Teens leaving foster care due to age typically don’t use services available to help them transition to adulthood, a recently released study shows.
Young people would have an easier time as older teens and young adults if they took advantage of help with housing, work and education, shows a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It’s the first of its kind to look at outcomes for youth in foster care ages 14 and up.
But many times the teens have had such negative experiences in foster care that they want to be free of anything that’s offered, said Pete Hershberger, a former state legislator and retired director of FosterEd, which works to improve educational outcomes for foster children.
“Many of those kids end up being burned out by the system,” he said. “They end up wanting nothing to do with the system. They just want to get out.”
Only one in four of aging foster care youth nationwide use services that can help them, the study called Fostering Youth Transitions shows. In Arizona, the number of teens accessing help is higher than the national average, but the findings here are based on a very small representation of this population in Arizona.
Of the nearly 900 teens aging out of foster care in 2016, which is the year the study looks at, only about 80 were included as part of the report.
That’s because Arizona has not done a good job tracking the older teens and young adults who have been in foster care, said Beth Rosenberg, director of child welfare and juvenile justice for Arizona’s Children’s Action Alliance, a public policy institute that works to improve the lives of the state’s children and their families.
The state is supposed to improve on reaching more of these teens to see how they are doing, she said, although the plan from the Arizona Department of Child Safety has not been made public yet.
The Foster Care Independence Act of 1999 requires states to track national and state-level data and outcomes around youth who have been in foster care. The quality of the data varies state by state, the Annie E. Casey Foundation reports, with many states missing a full collection of data.
The study found only 23 percent of youth nationwide receive help through employment programs, vocational training or financial assistance for education. And only 19 percent received help for room and board assistance. In Arizona, where the number of teens studied was very low, 49 percent are shown to have received help with employment, 37 percent received vocational training or financial help with education and 48 percent received help with room and board.
These teens lag behind their peers in completing education and finding employment.
There are also significant racial disparities, with minority teens struggling the most. Many are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.
The report “should be seen as a wake-up call to guide policymakers in advancing needed policy reform,” said Patrick McCarthy, president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “If we want to ensure young people don’t fall through the cracks after aging out of foster care, then policymakers need to look at these data and embrace policies that will help young people become successful adults.”
In about half of the states, including Arizona, the rate of being in foster care for young African-Americans ages 14 to 21 is over three times higher than the rate of young white people. African-American youth are more likely than their white counterparts to experience three or more placements in foster care.
People here are trying to collaborate more to help young people transition out of the foster-care system, said Jessica Marts, a program supervisor working with Pima County teens through the Arizona’s Children Association.
“That’s the only way we’re going to make more progress,” she said.
Sometimes the teens and young adults don’t know what they want, Marts said, but it is critical that all of them know what’s available.
