Catawba County, North Carolina
Lack of stability can take a toll on children in the foster care system. Changing homes, lack of continuity, and having to adjust to new schools can all affect a child’s performance in school.
Catawba County Manager Tom Lundy believes in giving department heads and staff the power to address issues they see as important in their service areas. So when, in 2012, Catawba County Social Services decided to address the problem head-on, Lundy encouraged Social Services Director John Eller and his staff to act.
Working in partnership with the Duke Endowment’s Child Wellbeing Project, Catawba County Social Services set up the Educational Advocate Service, a program designed to give foster kids in the county more continuity and stability by minimizing the number of school moves they’d have to make.
The program’s goals are to:
- keep children in their school of origin, if possible, as they enter and exit foster care;
- facilitate timely record exchange and sharing of information across systems;
- keep children on their grade level academically while addressing educational challenges.
To get the program up and running, Social Services established relationships with the school systems, redesigned its foster care database to identify school-aged children in foster care, their grade levels and school placements, and identified staff at each school designated to assist with the program.
The department then developed protocols to identify children, share report cards, reduce the number of school moves, and ease the transition for children who did have to change schools because they moved foster homes.
The result is a safety net for some of the kids who need it the most. The advocate:
- sends bi-weekly reports to the schools so they can keep track of kids who are or have been in foster care.
- makes sure the appropriate social worker receives report cards, attendance summaries, and behavior reports for children in foster care and post-foster care quarterly.
- holds annual trainings for school designees about Advocate services and the impact of trauma and foster care on child development and learning.
- leads quarterly meetings for information sharing and problem solving across agencies.
Results
During the 2012-2013 school year, 77 percent of participating students experienced two or fewer school moves.
Learn more about the Duke Endowment’s Child Wellbeing program.
Learn more about Catawba County Social Services.
Also see Catawba County: Putting QR Codes to Work for the Public
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