Schools may be the only lifeline for many teenagers leaving foster care before graduating from high school.
Half of foster-involved teenagers leave the system without having been either reunited with their birth family or having found a new permanent family, finds a new study by the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Inititiative. Black and Hispanic students were at least 10 percentage points more likely to be emancipated than their white peers.
Only 76 percent of students emancipated from foster care graduate from high school, the report finds, about 10 percentage points less than the average. Of exiting foster students who received transition services, only 23 percent had employment or vocational training, and the same proportion had help with financing college.
The study tracked state data on more than 171,000 students in foster care who were 14 and older.
