Jennifer Behrens is a social worker with the Charlottesville Department of Social Services (www.charlottesville.org). One of her cases, an elementary-age boy who entered the foster system, needed a new place to live that would take him out of his home school district. Local schools are usually flexible—State legislation passed in 2005 says they can let foster kids stay in their schools even if they’re moved out of district. But in this case, social workers hit a snag: transportation. The boy was forced to switch.
“He had been a very good student at the home school and had literally no behavior problems,” Behrens says. After he transferred, the student was caught stopping up toilets and getting into fights.
Could a simple ride to school have solved the problem? For at least a dozen area kids and many more statewide, child advocates say yes.
This year, Governor Tim Kaine’s budget includes a line item—$150,000 to be used to reimburse schools for such transportation. It doesn’t sound like much, given that Charlottesville DSS staff once discovered it would have cost $60 per day to transport a girl who moved just 20 minutes away from her old placement.
But Andy Block, legal director of JustChildren at Legal Aid in Charlottesville, says it will be enough to start to put transportation back into the hands of schools. Currently, local departments come up with transportation solutions on a relatively ad hoc basis. The County Department of Social Services (www.albemarle.org) has had good luck reimbursing foster parents to drive kids to and from school, according to Phyllis Colman, Albemarle’s foster care and adoption supervisor. But sometimes, it just can’t be done.
Behrens estimates that about half the kids in City foster care are affected by a school-jurisdiction issue, and about 10 percent of last year’s 134 foster kids ran into school transportation problems.
Buzz Cox, director of Charlottesville DSS, says, “I think the advocates for this are happy that money’s in the budget. …It just becomes one less really difficult thing the child has to go through.”
“Where children fall through the proverbial cracks is when there are multiple systems involved, when they have to move from school to school, home to home,” says Block. “The law that was passed two years ago and the funding that we hope will be available now do a great deal to fill in the cracks that…too often swallow kids up who are in the foster care system.”
