Foster kids feeling left out of Michigan’s $24.3B education investment

By Kiara Hay

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    MICHIGAN (WXYZ) — One of the main missions of the $24.3 billion investment in education in Michigan was to offer additional support to the most at-risk kids.

However, some of those kids tell us they feel forgotten after being left out of the investment.

“It’s just like, when will they notice us, ya know,” Alyssa Andrews told us.

Disappointment is a feeling she’s all too familiar with. Placed into foster care at the age of four, she was shuffled through the system more times than she can count.

“I might be in a shelter one day. Imight need my auntie to take me this day, oh I’m living with this other auntie this day,” she said.

School, she said, was her safe place. She had a 4.0 GPA and a goal to go to college. But her junior year, she was forced to switch schools and missed six months before she was re-enrolled.

Christian Randle also grew up in foster care. He discovered while trying to enroll in high school as a senior that he only had enough credits to be a freshman. The reason is that the state-funded school he was attending didn’t have an accredited school program.

“We have the lowest graduation rate, period, out of every population,” he said.

Fewer than 40% of children in foster care walk across the stage, compared to 80% of their peers.

“All of my transcripts were missing, all of my credits were missing,” Randle said.

Randle and Andrews have been sharing their stories with lawmakers in Lansing for more than a year, wanting sweeping changes to the system. Despite their best efforts, kids in foster care were absent from the state’s $24.3 billion investment in education.

“It kind of just feels like a slap in the face,” Andrews said.

The state’s school budget does provide an additional $204 million for children considered to be at-risk, bringing the total investment to $962 million.

At-risk includes children economically disadvantaged, English as a second language, or a child with special needs. But, foster care advocates say their needs are more specific, and because many aren’t placed in traditional schools, they won’t see any of that money.

“I don’t think there is a specific carve-out for foster students in the budget,” State Sen. Darrin Camilleri said in a statement. “Based off of your reporting and some of the things we heard around our communities, I think it’s important we re-evaluate credit systems as well as additional support systems.”

Right now, there is a bill with bipartisan support making its way through Lansing that would require foster care youth to be enrolled in the Michigan Merit Curriculum, which is the standard for all public education.

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