| Revamping Youth Services: Preparing Young People in Foster Care for Independence
On your child’s 18th birthday, you tell him he has until dinnertime to leave your home. He has not yet graduated from high school. He does not have a job, place to live, or prospects for higher education, but you sever all ties anyway. Unthinkable? Think again! This is exactly what happens to most of the 20,000 young men and women who leave our nation’s foster care system each year.
Locally, the good news is that the District is one of the few jurisdictions that keeps young people in foster care up to age 21. We provide generous monthly stipends for older teens learning to live on their own. We also pay tuition for any foster teen who wants to attend college—and then offer a temporary allowance during the transition period from student to working adult. The bad news is that past failures to keep families together and to find permanent homes for children who cannot return to their parents have left over 800 District youngsters, ages 16 to 21, growing up in foster care. That is one-third of the city’s current foster child population.
As the “parent” of over 2,600 children of all ages in foster care, the DC Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) is attacking this issue on two fronts.
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We are aggressively seeking prompt, safe, permanent solutions for every foster child and teen.
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CFSA is overhauling services to do the best we can for all youth now growing up in foster care as a result of past systemic failures.
The new white paper Revamping Youth Services: Preparing Young People in Foster Care for Independence* discusses CFSA's plan for addressing this issue.
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