Foster Kids in D.C. Aim to Change a Failing System

But first, check out the joyful scenes from the This Is Me Saginaw fashion show, featuring youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities in their favorite styles.“We need to let the special needs kids know that they matter. A lot of times they get kind of disqualified, you know, nobody thinks about them,” mom Cymone Bearyman, whose son was diagnosed with encephalocele, told MLive. “But this is a place to showcase their abilities, what they can do and let them just be free and be who they are.”

The Soul Act allows foster youth to define family for themselves 

Short of legal adoption, older youth in foster care have three options for continued support: legal guardianship, which ends at age 21; reunion with their family of origin, which may still be unable to offer stability; or aging out of the system entirely, at which point the remnants of state support fade away.

For many, the last of these options comes with a harsh cost. Research from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a child advocacy nonprofit, finds that youth who age out face higher rates of housing instability, unemployment, incarceration and early parenthood.

Facing no other viable option, between 15,000 and 20,000 young people age out of the U.S. foster care system each year. 

According to the Washington Post, roughly 16% of foster youth in Washington, D.C. exit the system without permanent family support — twice the national average — and Black and Brown children, who make up 95% of D.C. foster care cases, age out at disproportionate rates.

That’s why a group of young people who grew up within the system in that city began to draft a far more helpful fourth option themselves. 

The Soul Act, standing for Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships, would, if passed, create a fourth legal permanency option for older foster teens, allowing them to build a legally binding network of trusted adults without severing ties to their birth parents.

For instance, a teacher or coach could provide guidance on jobs and college or help pay for clothing or car repairs, duties that would traditionally fall to a parent. A different caregiver could provide housing and basic needs.

“One of the beautiful things about Soul is it opens up a much broader, more dynamic vision of what a family is,” said Tami Weerasingha-Cote, Policy Director at Children’s Law Center, which along with the Family & Youth Initiative helped a group of about two dozen D.C. teens and young adults craft the legislation.

Justice Thurston knows firsthand what such an expanded network could mean. She spent eight years in D.C.’s foster care system, bouncing between placements, including one where she was locked in her room for nearly an entire summer.

Eventually, a guardian that she and her sister trusted stopped providing basic care and sent them back into the system. 

“After that, I felt broken for a long time,” Thurston said. “And when I came back into care, I vowed to myself that I was going to fight for my rights, period, and help anybody I could.”

Presented with the opportunity to help draft Soul, she immediately thought of the teachers, mentors and family members who could have been her pillars of support.

“If I had a Soul family, my life would have turned out differently,” she said. “And just being able to know that I’m a part of something that is gonna help the next generation after me has really healed a deep part of me.”

Critically, Soul also removes a financial barrier that has long pushed older foster youth toward aging out. Under current law, many teens forgo adoption or guardianship to preserve access to state and federal benefits, like tuition assistance and savings programs, that they would otherwise lose.

Under Soul, they wouldn’t have to choose: they could retain vital financial support and have a legally recognized family.

Kansas became the first state to pass Soul legislation in 2024, approving 40 Soul families in its first year. D.C. could become the second jurisdiction to adopt the program — if its Council passes and funds the bill amid widespread budget cuts.

Even then, the bill faces a three-year implementation period. But there is also a financial case for Soul.

A cost analysis found that supporting one youth through Soul costs roughly half what a traditional foster placement does — savings of about $21,000 annually per child — largely because the model anticipates fewer administrative, court and social work support expenses.

Advocates estimate around 40 young people could benefit from the legislation each year – and many states might take notice.

The art of keeping kids engaged in an age of distraction

Educators across the globe say they’re grappling with shortening student attention spans. In a recent study of kindergarten through second grade classrooms across the U.S., 75% of teachers said that students’ ability to focus has decreased since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Excessive screen time and overconsumption of fast-paced, short-form content (think: TikTok videos) are often noted as contributing factors, but some developmental experts have suggested that it’s not only students’ ability to focus that has eroded, but their willingness to do so.

As a result, educators are stocking their teaching kits with a bevy of strategies to help students stay engaged in learning.

“The new word is ‘edutainment,’” Curtis Finch, superintendent of Arizona’s Deer Valley Unified School District told the Hechinger Report. “How can you make your lesson applicable, interactive? Teachers are going to have to be more engaging for students.”

Brain breaks, or short bursts of physical activity like jumping jacks, help students reset mid-lesson. Teachers are also breaking lessons into smaller chunks, reducing in-class screen time, and making instruction more interactive.

At McKinley STEAM in Toledo, Ohio, fifth graders struggling to retain the difference between the Earth’s “rotation” and its “revolution” around the sun learned by walking in a big circle that spun around their teacher.

“Rotation is light and night, and it takes 24 hours,” they recited the next day. “Revolution is going around one year, 365 days and a quarter.”

In an eighth grade classroom, one teacher led students through a genetics lesson by demonstrating how to use various candies to determine which phenotypic traits would present on a marshmallow baby.

Computer science teacher Laurel Daniels said she not only begins each class with a group discussion, but she’s divided her 45-minute lecture block into smaller “microlessons” to boost student focus. It also enables her to quickly reintroduce concepts in a different format. 

The science behind these strategies is grounded in how memory actually works, says Emily Elliott, a psychology professor at Louisiana State University. Long-term retention requires repeated exposure over time — not cramming.

“The more times that you are exposed to something, you learn it, you have to try to remember it,” she said. “You practice retrieving it, and then you have a break. Then you do something else and come back and try again. That’s strengthening your neural network.”

But not every technique to increase student focus relies on mental stimulation. Kindergarteners at McKinley STEAM start the day with guided meditation followed by a series of deep breathing exercises and self-selected affirmations.

The approach reinforces that they are capable of remaining attuned to learning — even during the tedious parts of the day. While learning should be fun, Elliott says, students must develop the stamina to push through when they’re bored.

In other news…

Parents, grandparents, and other readers might want to bookmark “The Shock and Beauty of Early Parenthood,” a series of personal reflections on birth, adoption, parenting myths and why we need a village to care for babies and children. The stories were written by Thelma Ramirez, EdM, and Junlei Li, PhD, of Harvard University, who both work in the field of early childhood and relational health and are parents themselves.

The idea for the series came from related projects on which the two worked with colleagues and partners in 2023 and 2024, including a review of early relational health research. The research was gratifying, but there just wasn’t room for all the rich personal stories, reflections and questions they wanted to explore. 

But as Caregiving Ambassadors with Nurture Connection, an organization based at the Thrive Center for Children, Families and Communities at Georgetown University and devoted to building strong, positive connections from pregnancy to infancy and early childhood between caregivers and children, Li and Ramirez wrote a moving series of first-person articles.

They include stories on fathers, parent-child interactions, new parents’ urgent need for support, and the myth of the parenting instinct – in men and women. (Spoiler alert: one of our editors here at MindSite News – in work unrelated to our news outlet – was involved in editing the series.) – Diana Hembree

Dads now work the second shift, but moms’ load hasn’t lightened: The “second shift,” defined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild as the unpaid domestic labor that follows a paid workday, is no longer just a women’s issue but “everyone’s burnout,” says Ericka Sóuter. Reporting for Fast Company, she cites research finding that while moms still carry a heftier mental load, dads are more involved in parenting than ever before, doubling their childcare time since the 1960s. 

Unfortunately, most dual-income households are led by partners simply doing more of everything, with no reduction in expectations at home or at work. Remote work has made circumstances even worse. Without a commute to serve as a mental off-ramp, work bleeds into bedtimes and the line between professional and personal life has all but disappeared. The result: two parents working two jobs and rushing toward burnout.

The solution for us millennials as well as Generation X, Sóuter writes, may be to follow the example set by Generation Z. “They’ve grown up seeing their parents work on reports during family vacations and answer client emails during soccer games. They don’t think that’s the version of success they want…Gen Z will say no to policies like ‘flexible schedules’ that actually require your schedule to be flexible…for their business.”