Indiana Falling Short When It Comes to Foster Students?
July 21, 2019
According to The 74, this spring, when Indiana released a “bleak report” regarding educational outcomes for students in foster care, it “broke new ground in making public the state’s troubling statistics.” And the “same Indiana law that called for the first-ever release of the distressing outcomes also demanded that the state create a remediation plan, explaining how it could better serve foster youth.” But this summer, the Indiana Department of Education has only presented a “shadow” of what was expected. “With its 2018 law mandating that a large swath of data be collected on foster care students…Indiana went a step beyond the federal Every Students Succeeds Act,” they write. “The K-12 law requires that states gather graduation rates and test scores for foster care students for the first time.” But now some feel “the follow-through has not been as exemplary, including a failed promise to have the remediation plan in place at the beginning of the 2019-20 school year.”