The Forgotten Children

By Quinn Kelly

There is a problem in our education system. Students in foster care are facing frequent repetition of grades and difficulty graduating. This is an issue because foster children have as much right to learn as any other child and constant school switches have made foster children fall behind in classes.

The average foster student switches schools once or twice a year and by the time they’ve exited care, they have attended five to seven different schools. This adds difficulty to the students' lives because all schools teach at different speeds and emphasize different courses, and the foster children have to rush to keep up only to be met with the same problem at their next school. The difficulty of switching schools is apparent as foster children are twice as likely to repeat grades. There are around 400,000 children in foster care and these problems apply to many of them. As you know there is a policy which allows students to attend school in a different district. This is the Inter-District School Choice program. This program isn’t well known and schools will run out of space making the program practically untouched.

I believe that a policy which makes foster children a priority for the Inter-District School Choice would be a step towards removing the struggle to keep up. In other words, foster students would automatically go to their original school and our tax money will be paid for tuition in the district the foster child's school resides in eliminating the obstacles that come with the constant switching schools. We need to change something to make the world a better place.