CalYOUTH

Amid a seemingly intractable homelessness crisis, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors proposed Tuesday to support two youth populations long known to have serious housing instability: transition-age foster youth and young people exiting the county’s juvenile justice system.

The Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago recently released a brief highlighting factors that lead to high school completion and college enrollment for foster youth. “Each month in extended foster care past age 18, increased the expected odds of completing high school by about 8 percent,” the Chapin Hall brief said.

When White House advisor Kellyanne Conway tried to explain away false claims made by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, she branded those claims “alternative facts.” To which Chuck Todd, who was interviewing Conway on Meet the Press, replied: “Alternative facts are not facts.

Maria Serrano couldn’t wait to leave foster care behind when she turned 18 two years ago. “I didn’t want anything to do with the system,” she said. In foster care since she was 15, Serrano felt unstable in the child welfare system.

Imagine you read an article that began like this: “A reckoning is coming in gerontology. New studies show that when a group of 95-year-olds is followed for five years, a greater proportion die than when they are followed for only one.”

Researchers and child welfare advocates will gather in downtown Los Angeles on May 10 to explore the preliminary findings of the California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study (CalYOUTH). CalYOUTH is a five-year research project looking at the impact of the California Fostering Connections to Success Act, a California law known as AB 12 that extended foster care to age 21 and took effect in 2012.

Every time I explain federal child welfare financing to someone for the first time – whether it be a student or a Congressional staffer – I have the same experience. I start by saying that the federal government doesn’t actually run a child welfare system, but instead establishes requirements and standards for state and county-based systems and then provides funding to put those standards into practice.

By Anna Maier New research shows that California teenagers in foster care display a surprising optimism about their future, despite the many challenges they face. “In general young people [aging out of foster care] tend to be pretty optimistic, in that sense I don’t think they differ much from their peers,” said Mark Courtney, Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and director of the CalYOUTH study.