Approximately 20 percent of the public school students in the City of Los Angeles attend a charter school. Los Angeles is home to the second-largest school district in the nation. The School Choice Demonstration Project research team has documented disparities between traditional public school (TPS) and charter school funding in Los Angeles…

Australian and international research documents the limited access of young people transitioning from out-of-home care (OOHC) to further and higher education. This paper examines the processes, outcomes, and key findings of the Raising Expectations project, a collaborative university and industry approach to promote higher education among care…

Background: The transition to adult life for those leaving foster care is a multidimensional phase of their personal development. Care leavers' life outcomes are poorer in education, employment, income, housing and parenthood compared with their peers from the general population. They suffer more than other youngsters from mental health and…

Purpose: This study examines foster care reentry after adoption, in Illinois and New Jersey. The provision of services and supports to adoptive families have garnered recent attention due to concern about the long-term stability of adoptive homes. Method: This study used administrative data to examine the pre-adoption characteristics associated…

Since the late 1990s, the federal government has increased supports that promote college success for foster youth (Okpych, 2012), such as the $5,000 education and training voucher that foster youth can use each year toward college expenses. A key piece of federal legislation supporting foster youth is the 2008 Fostering Connections to Success and…

All Washington's children and youth grow up safe and healthy--thriving physically, emotionally, and educationally, nurtured by family and community. In this first five-year strategic planning cycle, the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) will focus on six Strategic Priorities--one relates to equity, three relate to…

The aim of this research is to improve the social skills of children in need of protection for 7-12 age groups through visual arts education. In the study carried out within the framework of general purpose, the effect of the activity-based visual arts education program on the social skill levels of children in need of protection for 7-12 age…

Social work educators face the task of integrating personal experiences into their teaching practice. In difficult topic areas such as child protection, violence, trauma, and abuse, the challenge of presenting material objectively is made more difficult when the social work educator has lived experience of these topics. This paper uses a…

Objectives: empathy brings people closer and facilitates communication in almost all the fields of daily life. Having been an important dimension of foster care, empathetic skills should be developed in a foster family. In this study, we aimed to determine the empathic level of the foster families. Methods: this cross-sectional study on foster…

Background: Pre-service training of treatment parents is a requirement for all foster care models to ensure safety and well-being of children in care. Researchers theorize treatment parents benefit more from enhanced pre-service trainings; however, no rigorous studies exist indicating the effectiveness of these trainings for treatment parents.…

Background: Little is known about the nature and reactions to sexual abuse of children with intellectual disability (ID). The aim was to fill this gap. Method: Official reports of sexual abuse of children with ID in state care were examined (N = 128) and compared with children without ID (N = 48). Results: Clear signs of penetration or genital…

The Safe Babies Court Team™ (SBCT) is a community engagement and systems-change approach focused on improving how courts, child welfare agencies, and related child-serving organizations work together, share information, and expedite services for young children in the child welfare system. Ten sites across four states received technical assistance…

This paper addresses the shortage of studies on the 'success' of care-experienced young people in Higher Education (HE) internationally. It draws on the findings of a study of a near peer, pre-entry coaching intervention developed in England to address stakeholders' concerns around a lack of 'success' post entry to university, linked to gaps in…

This report is prepared in compliance with HB 1661 Sec 104(2)(k), which requires the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF, or the Department) Office of Innovation, Alignment, and Accountability (OIAA) to submit to the Governor and the appropriate policy and appropriation committees of the Legislature: (1) A review of the current…

Parents, guardians, caregivers and school administrators will sometimes disagree over whether a student may enroll in or continue to attend a public school based on his or her place of residence. The information in this manual is designed to help parents, guardians and caregivers understand New Jersey's public school residency rules and to inform…