Fresno Co. schools reach out to foster children

Published online on Tuesday, Oct. 06, 2009

Fresno County has come up with an innovative way to help foster children, whose challenges at home often overwhelm their efforts at school.

The county is placing social workers in schools, where they provide educational assistance to children they’re already monitoring for foster care. The social workers focus on educational performance and getting foster children prepared for life as self-sufficient adults.

“They have all been through a lot — neglect, abuse and suffering — and they often don’t think they have a future,” said Krista Hopper, a social worker at Fresno High School. “Once they see someone is checking on them, it changes their outlook.”

Fresno County was the first in the state to place its own social workers in schools, and is still the only one with county social workers doing case management in high schools, said Catherine Huerta, director of Children and Family Services.

At least four other counties — Imperial, Los Angeles, Merced and San Diego — have county child-welfare social workers in schools, according to the California Department of Social Services.

In the Fresno County program, 11 social workers are responsible for 430 foster children in the Fresno, Clovis and Central unified school districts, which provide office space and access to student records. The county plans to add two more social workers at rural schools in coming months. Huerta said the program doesn’t cost the county more money because the social workers already are on the county’s payroll to handle case work. The current version of the program is in its second year — too soon to measure its success, officials said. But it’s filling a critical need: Foster care focuses on health and safety, and often overlooks education, according to a May report by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Statewide, foster children perform significantly worse than other students, and that helps explain what happens to many of them as adults. Former foster children have high rates of unemployment, incarceration and homelessness, the report says.

Courts remove foster children from families when they’re at risk of abuse or neglect. Foster children often grow up with trauma and instability, making it hard to focus on school, officials say.

Huerta said she decided to start the program because foster children weren’t performing in school as well as they should.

In the past school year, foster children at Fresno Unified attended class 93% of the time, just one percentage point less than all students, according to data from the district and the county.

But only a little more than 20% of foster children scored proficient or better on the California Standards Test for language arts and math, compared to nearly 40% of all students in the district. “When you’re worrying about your life, it makes it difficult to focus on school,” said Kizzy Lopez, a former foster child who now coordinates a Fresno State program for students coming out of the child-welfare system. “All the moving around is really challenging. You’re constantly having to readjust.”

Huerta was initially concerned that foster children would avoid the social workers, out of a fear that it would tip off other students that they were foster children. That hasn’t been a problem, and that’s a testament to the value of the service, Huerta said.

However, some social workers say they’ve avoided a stigma by not promoting their work on campus. They meet with foster children off campus and ask for permission to contact them at school.

School administrators have welcomed the social workers. In a time of diminished resources, the extra help is appreciated, they say. At Fresno’s Sunnyside High School, each counselor is responsible for about 500 students, which doesn’t give them enough time to meet the emotional needs of many foster children, Principal Sheryl Weaver said.

At Fresno High, counselor Kimberly Lewis said her office faces similar limitations trying to respond to foster children. The addition of a county social worker also helps because school counselors typically don’t know when a student is a foster child, she said.

The social workers develop a life plan with the students — four goals, along with activities that will help them achieve the goals. Foster children have listed goals that range from ambitious, such as wanting to become a doctor, to simple, such as staying out of trouble.

Ruby Falcon, a social worker at Sunnyside, remembers the plan she did with a student who lost both of his parents before he was 9. Falcon recently took him to see their graves for the first time in his life.

“One of his goals was to have a home,” she said. “He said, ‘I just want someone to love me.’ ”