Pomona Unified is one of several large school districts in Los Angeles County not spending enough money on foster children despite the state earmarking funds just for them.
The criticism, lobbed in a recent Los Angeles County Grand Jury report, comes a few months after the ACLU sent the district a letter, taking it to task for not fully spending the money it receives for high-need students, including foster youth, the year it receives it.
The Los Angeles County Grand Jury spent a year investigating the budgets of 10 school districts, including Pomona’s, to trace the money earmarked for foster children and to determine whether their special and unique needs are being met.
As grand jury chairwoman Joan Pylman put it, they had to find out whether the dollars districts receive “for foster youth are being taken advantage of.” So they scrutinized the 10 districts with with at least 100 foster students enrolled in the 2016-17 academic year.
Finding reliable numbers wasn’t easy. According to the report, depending on what database one uses, Pomona Unified had either as few as 180 foster children enrolled or as many as 676. Jury members called on regional and state agencies to produce reliable data.
Then they tried to follow the money. That wasn’t easy either.
“We really don’t know how much money is actually being given to the foster youth programs,” said Pylman, herself an L.A. Unified special education teacher for 40 years.
How we got here
In 2013, the state radically changed the way school districts are funded. At the time, Gov. Jerry Brown called it “revolutionary.”
Where previously, districts received the same amount for each student, under the Local Control Funding Formula, more money is sent to school districts with large numbers of high-need students. These students – identified as low-income, English learners and foster youth – often overlap categories, and the state lumps the money for them together.
“That’s the problem,” said Francisco Meza, Pomona Unified’s assistant superintendent of Pupil and Community Services. “Foster youth are homeless. They are economically disadvantaged. They are English learners. So to say, ‘OK, you’re a foster youth, but you’re none of these other things,’ that’s not — that’s not reality.”
The grand jury report determined Pomona Unified sets aside about a $500,000 for a foster youth liaison program. Comparatively, the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District set aside 10 times that, $5 million, for foster youth liaison and support services in the last academic year alone.
Pomona and the other school districts will have until the end of September to respond to the grand jury with how they plan to bolster its services for foster youth.
While some of the figures in the grand jury report were technically accurate, Meza said they didn’t tell the whole story. Several counselors who assist foster students whose salaries are budgeted elsewhere.
A better ballpark estimate of how much the district spends on foster youth liaisons would be almost $1 million, he said.
Parents in Pomona have been skeptical. Two parent groups, Gente Organizada and Padres Unidos de Pomona have been demanding better transparency in Pomona Unified’s budgeting process, specifically in how the district plans to serve the high-needs students: the English learners, lower-income students and foster youth.
“The recent civil grand jury report,” Jesus Sanchez, executive director of Gente Organizada, said, “serves as validation for the concerns that our parent leaders have raised for over two years now.”
What the numbers show
Pomona and four of the 10 districts examined d– Antelope Valley, Downey, Long Beach and Paramount – did not have “substantial programs and funding specifically to meet the unique needs of their students in foster care.”
Suspension rates for foster youth in Pomona Unified are three times more than the general student population and nearly double the average for fosters elsewhere in Los Angeles County, according to the grand jury report. Where 1.7 percent of the total student population has been suspended at least once, countywide, that number was 6.5 percent for all foster youths countywide but 12.1 percent in Pomona.
On the other hand, Pomona Unified’s foster youth are doing better when it comes to chronic absenteeism, a common obstacle for children who are moved from home to home, district to district. The numbers: 12 percent for all students countywide, 26 percent for all fosters, 18.8 percent for fosters in PUSD.
Pomona’s graduation rates are also better for foster youths than countywide averages. PUSD graduates 76.2 percent of its foster children compared to 64.5 percent across L.A.County. Overall, Pomona Unified has a 89.4 percent graduation rate, which is also better than the 86.6 countywide average.
As for the report’s claim that PUSD should be allocating more money in general toward foster youth, Meza said, “We’d love to, but it always comes down to: What do we cut?”
What PUSD is doing
It’s difficult working with a limited budget, but the district does have groups advising it on what it should be working to improve — such as its foster youth programming — and it listens to that feedback and incorporates it into the budget every year, Meza said.
He said the district is always working to improve its absenteeism and suspension rates in general, and foster students are included in that. When it comes to addressing the specific challenges they face, PUSD has partnered with Los Angeles County and certain nonprofits to help provide more specialized support.
Meza said L.A. County has placed two full-time social workers in the district, and the Children Youth and Family Collaborative provides mentors at the school sites to meet with individual foster students once, twice or three times a month, depending on what the student needs.
There’s also a district director who meets with local group homes quarterly to make sure the district is always providing services that are in line with those students’ needs, he said.
Meanwhile, PUSD is trying to expose these students to more than just the classroom, Meza said, pointing to a recent L.A. County initiative to create a college fair specifically for foster students.
“We’re taking our kids,” he said. “We’re taking them there and saying, ‘Hey, look, these are the colleges that want to help you and can help you.”He added, “So there’s a lot of ways that we’re trying to make sure our kids are doing well.”
It may sound like a lot, but it’s not enough for Gente Organizada’s Sanchez.
“We simply need to do a better job of providing direct services for foster youth, low income and English learner students,” Sanchez said. “We look forward to continuing conversations with district leaders on how we can continue to improve spending and our hopeful that we can reach a prompt and equitable resolution.”
July 21, 2018
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
By Liset Márquez and Hayley Munguia
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