By Erin Einhorn: For Complete Post, Click Here…
ngd-I wonder what the justification is for this appalling failure to provide even minimal support after forcing foster care???
Michigan is catastrophically failing to provide many of the most vulnerable children in its care with a quality education, delaying some teenagers’ graduation by years or leaving them so frustrated that they drop out of school, according to foster youth, their advocates and educators who’ve tried to help them.
NBC News spoke with 10 current or former Michigan foster youth who collectively spent time in more than a dozen residential facilities in recent years, either because social workers couldn’t find a family to take them or because the state said they needed treatment for mental health or substance misuse issues.
All of them attended classes for months or years with other young residents of those facilities.
All of them were assigned schoolwork and completed it, they said.
Some thought they’d received quality instruction from caring teachers. Others recalled being largely parked in front of computers or handed packets of worksheets.
But all of them learned a difficult lesson when they moved out of these facilities and tried to transfer to a public school: The classes they took in the state-funded, state-licensed institutions didn’t necessarily count toward graduation.
“They said I had no credits so I had to start over,” said Kayla Goshay, 23, who learned at 18 that the classes she took during two years in a home for girls weren’t reflected on her transcript. She suspected the courses weren’t great — girls ages 12 to 17 were all taking the same online classes at the same time, she said — but she was told she was working toward a diploma.
“I was shocked,” she said. “I was hurt and irritated because I thought I was doing something and I really wasn’t doing anything.”
