Some, freshly pressed passports in hand, end up in their parents’ country of origin — even when it’s not their own.

Others are sent to live with family or friends while an unlucky number are placed in foster care, their parents’ rights in jeopardy and reunification precarious. 

The teenagers among them are sometimes thrust into a parenting role themselves: This overnight push into adulthood can leave them managing mortgages while their peers are picking prom dresses in the first of many sacrifices, immigrant advocates told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

“A lot of these older siblings are forgoing college plans and looking for work, trying to figure out how to be mom and dad for their siblings,” said Wendy D. Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families for The Center for Law and Social Policy.  

An 18-year-old Texas resident was left without parents or his U.S.-born siblings more than a year ago when his entire family was stopped by federal agents as they were driving to get medical care for his seriously ill sister. All ended up being sent to Mexico. Using the pseudonym Fernando HernĂĄndez GarcĂ­a, the young man testified before a House and Senate hearing last week that he was forced to give up college in order to work full time to try and keep the family home.

There are measures in place to help families with this unwanted transition. In 2013, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued the , a federal guideline meant to ensure “immigration enforcement activities do not unnecessarily disrupt” parental rights. 

It allowed ICE to consider whether it needed to hold these immigrants. And if they were detained, the directive encouraged the agency to house them near their families so they could participate in child placement hearings. 

The agency was also advised to arrange transportation to and from court or otherwise allow parents or legal guardians to participate in such proceedings by phone or video.

“It required some sort of cooperation between ICE and local child welfare agencies,” Cervantes said. 

But this directive has been under attack for years. It was weakened during the first Trump administration, bolstered in the Biden era and diminished once again when Trump took office for the second time — and launched a mass deportation campaign.

found that the parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children were arrested and detained in the first seven months of Trump’s second term. The news site also determined the Trump administration is per day as did the Biden administration. 

That 11,000 number will have ProPublica reported, if arrests and detentions continued at the same pace in the ensuing months.

The data obtained by ProPublica covers a period up to mid-August 2025. Some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive immigration enforcement sweeps occurred after that in targeted cities, including Chicago, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Minneapolis.  

“I do fear in the months ahead that we could see more instances where kids unnecessarily end up in the child welfare system because of the way ICE has been conducting its raids,” Cervantes said, adding its tactics have been carried out “in a way that really doesn’t give us any assurances they are abiding by their own policy to allow parents to make decisions about what happens to their kids at the time of arrest.”

Families too afraid to reach out

Added to this anxiety, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the execution of these and other directives, is in flux. The DHS is now in the second month of a partial government shutdown as congressional Democrats push to rein in the actions of federal immigrant agents and make them more publicly accountable. 

The department is also in the midst of a leadership change: Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin will replace former Secretary Kristi Noem, who was

Despite concerns about his temperament — a former cage fighter, Mullin once tried to coax a union leader into a physical altercation during a Senate committee hearing — his nomination was .

It’s unclear how Mullin, a 2020 election denier, would wield his authority. But he has said he and recently defended the killing of two Minneapolis residents who protested the government’s immigration enforcement efforts, calling victim Alex Pretti “deranged.” He later said he should not have made the comment, but declined to apologize for it. 

Parents considering their family’s future in the current environment are sure to wonder what comes next as they contemplate the limited tools available to them, including , which allows people subject to immigration enforcement in some states to designate a caretaker for their kids. 

It’s a valuable lever, said Julie Babayeva, supervising attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group: It goes into effect the moment someone is detained. But many families are reluctant to apply for it, she said. 

“We have been talking to PTAs, schools and community organizations in heavily immigrant communities,” Babayeva said. “It’s just difficult for people to trust this. They think, ‘What if I tell you my phone number and that leads to ICE coming to my house?’ People don’t understand that we’re not giving this information out to anyone, that it is confidential.”

shows 19 million children in the U.S. have at least one immigrant parent and that 1 in 6 — or 9 million school-aged children — live in a household with at least one noncitizen adult. An overwhelming majority of these kids are U.S. citizens. 

A Los Angeles teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because of her own citizenship status, recalled the case of two elementary school-aged children — and a toddler — left with their nearly 80-year-old grandmother, who had to return to work to support them after their parents were taken by ICE. 

Such disruptions inflict enormous psychological and emotional damage on children, she said. 

“They’ve heard the rhetoric of Trump saying he’s going after criminals and though they know that’s not true, they still don’t understand why their parents would be targeted,” she said. 

Roughly were deported in Trump’s first year in office and of the in ICE detention as of February, more than 73% had no criminal convictions. 

Eric Marquez, a teacher at New York City’s ELLIS Preparatory Academy, which serves older, immigrant students, said that from a classroom perspective, what stands out most is that these newcomers often present as remarkably composed. 

“They tend to put on a brave face, adapt quickly on the surface and rarely bring up in conversation the people in their lives who may have been detained or deported,” he said. “There’s often an understatedness to it.”

At the same time, teachers can sometimes see the impact indirectly, including shifts in focus, attendance and energy, he said. 

Ellis Prep’s own Dylan Contreras was among the first high school students to be detained by ICE when he was arrested after a May 2025 court appearance. Held in a Pennsylvania detention center for 10 months, he was and returned to school for the first time March 24.

Immigrant families are not the only ones puzzled and angry over the administration’s tactics. Residents in Springfield, Ohio, worried their Haitian neighbors will be deported because their Temporary Protective Status is in jeopardy, have stepped up to do something about it — in this case, house their children. 

One woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of attracting stirred up by Trump, secured emergency foster care credentials to support kids who might need somewhere safe to stay while they wait for a more permanent placement. The process took eight weeks to complete, she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

“I am ready for 0 to 18,” she said of the age of children she could take in at a moment’s notice. “I want to keep siblings together.”

A sudden rush of unhoused kids felt imminent earlier this year when Haitians’ protective status was set to expire and word spread that federal immigration agents would soon arrive in Springfield to deport them. After some 600,000 Venezuelans lost their last year, a lawyer representing the group said “hundreds and potentially thousands of Venezuelan nationals (had)

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court prohibited the Trump administration from ending Haitian deportation protections and in the case in late April. 

Separation not easily undone 

Once separated, family reunification can be difficult, notes Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who has studied immigration for years. Bureaucratic hurdles mean it can take months for a U.S. citizen child to get a passport to join their parents in a foreign country. 

Oliveira said, too, some of the children who enter foster care have family eager to shelter them but they won’t step forward because they are too afraid to interact with the government.

These new forms of family separation are among many fears undocumented immigrants face. But it’s not the worst of them, Oliveira and other advocates said: Detention is by far the most frightening prospect. 

“It’s been harder and harder to get in touch with people who are detained,” Oliveira said. “Sometimes months go by and (federal authorities) don’t even tell you where they are. So, parents are even more worried about that than the actual deportation.”

And, she said, limited communication with family makes it challenging to come to a conclusion on child care. 

“You can’t make decisions,” Oliveira said. “You can’t make phone calls. You can’t figure out what the plan is.”

Already, Cervantes said, her office has seen the fallout. 

“We’ve heard about 15- and 16-year-olds living by themselves for several weeks because their parents were detained and they had no idea where they were,” she said. “ICE was not checking to make sure they were OK. These are U.S. citizen kids.”

And there are other, practical issues that make it hard to reunite in a foreign country, Oliveira said, recalling one family trying to meet up in South America. 

“The dad got deported and the mom was here with the kids, and then she was trying to leave and go back to Brazil — but she was nervous that if she went to the airport, she would be arrested,” Oliveira said. 

When children are left with undocumented relatives, it’s nearly impossible for them to leave the United States to deliver the kids to their parents, said Shaina Simenas, co-director for the Young Center’s Technical Assistance Program.

“If you have a young child that is left with another relative who has their own immigration needs, how would you get them to the country of origin?” she said. “We’re working with a lot of families who are from Venezuela, and there are so many challenges even getting Venezuelan passports — or getting flights to Venezuela. And, of course, there is the financial toll of buying international flights and paying for passports and travel documents.”

Simenas believes poor record-keeping on the part of the government means a lack of accountability. 

“ICE doesn’t consistently and reliably identify whether adults are caregivers for children and so that alone makes it harder to track what might have happened to their children after a parent was taken,” she said. 

Many families separated during Trump’s first term have not seen justice, she noted. Nearly 1,000 children were still waiting to reunite with their parents in 2023, according to . 

“For families being separated now,” she said, “I think there are even fewer ways to track them, to be able to support and ensure they have access to reunify.”

When children are unnecessarily removed from their homes, experts say the separation puts them at risk of chronic mental and physical ailments. 

With that in mind, four Kentucky libraries are launching programs to keep families together, well resourced and educated, aided with $200,000 in grant money from the national nonprofit . 

Libraries in Jackson, Johnson, Marshall and Spencer counties received around $45,000 each for a variety of programs to help parents meet their children’s needs. 

, the executive director of the Youth Village initiative , said libraries are a “low stigma, high access point of contact for all communities” and make sense for grassroots outreach. 

“They pretty consistently exist in most counties where they can be reached by lots of families, especially those in rural areas, and they’re (places) people trust to get information, to get access to resources,” she said. “They don’t carry the stigma, for example, of going to a child welfare department and asking for resources in a way that might feel very vulnerable.”  

Among other things, the libraries are using the grant month to host trainings on growing food in an apartment setting, teaching parents how to deal with challenging behaviors and how to cook basic recipes, and connecting families to other community resources where they can get car seats and other necessities. 

Libraries are also a more “natural” place to host visitations for parents who are working toward reunification, Binkowski said. 

It’s “often not the case” that a child is removed from a home because the parents are outright bad, she said. Most of the time, parents lack the resources to properly feed, clothe or otherwise care for their children, she said. In fact, about 70% of all Child Protective Services allegations are related to neglect and poverty, the Lantern . 

“We see and parents who are struggling with that as a significant driver of entries into foster care — not only in Kentucky, but across the country,” Binkowski said. 

Other preventable issues contribute to removal, she said, like a parent not being able to buy a car seat or access safe child care. 

“Things like that can cause safety issues that have to be resolved for a child to remain safe and stable,” Binkowski said. 

‘Before there’s a problem, let’s fix it.’ 

Tammy Blackwell, an author and the director of the Marshall County Public Library, said libraries working in this space is just “logical.”

“Libraries are already reaching families and just doing a lot of good work giving families a place to be and form bonds,” she said. 

Marshall County’s grant supported a renovation of the to create a more child-friendly space and funded an eight-week program for mothers of young children called Mom’s Night Out. 

During the Mom’s Night Out program, which will start the first week in September, mothers who are referred by Court Appointed Special Advocates will gather weekly and have a meal together. During the meal, representatives from the Marshall County Extension Office and the health department will lead discussions about stress management, home upkeep and how to cook recipes with staples handed out at food distribution centers like rice and beans. 

Because this is grant-funded, it’s not affected by recent program, Blackwell said. Congress recently passed the Big Beautiful Bill Act, which program, among other things. 

The Mom’s Night Out discussions will be in a “very non-judgmental way, and not in a lecturing kind of way, but as a conversation and getting those families very comfortable in that space, very comfortable with library staff, comfortable with community partners who they may need to call on at some point,” Blackwell explained. 

“We’re hoping that they build a bond with each other; other people with similar lived experiences, and to really give them a sense of community and resources in order to help the mothers thrive, so that the children may thrive,” she added. “I love that it’s ‘before, let’s fix it.’” 

The first round of the program will only include mothers — Blackwell hopes between 12 to 15 — who have children of preschool to early elementary school age. Should it be successful and receive funding for a repeat, she’d like to expand it to fathers as well. 

“There’s been some coverage of how many kids in Kentucky are in either foster or kinship care situations,” Blackwell said. “It’s a lot of kids, and that really impacts their ability to be successful in life. And anything that we can do to strengthen those families and give those kids, then we need to at least try. And I think libraries are in a perfect position to really make a difference.” 

The 2024 Kids Count report, from Kentucky Youth Advocates and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, showed there were in the state from 2021-2023. In that same time period, the number of children leaving foster care and reunited with their families dropped to 32%. Pre-pandemic, from 2016-2018, it was 36%. 

Additionally, in 2024 there were around 55,000 Kentucky children being raised with a relative in a arrangement. 

The Department for Community Based Services came up with the idea to partner with libraries, Binkowski said. Lesa Dennis, the DCBS commissioner, wasn’t available for an interview but said in a statement that “by meeting families where they are, we’re building pathways to stability, resilience and well-being so no family has to face challenges alone.” 

Removal is ‘traumatizing’ 

Binkowski, who previously worked as Assistant General Counsel for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, said that “a foster care intervention, even if necessary, is traumatizing to everyone involved.” It can damage bonds between parents and their children and upend daily routine and connections, she said. 

“We have a substantial body of evidence that tells us that children do best when they are with their families of origin — when it can be safe,” she said. “We know that connections to biological family, knowing where you came from, feeling like you belong — those are really critical emotional stabilization and safety factors that support children’s growth and development.” 

Experiencing brokenness in the home, abuse or neglect are Adverse Childhood Experiences, which refers to traumas or stressors in a person’s life before their 18th birthday. They include, but are not limited to, parental divorce, abuse, parental incarceration, substance use issues in the home and more. The more such experiences a person has, the more likely they are to have poor health, lower education and economic hardships. Childhood trauma also . 

“Enough stressors on a child at early ages without protective capacities to keep them from having negative outcomes can literally take years off of their lives,” Binkowski said. “So, while we don’t want children to experience abuse and neglect … we also don’t want them unnecessarily being removed from their home if the issues are not creating those kinds of negative impacts and we can stabilize a family without requiring removal.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.

He wasn’t unsafe. He wasn’t unloved. He was just missing too many days of school: seven, to be exact, the unexcused limit. And that was enough to trigger an investigation. Just like that, he became one of more than investigated by child welfare services each year — over 8,000 every single day. Overare for “neglect,”  a vague, inconsistently defined category that often just reflects poverty. 

Education personnel — teachers, counselors, and school staff — make the second-highest number of reports to child welfare services every year, I’ve found in my work researching the child welfare system. While the intentions are often good, the system often punishes families struggling with poverty, addiction, or trauma — not abuse. And once inside, these children are placed into systems that deepen, rather than heal, the original pain.

This is not protection. It is harm, simply by another name.

Children placed in foster care are to experience sexual abuse than those who remain at home, and 10 times more likely when placed in group homes. The trauma doesn’t end there. involved in child welfare today were themselves in foster care. California reports a rate within one year of reunification, driven largely by untreated mental health or substance use, not new abuse. 

And most chilling of all, in the U.S. have spent time in foster care. Many are trafficked while missing from foster care. In 2024 alone, over from state custody — and a significant number were later identified as victims of sex trafficking.

Without mental wellness at the center, the child welfare system doesn’t just fail. It recreates and sometimes exacerbates the very harm it claims to prevent.

Across the country, models centered on healing are showing what’s possible when we meet families with care instead of immediately extracting their children. As a World Bank scholar and the founder and CEO of , an organization that has supported efforts across the world to end the cycle of trauma, I have seen the impact of community-rooted, trauma-informed programs that prioritize wellness over surveillance. 

Drawing on my training, I conducted an 18-month of the PACE program, an educational neglect prevention program in Olmsted County, Minnesota. I found that re-entry rates dropped significantly, both in the short and long term. The program primarily served children of color, who made up 60% of neglect reports despite comprising only 35% of the student population. PACE created safe spaces, trust, and skill-building — addressing risk factors early and reducing long-term involvement in child welfare.

Similar results exist nationwide. program uses specially trained peer navigators and reduces re-entry into foster care, showing that youth-led healing is effective. In New York’s Initiative, judges partner with mental health professionals to stabilize families through therapeutic interventions, resulting in faster reunification and better long-term outcomes. 

What unites these models is their focus on healing, not punishment. A truly healing-centered system has three defining characteristics:

First, systems awareness, not just individual blame. These approaches look beyond isolated “cases” to ask: What happened to this family, and what systemic forces shaped their situation? They take into account poverty, racism, community disinvestment, and intergenerational trauma. That means working with community organizations, investing in housing and mental health care, and rewriting policies that punish poverty instead of addressing its root causes.

Second, psychological and emotional safety, not just physical safety. Traditional child welfare systems focus almost exclusively on physical harm. But healing requires us to ask: “Will this child be harmed more by staying, or by being removed?” A healing-centered system weighs both forms of harm. As legal scholar Shanta Trivedi has argued in , separation is not a neutral act; it often inflicts its own kind of trauma, particularly for children of color who are disproportionately separated from their families. 

And third, rebuilding from within. Healing-centered systems support the emotional resilience of the adults who shape a child’s daily environment: teachers, social workers, family coaches, and therapists. They must not only regulate their own stress, but also help caregivers and children build emotional tools to stay grounded. It also means embedding supports — like supervision, peer learning, and trauma-informed training — so this work is sustainable.

Many people still picture child welfare as a virtuous system that rescues battered children and places them with loving families. But that’s not how it actually works. Anyone can report you to child protective services: a neighbor, a teacher, even a stranger. When the person reporting doesn’t understand the trauma of removal, or the realities of foster care, well-intentioned calls often end up making things worse.

So instead of asking, “Should I report?,” we need to ask: “How can I support this family better?”

We deserve better. Our children do too.

The state will close the West Virginia Children’s Home, a residential facility in Elkins for foster children, by the end of the year. The decision to close the 25-bed facility comes as the state on group homes to house foster kids and doesn’t have enough available beds.

The 25-bed , which serves youth ages 12 to 18 years old from any county, is operated by the Department of Human Services. The youth aren’t able to be served in a traditional foster home due to behavioral issues.

The West Virginia Department of Education operates a school on its premises.

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“There have been six to 10 students there for the last 12 to 18 months,” said Jacob Green, superintendent of  West Virginia Schools of Diversion and Transition, adding that three children currently reside at the facility. “There is a new program in Parsons run by Genesis [Foster Care and Adoption Services], and we will be moving resources there.”

Green added that the decision was made after talk of closing the facility for more than two years.

DoHS did not respond to questions for this story about why they will close the facility. Department Secretary Cynthia Persily last year that the West Virginia Children’s Home, built in 1909, had numerous safety concerns involving windows and doors that needed to be addressed.

Hundreds of West Virginia’s 6,135 foster kids are in group homes, according to . There is a , particularly for older children.

Lawmakers and advocates have said kids are continuing to be housed in hotels due to a lack of foster families and available beds in group homes.

Shanna Gray, is the executive director for West Virginia Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASA.

“Too many children who come into foster care in West Virginia are currently residing in residential facilities, away from family connections,” she said. “It is our hope that the closing of this and other already identified unsafe environments for West Virginia children will force our systems to acknowledge other ways in addressing and curbing the unprecedented influx of children entering [the] foster care system, including building capacity of community support.”

When lawmakers last year discussed possibly closing the facility, Persily cited a that requires West Virginia to operate an “orphanage.”

DoHS did not answer a question about if a different facility would not meet the code’s requirement to house foster children.

An , filed in 2019, alleged the mistreatment of thousands of  foster children in DoHS care; the suit said that a disproportionate number of children were sent to institutions. DoHS in the suit in July, vowing they’d made improvements to the system that included recruiting more foster families. Attorneys suing the state said the problems persist and are planning for a trial in March 2025.

Correction: This story was updated to say that hundreds of West Virginia’s foster children live in group homes.Ěý

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

After receiving what she called “numerous” complaints about foster children in Kentucky without supervision by trained staff, state Auditor Allison Ball said Tuesday the Office of the Ombudsman will investigate.

Calling it an “ongoing crisis” that is “years” in the making, Ball said the will investigate the Cabinet for Health and Family Services to get at the root causes.

Terry Brooks, the executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said the problem isn’t new — and solving it won’t be  simple or cheap.

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It involves a “niche population” of high-needs youth who likely need specialized care, he told the Lantern.

“It’s not typically 5-year-old kids who look like they fell off a TV commercial,” Brooks said. “You’re talking about older kids, teenagers, high levels of acuity, probably some special needs, probably with a history of aggressive behavior. I’m painting a portrait of a young person who we definitely need to care for, but we know it’s going to take creativity and resources to be able to do that.”

A spokesperson for the auditor said the office thinks the practice has “been going on for two years and has affected about 300 children, but we’ll know exactly once we dig in.”

The cabinet said in a statement that it has “taken action to address the challenges that come with placing youth with severe mental and behavioral problems or a history of violence or sexual aggression with foster families or facilities.”

“We’ve publicly addressed this many times with lawmakers and have offered more funding to secure additional safe, short-term care options for youth,” a cabinet spokesman said. “When one of these placements are necessary, we work to make sure each youth has a safe place to stay until a placement can be made. We urge those interested in becoming a foster parent to help us meet the needs of all our youth, please visit .”

In 2023, The Courier Journal reported that a was a factor in the state’s decision to house some youth in a Louisville office building. earlier this year that the practice has continued, despite concerns raised by a Louisville judge.

“My office has continued to receive numerous complaints of foster children and teenagers sleeping on cots and air mattresses in office buildings, often not supervised by trained staff,” Ball said in a statement. “I have instructed the Ombudsman’s Office to investigate this issue to uncover the problems associated with this ongoing crisis.”

“The vulnerable children of Kentucky deserve to be placed in nurturing environments where they are provided with the resources, stability, and care they need,” Ball said.

Staff are still trying to confirm how many office buildings are involved, a spokesperson for Ball said, though “we can confirm that this is not exclusively a Jefferson County issue.” 

Sleeping in an office building can compound trauma youth already have experienced, Brooks said. “It certainly is not going to create a positive childhood experience,” he said. “It’s going to create more adversity to kids who have already experienced too much adversity.”

Kentucky ‘can’t do this on the cheap’

Kentucky needs more families to , but it also needs a better system to support children who can’t be placed, Brooks said. Kentucky must “incentivize” — through higher wages and reimbursements — a “willingness to take on tough cases.”.

Lawmakers can look to Tennessee, he said, which has faced and responded by increasing  payments to foster parents and wages to state staff working with higher-needs children.

“They have just owned the fact that,‘if I’m getting paid $15 an hour, I’m probably not going to be volunteering to get bitten, spit on and other issues with tough kids,’” Brooks said.

Another solution Kentucky should consider, Brooks said, would be  to — safe, secure, designated spaces — to temporarily house children who can’t immediately be placed.

“If the General Assembly cares about those kids sleeping in offices as much as (CHFS Secretary Eric Friedlander) and Auditor Ball, then they’ve got to take action,” Brooks said. “And it can’t be rhetorical. It has to be resources. So I don’t know if that is looking at existing resources, I don’t know if that’s taking the big swing (and) reopening the budget, but you can’t do this on the cheap.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

Erinn Rolland-Forkey has been a foster parent in Vermont for about 25 years, and has been active in that time advocating for the rights of parents and children in the system. In 2016, she was even appointed to sit on a foster parent workgroup created by the Legislature, which pushed, , that the state provide a two-pager to foster parents each time a child was placed in their care.

But while Rolland-Forkey is glad to receive that document, which is supposed to guarantee she’ll get at least some basic information about the child in her care, she never assumes it’ll be accurate or complete.

As Rolland-Forkey was speaking to a VTDigger reporter over the phone, she began inspecting the state paperwork that had come with a child who had recently been in her home. Under “allergies and dietary restrictions,” she said, someone had simply drawn a line, suggesting there were none to report.

“Actually, that child has an EpiPen,” Rolland-Forkey said, “and was allergic to all shellfish.” 

She learned about the allergy from the child, who mentioned it in conversation about a week after arriving.

Rolland-Forkey and many advocates — including Vermont’s newly created independent ombudsman for child welfare — say such scenarios are not rare, and the culprit, in most cases, is clear: antiquated information technology systems serving the family services division at the Department for Children and Families. 

Vermont’s state government is no stranger to IT woes. Amidst a pandemic-induced economic shutdown, for example, the state’s unemployment system  and later  of thousands of Vermonters. 

But the problems with the family services divisions’ IT systems nevertheless stand out — not only because of the age of the databases, but because of the stakes involved. 

The primary system, called SSMIS, for inputting and warehousing basic information about minors in state custody and their placements was created in the early 1980s. State officials and advocates alike note frequently that this means the cyber backbone of Vermont’s child protection system predates the creation of the World Wide Web. A secondary system, FSDNet, that handles child abuse reporting intake information and case notes, dates back to the 1990s.

Before becoming deputy advocate in Vermont’s , which has independent oversight powers over DCF, Lauren Higbee worked at the department for five years, and has firsthand experience with these data systems. She’s since developed a shorthand for conveying their limited functionality.

“It doesn’t even have the capability of using a mouse,” she said of SSMIS. “That’s how old it is.”

In her former role, Higbee oversaw residential licensing and special investigations at DCF. And she recalled how badly the system complicated her work.

“You can’t search by facility to see all the allegations attributed to one facility. Right? So I’m not getting the scope, the history, the issue of what happened, or has happened or allegedly happened in one facility,” she said. “Huge issue.”

SSMIS is so clunky that even the most basic information about a child can be hard to find. If they’re placed with a private service provider which may have several locations, for example, the system will only register that provider’s name — not the specific address where that particular child is located. 

DCF Deputy Commissioner Aryka Radke, who helms the department’s family services division, argued that this doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t know the location of the children in its care. But she acknowledged that identifying where it has stored such information is sometimes difficult.

“The address could be in case notes, which means that it’s gonna be harder to find. Obviously, the worker has the address for the child, which means we need to contact the worker to get the information. Or the district director may have it. Or it’s in a paper file at the district office. Or it’s in the worker’s telephone,” she said. “So it’s not readily available sometimes, but it’s absolutely there.”

But for Matthew Bernstein, who leads Vermont’s Office of the Child, Youth and Family Advocate, information that’s hard to find is almost as bad as information that doesn’t exist — putting kids at risk.

“We don’t know what medications a kid is allergic to,” he said. “A kid is in the hospital having an acute event — and sure, medical providers can do their thing and sure, some DCF workers can shuffle around looking for some paper that says what medications the kid is allergic to or anything else relevant to that. But that information is not at our fingertips. And that can obviously be catastrophic.”

As work-arounds to these inadequate systems, state workers and administrators report that they rely on an unwieldy and rickety system of supplemental databases, their own memories, and more than 30 Excel spreadsheets. The result is redundant data entry which is time consuming and, most importantly, vulnerable to human error. 

“When we remove a child and take them into state custody, we’re really taking responsibility for them and all that that entails,” said Amy Rose, the policy director for the nonprofit advocacy group Voices for Vermont’s Children. “And not prioritizing just even accurate information — or the ability to access that information — really sets us all up for mistakes. And those mistakes can have a significant impact on the lives of the children that we’re taking responsibility for.”

 on the drivers behind the high rates of children in state custody in Vermont, produced by researchers at the University of Vermont two years ago, named the “immediate priority” of replacing the division’s IT infrastructure as its first recommendation.

The researchers found that data systems were inadequate and did not allow child welfare workers to “meaningfully measure and track child safety, permanency, or wellbeing.” Bad data impacted decision-making, and created “opportunities for individual bias in decisions to place a child,” the study’s authors wrote.

In November 2021, Sally Borden, the co-chair of Vermont’s citizen advisory council to DCF, urged lawmakers in to invest in a new IT infrastructure and marveled that the system wasn’t riddled with even more errors. She argued that the status quo makes the foster care system a sort of black box. Because family services databases cannot reliably search, organize, and collate data, administrators and advocates alike often find it impossible to accurately measure a problem — let alone measure progress in fixing it.

To figure out how many parents involved with DCF were dealing with substance use disorders, she noted, the department had recently relied on a hand count, derived from asking individual family services workers to tally up their cases.

“This, in the middle of an opioid crisis, is absurd,” Borden wrote.

In October 2020, Christine Johnson, then the head of DCF’s family services division, offered a similar critique during a . Johnson recalled arriving at her job the year prior and, in an attempt to get a lay of the land, requested a variety of data points she believed would be available “with a few strokes” in a user-friendly dashboard. 

“What I found very quickly was that we had a system that was built in 1982 — back when computers weren’t even really a thing,” she said.

Radke, Johnson’s successor, pushed back at the notion that the state’s IT system puts children at any risk. “I think it impacts my team and that they have to go the extra mile to make sure that we have the level of care that we need,” she said. 

Nevertheless, she stressed that an upgrade was of utmost importance. And Radke has made more progress than any of her predecessors to fix the problem, although it is only a start: She is finalizing a request for proposals to build a new IT system, expected out this January.

But once contractors submit their offers, the state will have to decide whether it is willing to pay for an overhaul. No one knows yet what the price tag will be.

“At this point, based on our estimates of similarly situated states, we’re estimating that the cost could be anywhere between $35 and $40 million,” Radke said. “But of course we’ll have a much better idea when we get those responses.”

Luckily, the federal government will likely pay half the cost. And those pushing for a new system can also plausibly argue the upfront cost will pay for itself over time. The state leaves federal dollars on the table each year in reimbursable expenses because the data system regularly fails to comply with federal reporting requirements.

But even if the state fully commits to funding a new system, it’ll be years before a new one is in place. Radke guessed three — at a minimum. 

In the meantime, state workers and families will have to keep making do. 

Rolland-Forkey, the veteran foster parent, wonders whether that’s tenable — for her, for other foster parents, and particularly for the children they bring into their homes. She worries the system causes even more “fracturing” for children already dealing with such instability. And she struggles with a feeling of “moral injury,” when she realizes a kid in her care isn’t taking the medications they need, or missed a doctor’s appointment, court hearing, or after-school activity because there was no reliable record available for her to consult.

“We’re supposed to be doing no harm,” she said. “We don’t take an oath or anything, but I feel that. I feel like that’s what we should be.”

This was originally published in VTDigger.

Youth in the foster system experience a bizarre duality of stereotypes and treatments, inside and outside the classroom. On the one hand, they are perceived as broken kids — highly at-risk, traumatized and in need of clinical services. They have than children in the general population and are disproportionately prescribed . Often, drugs are used as a type of instead of skills-building and mental health care.

On the other side of the broken kid stereotype is the bad kid, who gets blamed for a wide range of behaviors that flow directly from trauma and the failures of adults. Their responses are interpreted by school staff as malicious or violent, their mistrust misunderstood as noncompliance. As a result, they experience high rates of punitive and exclusionary discipline — in some cases, more than as likely to be suspended or expelled than their peers.Ěý

Also incredibly damaging is the of school changes that students in the foster system are put through. Despite laws allowing students to remain in their school when they change homes, if that is in their best interest, far too many still experience . This happens not only because agencies and foster parents may be unfamiliar with the law, or may find transferring a student more convenient, but because kids’ need for stability and predictability goes unnoticed at a time when so much is changing in their lives.Ěý 

To improve educational outcomes for students in the foster system, schools must become aware of their experiences and assess how they are faring in school. That can start with better training and data transparency. For example, New York City’s Department of Education has partnered with advocacy organizations to train superintendents, social workers and other staff about the unique challenges of youth and families in the foster system and how best to support them. Schools can also hire students and parents who have experienced the foster system to provide insight.

Elected officials, districts and school staff must push for data transparency to better understand the educational outcomes of their youth. For example, the chair of New York’s City Council Committee on Education, a former teacher and foster parent, recently introduced a calling for disaggregation of special education data for students in the foster system. California already collects such data and assesses how schools are meeting these students’ needs. The state Department of Education has surfaced and highlighted how important it is to have strong relationships and communication among schools, students and parents. Data helps educators and policymakers learn from the states, districts and schools where things are working well and identify groups of students who need more support and resources.

School districts, in collaboration with local foster systems, must create communities of support for young people. , in California and Arizona, places educational liaisons within schools, providing a web of support by engaged adults who can help students achieve their goals. Similarly, in New York City, embeds education specialists and coaches in child welfare agencies to advocate for the needs of students in the foster system.Ěý

All efforts must be grounded in relationships with students and parents. States and districts must invite them into conversation and cede real power to them to identify problems, propose solutions and hold education systems accountable. For example, New Jersey’s child welfare agency’s 25-person Youth Council a that provides critical information to youth in the foster system. In schools, young people can participate in developing programming, both during and after class, that provides the academic and social support they need to thrive.Ěý

Approaches like these have significant potential to improve the educational experiences and outcomes of youth in the foster system. Schools can and must take steps to better understand the unique circumstances of these young people and do the meaningful work to meet them where they are with compassion and support.

Parents and advocates held a virtual rally on Thursday calling for New York state to eliminate mandatory reporting practices in child welfare — a policy under which New York City school staff make thousands of unsubstantiated child abuse or neglect allegations each year, mostly against poor families of color.

State legislators had scheduled a Thursday to examine “potential biases” in mandated reporting and “how the system can be reformed,” but the meeting was postponed two days prior with no rescheduled date announced.

“We show up even when they don’t,” said Joyce McMillan, who organized the rally attended by some 85 people. McMillan, founder of the nonprofit , has lobbied for years to reduce the share of professionals who are mandated reporters. In her remarks, she called the practice a “harmful weapon” that “prevents people who are in need from asking for help.”

The New York state Assembly press office said it could not disclose how many individuals had signed up to testify at the hearing, which was supposed to take place in Manhattan, and that the list would be posted online just before the rescheduled hearing. Neither Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, D-Queens, nor Assemblywoman Taylor Darling, D-Long Island, who called the meeting, responded to requests for comment.

The online rally came on the heels of a Wednesday from New York’s Office of Children and Family Services that the state would be strengthening its anti-bias training for all mandated reporters, requiring more than 50 professional groups to complete a self-directed online course by April 1, 2025.

“New York State recognizes that mandated reporters provide a key defense for vulnerable children,” acting Commissioner Suzanne Miles-Gustave said. “However, a family’s race and/or lack of adequate financial resources should never be the basis for a call to the [State Central Registry]. This updated training is not only a step in the right direction, it is downright necessary to put an end to the practice of punishing race and poverty.”

However, advocates dismissed the changes as tweaks to a system they say can’t be reformed.

“I do not believe that supporting [families] and mandated reporting go together,” said Teyora Graves-Ferrell, who works at the nonprofit . She said she had given feedback to the Office of Children and Family Services on possible improvements, but was disappointed by this week’s announcement. “I really do believe that this system needs to be abolished.” 

Like most states, New York requires educators, child care providers, law enforcement officers, health care professionals and social workers to call a hotline if they believe a young person may be experiencing abuse or neglect. State-level mandatory reporting laws began to proliferate in response to high-profile reports of violence against children and instances of child deaths that adults later admitted they suspected abuse but had not taken action to prevent.

But those suspicions can be prone to personal biases. In an internal December 2020 obtained last year by the legal organization Bronx Defenders, employees of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services said the agency “specifically targets Black and Brown parents and applies a different level of scrutiny to them.” 

The audit cites mandated reporting as one of the “most significant drivers of racial disparities” in the child welfare system and blames school employees for sending the lion’s share of biased reports.

“[Department of Education] staff frequently file reports based on the cleanliness of a child’s clothing or whether they bring food to school,” the report found. Caseworkers said these teachers and principals should be connecting families to financial and nutritional assistance programs instead of involving child welfare. 

Nationwide, more than half of Black children experience a child welfare investigation before they turn 18, compared to 28% of white children and 37% of children overall. Affected families say the process — which often involves intrusive questions, refrigerator probes and strip searches of children — casts a far-reaching mental health and legal shadow even when the allegations prove false. Several rally attendees said they had been subjected to such investigations in their youth, as parents or both.

Investigations that do lead to child removal — a trauma associated with — disproportionately involve Black and Hispanic children in New York City and in most cases hinge on charges of neglect. Advocates argue neglect alone does not meet the threshold of “” set by the city for child removal and researchers contend many such families are in need of financial assistance, but instead are met with punitive measures rather than support.

“They say that we have neglected our obligations to our children, but it’s actually the other way around,” parent Desseray Wright said during the rally. “Systems have neglected their obligations to our families, which is to keep our families together.”

Isuree Katugampala is a pediatrician in the Bronx who introduced herself as a “mandated reporter who wants mandated reporting to end.”

“I come into work everyday hoping to help families, not tear them apart. And yet I see how poverty is renamed as neglect and abuse. Our training is minimal. Our training is sparse. Our training tells us to trust a gut feeling when in doubt about a family. They don’t tell us that that gut feeling is racism,” she said. “ I didn’t become a pediatrician to become a cop.”

The advocacy is personal for McMillan. When she was a young mother, caseworkers took away her 3-month-old daughter, McMillan said, after someone anonymously reported that she was using substances. McMillan was financially comfortable at the time, she said, but fell into depression, debt and homelessness after she failed the agency’s drug test and was separated from her baby with only once-weekly visitations for two-and-a-half years.

“A drug test is not a parenting test,” she said. “[My daughter] was born living in a four-bedroom house. When she was returned, we were in a shelter.”

Now a young adult, Kaylah McMillan joined the virtual rally and shared a poem she wrote. Her message ended with a call to action.

“Foster care didn’t protect me. / Tore me from my mother’s arm. / Worked hard to shatter our family bonds. / Now I stand here with an ask / to repeal mandated reporting. / That would be / a real child protection act.”

At least 23 children have died in Texas’ long-term foster care system since summer 2019, according to a new report by court-appointed monitors for state agencies in charge of the system.

Six of the children died as a result of either neglect or abuse by caregivers. Another is suspected to have died from abuse. Five more deaths are also still under investigation.

“It’s the safety of these children that’s at stake here,” U.S. District Judge Janis Jack said during a federal court hearing following the release of the report. “That’s the most important thing we have … and I expect Texas to live up to its duties to keep these children safe.”

The 387-page report was released ahead of a hearing in the decade-long lawsuit over foster care in Texas. It detailed “some progress” state agencies have made toward improving foster care but stated that “serious risks of harm to children persist.”

Jack previously ordered the state to stop putting children in placements that “create an unreasonable risk of serious harm.” But the report found the state “appears to have done so repeatedly, with serious, harmful consequences to the children in its care.”

This week’s hearing comes over two years after Jack ordered the Department of Family and Protective Services and the Health and Human Services Commission to address a long list of reforms for the state’s foster care system after she found in 2015 that Texas violated foster children’s constitutional rights.

 for failing to meet reforms ordered by Jack. She did not issue another contempt order during this week’s hearing.

During the hearing, which lasted all day May 5 and part of May 6, Jack acknowledged that there has been progress but highlighted several areas that continue to endanger children.

Jack grilled several state and provider officials about placement facilities reopening under different names — a phenomenon that the monitors surfaced last year. According to the report, several operations with histories of abuse, safety and neglect violations closed and reopened under a new name to escape citations from the state.

State officials said they have addressed the issue with an emergency rule to ensure this can’t happen. A permanent rule will go into place this summer.

“I mean it’s just stunning to me that these rules are even necessary,” Jack said. “Because for something to close one day and open the next day with the same children, the same owners, the same operators and the same staff — and nobody picks it up? It’s just bizarre.”

The report also said three contractors responsible for finding living arrangements, including foster homes, for children in state care placed children in unlicensed facilities.

“We are glad to see the areas in which the state is improving,” Marcia Lowry, executive director of A Better Childhood, a national nonprofit child welfare advocacy organization, and a co-counsel in the lawsuit, said in a May 4 press release. “However, we are very troubled that almost two years after the court’s remedial orders went into effect, children are being placed in unlicensed placements and being subjected to many dangerous, damaging conditions.”

The report includes a 3-year-old boy who died after being found unresponsive on the floor, bleeding from his ear and showing signs of abuse. His day care had reported previous injuries to his case worker. One teenager died by suicide when left alone, despite her case requiring that she be under constant supervision because she was at risk for self-harm. Other cases include negligence by the caretakers for medical needs or in one case when a toddler was able to climb into a pool and drown.

Other deaths not deemed from abuse or neglect include a teenager who drowned, children with severe medical conditions and a 15-year-old girl who had run away from care and was found murdered on the side of the road. One child was in a placement in another state and wasn’t investigated by Texas officials.

Eleven of the deaths were also included in the monitor’s first report last year. The data was collected after Jack ordered that child fatalities be reported to the court monitors.

The court monitors analyzed tens of thousands of pages of documents, conducted hours of interviews and probed various aspects of the foster care system.

Texas Health and Human Services did not revoke any licenses for placements — whether a foster home, a group home or an agency — in the five years prior to July 31, 2019. But between then and April 23, the department initiated revocation proceedings or denied licenses for eight group facilities that house seven or more foster children.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services canceled contracts with three of these facilities, while five others voluntarily relinquished licenses after being placed on heightened monitoring or another type of enforcement action due to suspected malpractice.

Jack blasted one provider in particular, Family Tapestry, for failing to meet minimum standards and prevent abuse within a shelter in San Antonio.

“You are running a dangerous, unsafe operation, and now you want more money to continue doing it,” Jack told Annette Rodriguez, chief executive officer of the Children’s Shelter and Family Tapestry. “You were unprepared to take care of those children, and you’re still unprepared to take care of those children.”

The Children’s Shelter created Family Tapestry and won a state contract in August 2018 to manage and place foster children. But Jack said there were persistent problems there that “are serious and an incredible safety issue.”

The shelter was cited 239 times for failing to meet minimum standards from 2016 to 2020, according to the report. Monitors detailed “substantiated” findings including one for physical abuse, one for sexual abuse, 10 for neglectful supervision and three for medical neglect.

Family Tapestry voluntarily surrendered its license for the shelter, but later continued to place children there, according to the court monitors. Rodriguez said at this week’s hearing the organization chose to do that because of a lack of other options.

“We are diligently working with providers to try to open up more capacity, as we have done all along,” Rodriguez said.

Jack said it is “absolutely astounding” that the organization has told officials that it needs more funding when defending itself from the reports.

“I hope that that doesn’t occur for the safety of these children,” she said.

After the Tribune requested an interview, Rodriguez responded in a statement that they are “deeply concerned” and working to address the issues raised.

“It would not be appropriate to comment further at this time. We remain committed to all the children we serve,” Rodriguez said.

During the hearing, Jack also instructed state officials to take action to better protect children from sexual abuse within the foster care system and to document when children have a history of abuse or sexual aggression, so they can be placed with precautions in mind.

A future hearing date for the ongoing case has not yet been announced.

The parents of one of the children who died while in foster care is suing ACH Child and Family Services, the organization who managed their son’s case, after he died, succumbing to injuries.

Amari Boone was three years old when he died in state custody. He had two emergency visits to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth while in foster care before his death from a brain injury, according to .

“Nobody should ever have to lose a child. We are still heartbroken but making sure that Amari did not die in vain gives us a reason to get through each day,” Amari’s parents said in a written statement to The Texas Tribune. “The Texas foster care system needs to change.”

The Boone family alleges that ACH Child and Family Services — the provider that managed Amari’s case — “cut corners to focus on profits over people, ignored multiple obvious signs and warnings of abuse, and kept haphazard records that resulted in Amari’s death.”

“We remain heartbroken over the loss of Amari Boone and our deepest sympathies are with his family and friends,” a spokesperson for ACH said in a written statement. “We are fully cooperating with authorities involved in the case and wish we could comment more, but now as a defendant in this case, we are not at liberty to discuss any information in public.”

The two foster caretakers, Deondrick Foley and Joseph Delancy, were arrested earlier this year and indicted on several counts of injury to a child by omission resulting in bodily injury, according to The reported.

Neelam Bohra contributed to this report. Reese Oxner is the breaking news reporter for , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

“There’s lots of research out there showing that basic supports for families like housing and income and education can really play a role in supporting families and reducing reliance on child protective services,” explains Vivek Sankaran, a parent attorney and clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. “The legislation addresses all three of those buckets,” potentially offering a new way “of supporting families so that they don’t have to resort to the foster care system.”

One found that children participating in Head Start were 93 percent less likely to be placed in foster care than children with no early childhood education. The pandemic relief bill includes $1 billion for Head Start programs and for child care subsidies.

links housing stability, including home foreclosures, , and with increased child maltreatment reports. The new bill over $27 billion for rental assistance, and $10 billion to help homeowners with mortgage. It also provides funds for Section 8 housing vouchers as well as $5 billion to help families struggling to pay their rent, mortgage or utilities during the pandemic.

The stress brought on by has been long associated with an increased risk of child maltreatment. Research also suggests that economic supports can reduce that risk. One found that raising the minimum wage by one dollar reduced child maltreatment reports by 10 percent. And a recent of low-income families with preschool-aged children found that the combination of job and income loss during the pandemic created stress and “hurt child development.” But parents who lost their jobs but not their incomes reported having more positive interactions with their children than they’d had even while working.

Family advocates predict that the bill’s allowance of up to $300 per child a month could provide a similar boon by reducing the strain of financial hardship. There is “tremendous potential for the child tax credits to support families and reduce economic stressors,” says Kathleen Creamer, managing attorney of the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, who represents child welfare-involved parents.

The research-backed idea that offering concrete supports that reduce parents’ stress will also reduce the need for child welfare interventions may sound like commonsense. After all, most kids enter foster care not on allegations of abuse, but on , a classification which in the child welfare field is almost always fueled by poverty. A parent’s not having enough money to buy groceries, pay rent, keep the lights on or secure safe child care can all add up to a neglect case in Family Court. And a dearth of monetary resources also makes it more difficult for parents with children in care to bring their kids back home.

“I have families right now who if they had housing, they’d have their kids in their care,” says Sankaran.

And yet, helping parents has never been the to keeping kids safe. Instead, we prioritize funding foster care services, including the invasive child protective investigations used to determine which kids may be in danger. With of these investigations resulting in a finding of abuse or neglect, family advocates say they are a costly, inefficient and damaging use of resources, misdirecting funds away from serious cases of abuse while adding further strain to millions of struggling families each year.

“Investigations are actually bringing in a new harm to families because the surveillance is not benign,” says Chris Gottlieb, co-director of the New York University School of Law Family Defense Clinic. “These are almost all families who are dealing with the many stresses of living in poverty, and you’re introducing significant additional stress.”

Investigations also disproportionately impact children of color, and especially Black children, with one study estimating that of African-American children will be part of a child welfare investigation before age 18.

Sometimes involvement with the child welfare system does lead to a family being offered services or supports. — or a little of over one million — of the children involved in a child welfare investigation in 2018 received services or supports. But too often, the offered supports fail to address underlying issues of poverty. The Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 was considered because it lets states use federal matching funds to keep children from entering foster care. But even that Act limits those services to the kinds already commonly offered by child welfare systems, and which focus not on changing a parent’s circumstances, but , such as counseling, parenting skills classes and drug treatment programs.

As by Kelley Fong of Georgia Tech demonstrates, for many parents living in high poverty neighborhoods that are saturated with child protective investigations, help connected with the child welfare system comes tinged with the threat of being judged as a bad parent and losing one’s child to foster care. “Parents who need help with school challenges, a winter coat or box of food know that every request for assistance can put their families at risk of a hotline call, an investigation and even family separation,” parent leaders at Rise, the publication by child welfare-involved parents, in written testimony at a recent a New York City council hearing.

The pandemic relief bill holds the potential to upend this dynamic with the simple but transformative approach that other democracies have long depended on: Give parents the help they need with no judgment and no strings attached.

It remains to be seen whether the funding allotted to, say, housing help or Head Start will be sufficient to make a meaningful dent in the number of reports made to child protective hotlines—and that’s something that Sankaran would like to see studied. Also, undocumented parents have been , meaning their kids won’t benefit and attorneys at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia say it’s still unclear how easy it will be for eligible families to access the supports. They are particularly concerned that parents who do not normally file taxes may miss out on the child tax credit, and are urging all of their clients this year, including those without earnings.

What some advocates say is certain is that the plan provides a powerful blueprint for reforming the way we keep kids safe in their homes. Sankaran says it has been a long time coming. “It’s the most significant legislation to help families in danger of losing their children to foster care. We’re not framing it like that, but that’s how I see it.”

The students at Monument Academy get two lessons in every class: academic and emotional.

One August day early in the school year, a seventh-grade English class lesson, on how the setting of a novel affects character development, came with a side of gratitude and empathy.

“Stuff doesn’t define your character, actions do,” DaShawn, one of the students, said, summing up the lesson on being kind to others who don’t have the same material advantages, taught by one of what’s known here as well-being coaches who give “positive action lessons” every day before the teachers take over.

That type of social-emotional learning is key at Monument Academy, a charter school in its third year, serving 127 children in fifth through seventh grades, most of whom have touched D.C.’s foster care system. The students live on campus from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon with house parents, a setup that provides essential life skills and helps them form the bonds with caring adults that are key to long-term success.

Emily Bloomfield, the school’s CEO and co-founder, was inspired to start Monument both by her work in education reform, including as a member of D.C.’s Public Charter School Board, and how the issue of children without caregivers had played out in her own family. Bloomfield said her young relatives in California were facing a lifetime in the foster care system when their grandparents had to weigh their own health concerns and diminished financial resources with the need to take them in.

Bloomfield looked at the statistics and was horrified: Students in the foster care system move one and a half to two times a year, ripping up relationships with friends and teachers; they’re twice as likely to drop out of high school; and only 2 percent earn a four-year college degree.

“Not only can we not have that for our own family, but it shouldn’t be the outcome for any child,” Bloomfield said during a visit by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools in mid-August, already the second week of school at Monument, which has only a six-week summer break.

There were 2,454 children under the supervision of D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency as of Sept. 21. They’re split between the 905 children in foster care and the 1,549 being monitored by the agency while still at home with their parents. Nearly all of Monument’s students, 85 percent, have come in contact with the foster care system.

Bloomfield dug into research to find out what does work for children in foster care, and found out that an excellent, personalized education and relationship with a caring adult were essential, as were life skills that children in foster care often miss, from cooking and cleaning to the financial skills necessary to prevent .

(ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: #FosterMyEducation: New Campaign Urges States to Embrace ESSA Rules Protecting Foster Kids)

A boarding system allowed all of that to come together. Students live in single-sex houses of no more than 10 children with house parents, usually a married couple, some of whom have their own children and pets who also live on campus.

“The boarding component was so important to this because it anchors so much of this work, the relationship builds other pieces. The other reason it’s so important is we have adults in this building who are talking to each other day and night about the student and the student’s needs,” Bloomfield said.

That caring adult makes all the difference, said Sharyl Dormus, the head of student life.

“A student walks through the halls of Monument Academy knowing that they’re loved and cared for, knowing that they belong and that they have that foundation behind them in anything they’re going to do, that makes all the difference in the world,” Dormus said.

Jeanne Peacock Davis had some hesitations about sending her grandson Elijah Miller to live at Monument as a fifth-grader because he was so young, but felt better after meeting his first set of house parents, she said.

“I began to loosen up and felt he’s going to be OK. The environment was so different than D.C. public schools that once I started coming here, seeing how things were going, I said ‘Oh, he’s going to do well.’ He has done exceptionally well here. I’ve seen a big turnaround,” she said.

Elijah “has had some trauma in his life,” and Monument has helped him deal with that, she said.

Charles W., a seventh-grader at the school, said sometimes he misses his family but living at Monument is better than staying at his mom’s house; his brother goes to Monument, too. (School officials asked ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ to use first names only for some students because of privacy concerns surrounding the child welfare system.)

“I like the atmosphere,” Charles said. He particularly likes his house’s trips to local stores, and the students in his house often help each other with chores, he said.

There were few examples of schools specifically serving children in foster care or in a residential environment for Bloomfield to look to.

(ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: NYC’s Haven Academy, a Bronx Breakthrough Serving Kids in Foster Care That Carmen Farina Has Yet to Visit)

One of the few was the in central Pennsylvania. It was founded a century ago by the famed chocolatier to educate orphaned boys. Now co-ed, it’s still funded by a trust started with his personal fortune, and currently serves more than 2,000 low-income pre-K-12 students  from across the country. Leaders there provided invaluable help, Bloomfield said, including lending the school a pair of experienced house parents for Monument’s first year — and covering their salary.

But by and large, “there’s no road map. We are building the highways right now,” she said.

In terms of academics, students come into the fifth-through-seventh-grades school anywhere from on grade level to as far behind as kindergarten or first grade, she said. A little more than half of the students have special education needs.

But teachers at Monument set high expectations for their students, emphasizing that they believe they can do the work — something many haven’t experienced.

“What they’ve heard is they’re failures, they’re bad, they’re not worthy, and they carry so much of that anyway from their own personal experience, loss and rejection, that school can become this other pile-on factor of loss and rejection that builds the narrative,” she said.

It can be hard for teachers, too.

Ogo Nwaneri, the teacher of the seventh-grade English class, said when she first started at Monument, she felt like she couldn’t do it, despite several years’ teaching experience in Baltimore.

Now, though, she and her husband have become house parents in addition to her teaching job, an opportunity that she says lets her work with the students in a less pressure-filled environment than the usual 80-minute academic block.

Monument is located in the former Gibbs Elementary School in Northeast Washington, a D.C. public school that closed several years ago. Student housing is in a different wing of the three-story red brick building from classrooms; each “house” is more like an apartment, with several shared bedrooms for students, a communal kitchen and living room, shared bathrooms for the students, and a private bedroom and bathroom suite for the house parents.

“I always say that this job teaches me more than I think I teach the kids,” Nwaneri said.

The school had to be a charter to work, Bloomfield said. Beyond the per-pupil education expenditures, D.C. provides additional funding to schools that also house students; Monument also solicits philanthropic dollars.

Autonomy and the ability to make decisions very quickly “is absolutely vital to our success,” she said.

Success for Monument’s students often involves a lot of quick changes in schedules, spaces, and the way staff do their work that “when you’re in a bigger system, it’s just really hard to do,” she said.

School leaders, who will add an eighth grade next year and hope to expand to high school after that, have learned a lot since they started three years ago, including what has become “blindingly obvious” — the importance of trusting relationships between adults and students.

“Building those relationships is the foundation on which you can then move forward,” Bloomfield said.