, even without school records. By law, we now get to go to school just like other kids do. As soon as I was 18, in 1988, I advocated for this law by writing letters to Ed Koch, who was then the mayor of New York City.
After I turned 18, I tried to start community college to get my GED in the hopes of one day earning my associate’s degree. But back then, I was told that I was not able to get federal student loans without my parents’ signatures and tax returns, and that there were no exceptions for legal wards of the state. I had to wait until I was over the age of 24 in order to apply without them. Regardless, with no school records, I wasn’t able to attend college back then, even without applying for student loans.
The Higher Education Act of 1965 specifies criteria for independent student status, and according to federal law, former wards of the court can obtain federal student loans and enroll in college, or a GED program, without any parental documentation or signatures. We can simply check a box on the student loan application. After my experiences, I wrote hundreds of letters to draw the attention of anyone and everyone involved in federal lawmaking and youth advocacy, and I did this for years. To this day, if you want to send any academic financial aid office into a complete meltdown of confusion, all you have to do is check the box listing yourself as a former ward of the state. Most schools have no idea what to do next. In my experience and that of others I’ve spoken with, it’s also nearly impossible to get the appropriate documentation from the foster care providers in order to have that category approved.
Now, some states offer tuition funds or waivers for former foster youth that can be applied to community or state college, but these funds are often only available if they enroll by their early 20s. Why isn’t this tuition fund a federal law? Why should foster kids be on some economically prescribed timeline when their normal is far from everyone else’s? Currently, I’m working to create a campaign to have the age cap removed on the federal level. I’m hoping to do this in partnership with Foster Care Alumni of America, an organization that enables us to speak for ourselves and helps us to advocate for what we decide we need.
In 2005, at the age of 35, I earned my High School Equivalency diploma by matriculating at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and in 2006, I went on to earn a full academic scholarship to Smith College. I then found that another problem former foster care youth face once in college is housing over summers and during holidays. I discovered this in my first year by finding a former foster child, enrolled in Smith, sleeping in a bush over spring break.
At the time, colleges providing students with on-campus housing — both state and private schools — were not required to make accommodations for former foster youth over summers and holidays — including Smith, my own alma mater. Kids like me sometimes ended up literally homeless during school closings. Based on the hardship it created for them, many students ended up not returning to their educational facilities, too. This lack of awareness on the part of educational facilities and the ensuing homelessness greatly contributed to the enormous dropout rate, all but ensuring that only 3% of former foster youth obtain college degrees. Today, many schools no longer make the default assumption that every student has a flight home for the holidays, and often provide special accommodations for such students. Many. But not all. Why is this not policy? I got on the letter trail for that, too, and now many school counselors are much more informed about the unique academic issues faced by former foster youth. In order to successfully advocate, we need to successfully graduate.
Most of the early advocacy that I did to support foster youth navigating education was as an individual, because I didn’t have access to or knowledge of any organizations. Since my time in the system, and through the hard work of several advocacy groups, the policies in place have improved. Children are no longer automatically made homeless on their 18th birthday. In some states, there is now a small independent living stipend paid to former foster kids for two subsequent years once they age out of the system, and some also grant access to many resources. A federal law passed in 2008 allows states to extend foster care past age 18, and some foster youth can now stay in the system until they turn 21.
We have made progress. Back then nobody was helping me. Nobody was helping us, because we hardly existed in and barely interacted with mainstream society — we suffered unemployment, homelessness, and educational obstacles — and it was easy for us to disappear. Foster children are still disappearing and falling through the cracks of our society. We have a very long way to go, but as individuals, we have more of a voice than ever before. Imagine what that’ll look like, and what is possible for us to accomplish — in the age of the beautiful brevity of hashtags and the power of our voices coming together online — to create those much-needed changes on the federal level.
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