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After passing two new bills in January and February of this year, state legislators say New Mexico is leading the way in ensuring educational stability for students who have been affected by homelessness and the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

In Arizona, as in many other parts of the United States, school stability for foster youth is a significant problem. Forty-two percent of students in foster care switched schools during the school year, according to a 2015 West Ed report, and research has shown that each change costs a student at least three months of academic progress.

According to a new guide released by Futures Without Violence, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) can provide states and school districts with improved ways to support a positive school climate and help address the needs of children who have been exposed to trauma.

A little more than a year after federal law mandated school districts across the country ensure foster youth are transported to school, at least 11 states are outright failing – or are clearly struggling – to make this happen, according to new reporting by The Imprint.

The Every Student Succeeds Act gave school systems across the country until December 2016 to  transport foster youth to school. Nine months later, implementation is wanting. For the roughly 270,000 school-aged children living in America’s foster care system, educational success can be elusive.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was signed by President Obama on December 10, 2015, and a new toolkit released by the Legal Center for Foster Care and Education can help jurisdictions implement the changes mandated by ESSA.

Her mother deported, her father incarcerated, 6-year-old V. Doe entered Rhode Island’s foster care system in 2005. By 2017, the girl-turned-teenager had changed residences no less than a dozen times as she bounced through foster homes and treatment facilities.

Since the 2015 passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), school districts and child welfare agencies around the country have been tasked with developing transportation plans to keep foster youth in their schools of origin if that is what they prefer.

Danielle DeMaison woke before sunrise one foggy morning last April and loaded her two daughters into her 2013 Hyundai Santa Fe. Even though the cornstalk-lined roads around her little hamlet of Sanborn on the western edge of New York state were mostly empty, it took DeMaison four hours to get her biological and foster daughters to their separate schools.

A $2.9 million bill aimed at improving the educational success of students who are foster youths cleared a key committee in the Colorado legislature in April. If the bill is signed by the governor, Colorado will be the first state to legislate the implementation of a federal law that compels school systems to ensure that, among other things, foster kids have a ride to school.