ED

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.

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.