Paper Example on Interactions Between Child Welfare and Education Systems

Question 1: How Challenges in the Child Welfare System Might Lead To Challenges in the Education System

In the United States, more than 500,000 children are in foster care (Pecora et al. 2017). Most of these children enter the system after victims of prolonged neglect and repeated abuse. Some of the children have profound disabilities but are denied proper care. The children early lives are characterized by being unstable where they do not experience any nurturing. Such experiences in the early lives of children are critical in the development of their brain in the short-and long-term. As a result, their ability to learn and interact in society is negatively impacted. The children are usually contending with multiple issues at the same time including physical and mental health issues, disability, and complex needs. Accordingly, their education would require collaboration and involvement of a number of agencies. Creating an education system that facilitates the necessary level of partnerships between the health care providers such as psychiatrists, pediatricians, foster parents, and the school teachers may be hard to achieve.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

The children enter the child welfare system from the concerns of the society about their safety. Unfortunately, recruiting foster parents for the children is a problematic task resulting in constant transfers from one foster home to another. This high degree of transition brings uncertainty in their lives. Consequently, their education lacks permanency and stability. The effect is transferred to the education system. Most states fund the education of the children under their foster care system. The number of children under the system continues to grow while the state funding remains stagnated or even reduced in some cases. The education systems, therefore, lack enough financial resources to provide adequate education and specialized care that such children require. For instance, most teenagers in the child welfare system may need counseling services to help overcome their abuse. Furthermore, the high rate of transition from one home to another complicates the problem. The education system should ensure that transition from one school to another helps to continue with the developmental achievement of the children.

Question 2: How Challenges in the Education System Might Lead to Problems in the Child Welfare System

Parent involvement is one of the challenges affecting the American education system. Most teachers complain that the parents to some students especially in the teenage age bracket fail to be seen in school for an entire school year regardless of the issues that may arise affecting their children. According to Albert (2017), the children under the child welfare system are the worst affected. Because most foster parents have to take care of a group of children, it is hard to keep track of every kid's school performance. Unfortunately, most of the children usually find themselves in conflict with school authority which can be attributed to the neglect and abuses they experience in different homes. As a result, most of the children are expelled from the schools. Expulsion rates of children under foster care are 33 percent compared to 9 percent of students in the general population (Landsverk, 2017).

Funding is another challenge faced by the education system in the country. The Federal government has continually used budget cuts to revise down school allocations. The cuts have created problems for most public schools nationally in recent years. As a result, they have to reduce their staff, they also have fewer resources at their disposal, and are forced to offer a lower number of services to the students or else they compromise the quality of service. The children under the welfare system are the worst affected given their unique needs including counseling. For the children with disabilities, they may require special amenities and treatment to help them with their education. When the public schools cannot provide the necessary services for such children, they may be forced to drop out of school. Interestingly, (Pecora et al. 2017), argue that adding more finances will not address these issues, at least not for the children in the system. The solutions to the problems require the lawmakers, the foster parents, health care providers involved with the children, and their teachers to come together for the benefits of all the students in public schools.

Question 3: How Could These Systems Work Better Together to Improve Outcomes for Children?

There is a lot of research regarding how the child welfare system can effectively collaborate with the education system to improve the performance of the children in the system. Albert (2017) advised that educational agencies and child welfare need to share critical information regarding the children. However, this task has proven difficult to implement given the high number of caregivers involved with such children ranging from the foster parents, the teachers, healthcare workers such as psychiatrists and pediatricians, and the justice system. By sharing the critical data successfully, agencies will be able to create a more detailed picture of individual students in the foster care which can be useful in informing the interventions.

In 2016, The Annie E. Casey Foundation created a roadmap that can ensure successful data sharing between the child welfare system and the educational agencies (Landsverk, 2017). The roadmap was a product of a gathering of leaders in California state foster care and education leaders. The report identified five areas of collaborations. A shared vision is the first area where agencies must come together. This strategy will help determine the value of their work in the lives of the children under their care and how they impact them. By sharing the vision for their students, agencies put a human face on the data. The second area of collaboration between the agencies is roles and responsibilities. Each agency involved with the children is required to clearly define its functions and duties thereby specifying how each will support the other in improving the quality of life of the students. This area also ensures that the quality of data shared is high and secure. The capacity of each agency addressed the need for structures that provide the sustainability of data collected over long periods of time.

By continuing the collaboration of the agencies, the high rate of transition of the students from one home to another will reduce significantly. As a result, the children will be more confident about their future and can concentrate on their education. The quality of the shared data should be high to create interventions that are effective for each child. Data should be accurate, useful, timely, user-friendly, and comparable. Finally, the privacy and security of data is the last area of collaboration. The privacy and security of information shared should be multifaceted and transparent. This ensures that all the stakeholders in the agencies understand how to comply with both federal and state regulations. Such collaborations will ensure that each agency involved in the care of the children cooperates with the others to create effective ways of meeting their multiple needs.

References

Albert, V. (2017). From child abuse to permanency planning: Child welfare services pathways and placements. Routledge.

Katz, P. C. (2017). Supporting Families and Children of Mothers in Jail: An Integrated Child Welfare 1 and Criminal Justice Strategy. In Children with Parents in Prison (pp. 27-44). Routledge.

Landsverk, J. (2017). Beyond common sense: Child welfare, child well-being, and the evidence for policy reform. Routledge.

Pecora, P., Whittaker, J., Barth, R., Maluccio, A. N., DePanfilis, D., & Plotnick, R. D. (2017). The child welfare challenge: Policy, practice, and research. Routledge.