Giving Compass' Take:

• Hailly Korman and Kelly Robson explain how the extensive support system for students experiencing significant life circumstances like homelessness, foster care, or incarceration often fails them. 

• How can funders help to build a more cohesive system to help students in need? 

• Learn how policies can help immigrant children stay out of foster care. 

Approximately five million students who are served by public care agencies have multiple official adults in their lives — judges, lawyers, therapists, volunteers, teachers, counselors, case managers, social workers and more — people paid to support them when they experience significant life circumstances like homelessness, foster care or incarceration.

That five million does not include those students who experience instability resulting from uncounted experiences like evictions, parental arrests, prolonged family medical crises, migrant work and other major life disruptions. These are generally not students who are “falling through the cracks” and being served by no one. Quite the opposite — they are instead being served by everyone.

School districts and states spend a lot of money on services for student care but, in reality, most students get too little from too many people via layered-on crisis intervention services and patchworked programs.

Ultimately, no one is planning toward any student’s long-term goals — unless a student does it himself or herself. In most places, there is simply no single adult who can connect all of the dots for individual students over time. Without that coherent and consistent support, young people are far more likely to end up dropping out of school, unemployed or employed in low-wage and insecure jobs, involved with the criminal justice system, or living with family violence.

The fragmentation that exists among schools and social service agencies is not a new problem, and every system has created workarounds to mitigate some of the most persistent challenges. In El Dorado County, California, Sheila Silan serves as a “chief of staff,” helping to coordinate services, gather information and update records for individual students. Officially, Silan oversees both El Dorado County’s foster youth education support systems and the student attendance review board. But she has also worked at the county office of education for 30 years and, as a licensed foster parent, has cared for dozens of youth in her own home who pass through El Dorado’s schools.

As a result, Silan carries and shares knowledge and long histories of families, schools and individual kids — things that are not in case files or incident reports. County leaders joke that the official system in place for quickly gathering information about a student is to call Silan.

Read the full article about students experiencing significant life circumstances by Hailly Korman and Kelly Robson at The Hechinger Report.