Executive Summary

1.     What Results Do You Want?

Youth transitioning out of foster care into adulthood face a number of challenges.  Often unable to seek emotional or financial help from their parents, young people leave care without the preparation or support needed to successfully transition to adulthood.  A key way states can support youth transitioning from foster care is to extend the services provided to young people through age 21 and continue to seek permanency for young people as long as they remain in state care. It is important that older foster youth are provided with the supports they need to be successful adults, including a permanent connection to family through reunification, guardianship or adoption or a permanent connection to a committed, caring adult. However, whenever young people have experienced foster care in adolescence, their trajectory towards adulthood has been disrupted.  They often need additional supports to promote their overall well-being and help them best transition into adulthood.

See more information on priorities and indicators.

2.     How Are Your Kids?

Young people leaving foster care without legal permanency experience less desirable educational, economic, health and familial outcomes than their peers in the general population.  In 2007, approximately 29,000 young people aged out of the foster care system in the United States without a permanent, legal connection to an adult.  See data for your state and guidance for understanding root causes and projections, as well as setting targets.  Also, review the limitations to the data that are currently available, and consider alternative indicators.    

3.     What Can Policymakers Do?

     Strategies:

Support the placement of youth in permanent nurturing families with their siblings.

• Require that child welfare agencies take action to ensure that all young people leave foster care to their family, legal guardian, adoptive parent or a caring, committed, permanent adult.
• Provide subsidized legal guardianship and kinship care as options for permanency.
• Reduce overreliance on congregate care and place young people in family settings in their communities whenever possible.
• Make all efforts to place siblings together.

Ensure educational continuity and post-secondary educational opportunities.

• Require that young people remain in the school that they are enrolled in at the time of removal and throughout placement changes unless a change is in the child’s best interest.
• Make tuition waivers to public or private schools available to young people formerly in foster care up to the age of 24.
• Provide other supports for post-secondary education.

Expand economic opportunity.

• Make Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) available to all youth (ages 14 to 24) currently or formerly in care.
• Mandate that all youth leaving care, age 14 up to 21, receive necessary documents upon exiting.
• Provide early and consistent connections to the workforce.

Support safe, affordable housing options.

• Allow young people to remain in care up to age 21 with continued legal advocacy and permanency planning.
• Provide a variety of living arrangements as options for young people age 18 to 21.
• Provide priority access to safe, affordable housing options.

Ensure access to comprehensive, coordinated health care.

• Extend Medicaid to former foster youth up to age 21.
• Ensure that health care services for young people are comprehensive and coordinated.

Create and support opportunities for youth to be listened to, to be informed, to be respected and to exert control over their lives.

• Require that young people lead the development of their case planning.
• Provide young people with opportunities for leadership and community involvement.
• Implement NYTD Plus.
• Collect and analyze outcome and administrative data.

       Success Story - Iowa

4.     How Can You Ensure Success?

Guidance on successful implementation and accountability strategies to support youth transitioning out of foster care.

5.     How Can You Sustain Success?

Guidance on financing and investing in results  and financing options.

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Courtney, M.E., and Dworsky, A. (2005). Midwest evaluation of the adult functioning of former foster youth: Outcomes at age 19. Chicago, IL: Chapin Hall Center for Children.