Many of us will give thanks for family this week. Sadly, more than one hundred thousand children awaiting adoption from the foster care system don’t have a family to be thankful for. More than 400,000 children are in the foster care system, and about a quarter are in circumstances that will prevent them from being reunified with their family of origin. They need adoptive homes. November is National Adoption Month, and this year’s initiative aims to find permanent parents for these 107,000 foster children. That’s a call advocates of limited …
May is national foster care month. In Arizona, the state legislature marked the occasion by passing emergency legislation to rescue an education program that helps foster children from being terminated. Since 2006, Arizona has provided tuition scholarships to students who have been placed in foster care to attend private school. Research shows that foster children are among the most at-risk groups in our society, and they often face challenges in the classroom. Among the challenges that foster children often face are instability (with frequent home placements leading to school transfers) …
On Wednesday, first-term Congresswoman Rep. Michelle Bachmann testified before the House Ways and Means Committee’s subcommittee on Income and Family Support to explain why foster children need better opportunities in school. A former foster mother, Rep. Bachmann shared her experience about the many challenges foster children face: [her foster children] had never really known what it felt like to be loved or cared for, let alone received encouragement to do well in school in the hopes of achieving a brighter future. Still worse, they were shuffled from school to school …
