Why Are CASA Kids So Educationally Vulnerable?

Our children are educationally fragile, in a myriad of ways. For CASA kids, it’s the layering of these issues that stack up against them. Being aware of the vulnerabilities is the first step to being able to advocate and provide support around them.

Physically:

1. Substance exposure—while sometimes we have documentation confirming a child was born substance-exposed to a specific chemical, it’s also possible may never know the full range of exposure. Further, children living in households with drug use are at high risk for exposure to or even ingestion of illicit substances. Adolescents may themselves be at risk for substance use, if living in a home with frequent exposure to drug use.

2. Chaotic prenatal experiences—the mother’s experiences and stressors during her pregnancy are profoundly relevant to the child’s development. For example, this study found that children exposed to Hurricane Sandy in utero had significantly higher rates of behavioral and mental health disorders.

3. Poverty—Not only can poverty increase exposure to environmental pollutants or toxins (asbestos, lead poisoning, etc.) which may cause developmental delays or disabilities, but food scarcity, housing uncertainty, and so much more can limit availability for learning. Additionally, the impact of environmental racism, or the disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards that communities of color experience, is also integrally linked with the impacts of poverty due to the enduring effects of redlining and other discriminatory policies, such as the building of highways through Black and Brown neighborhoods. For example, Black children continue to be exposed to lead at higher rates and levels than White children, and are more likely to be diagnosed with asthma and have asthma-related emergencies than their White peers. Local examples include the Dearington neighborhood, a historically Black neighborhood in Lynchburg, which at one time had the only public park accessible to Black citizens. Pools all across the city were closed and backfilled in 1961 as a backlash to attempts to integrate the pools. However, the pool in Jefferson Park, the only one available to Black families, was turned into a landfill that abutted the Dearington neighborhood. Eventually closed in 1966, there remain lingering effects from the time that space was a dumping ground, including erosion and sinkage that prevents building in some areas as Jefferson Park is revamped. Further, an article from 2014 expressed city officials’ plan to start monitoring the methane gas emissions at Dearington Elementary, a historically Black school, that has a playground located on a section of the former landfill.

4. Abuse or neglect—Our kids may have permanent damage from past maltreatment, such as a brain injury from abusive head trauma, or a wound that leads to permanent disability. Additionally, if active abuse is occurring, the child may be in pain or trying to conceal bruises, and have difficulty concentrating, or be exhausted and sleep-deprived from a frightening night.

5. Developmental trauma—Trauma has profound, long-term impact on both the body and brain, and if the trauma is severe enough, it can actually cause developmental regression, or prevent acquiring new skills. Apart from actual physiological changes in the brain, experiences of trauma can lead the brain to be constantly monitoring the environment for threats, resulting in less focus available for learning. There is also the reality that when children have imprints from traumatic experiences, there can be reminders at any time of that terrifying experience. The way a war veteran might respond to hearing a sudden sound that their brain interprets as a gunshot is the way a child might respond to hearing a song that was playing during an episode of domestic violence or sexual abuse.

6. Disabilities—We know that nationwide, children in foster care have more physical, developmental, dental and behavioral problems than any other group of children. A JLARC report published in December 2018 reported that in Virginia specifically, kids in foster care with at least one diagnosed disability have doubled over the past decade, due to an increase in mental health diagnoses. Suffice it to say—because of neglect, traumatic experiences, environmental factors or family history, our children are at higher risk for diagnoses and disabilities that could pose barriers to accessing instruction consistently: students with disabilities are 2.3 times more likely to be suspended than their non-disabled peers, and graduate high school at a rate 30 percentage points below their peers.

Experientially:

1. Absenteeism—If our kids aren’t receiving adequate supervision at home, they may not be getting up in time for school, or to school at all. Older children might be expected to stay home to supervise children too young or sick to attend school. A byproduct of poverty can mean that youth who have inadequate access to period products may not attend school on days they’re menstruating, a phenomenon known as “period poverty.”

2. Transience—Children meeting the definition of homeless are entitled to school stability via federal law, but many of our families may have to frequently change housing arrangements due to poverty and trying to make ends meet, without formally meeting the definition of homelessness. Each address change can bring with it a change of school zone (or even school district), which also means a whole new set of relationships with each new school. Frequent changes in schools can make it very difficult to see or respond effectively to patterns in a child’s behavior or academics over time.

3. Disruption/absence of services—If a parent is not responsive to paperwork from the school, requests to assess the child or implement services may go unaddressed. Frequent changes in schools may cause repeated breaks in services, and lag time waiting for a new referral and resumption of services.

4. Retention—it is very common in our population for a child to have been held back a year, whether due to significant absenteeism, behaviors disrupting access to instructional time, stressors that didn’t allow them to master the material, etc. Here’s the problem, though—retention increases the odds later on that the child will drop out of high school without graduating. Black children are retained at a higher rate than their White peers, and the children at highest risk for dropout following retention are Black and Latino girls.

5. Relational trauma—Kids who’ve experienced relational trauma, whether that be in the form of abuse, neglect, caregiver separation, etc. may be the ones in the school building who most need relational nurturing and attention, but because they’ve had deeply painful experiences in relationships, they may start out wary with adults, and the least able to access the benefits from connection. Additionally, kids with trauma experiences may have low tolerance for trying new or challenging things in an educational environment, as trauma and abuse can produce profound feelings of shame.

For youth experiencing disability, impacts of trauma, systemic racism, and so many more stressors with inadequate support, school can come to feel like “death by a thousand cuts,” ultimately leading to school refusal and disengagement.

6. Exclusionary discipline—Many of the same children who are overrepresented in foster care—children with disabilities and children of color—are at higher risk for suspension and expulsion in Virginia schools. Kids with diagnoses or disabilities may have struggles that put them at risk for suspension. The more suspensions a student has, the more academic instruction they miss. The more suspensions a student has, the weaker their relationship to the school community becomes, with fewer and fewer protective factors keeping them invested in school.

7. Weakened link to school community—Students with frequent school changes or high absenteeism have less opportunity to develop strong relationships with school staff. Not only can kids who most need the protective factors of a connected, caring school staff miss out on the resilience offered by nurturing adult relationships, but the lack of those positive connections can actually end up penalizing them. Many of the infractions resulting in suspensions are highly subjective, and highly dependent on staff perception of a student.

8. School refusal—With enough behavior & academic struggles, our kids may start to have more and more negative associations with school, leading to meltdowns, school refusal (not wanting to go to school in the morning or separate from their caregiver), class refusal (avoiding a particular class by skipping school, wandering the hallways, sleeping in class, etc.), or work refusal (not attempting assignments at all, not turning in work, sleeping instead of completing a task, etc.), and more. Quite often these behaviors are because of overwhelm for the child, with cognitive demands exceeding capacity (or their perception of their capability), or due to an overload of shame and frustration accrued in the school environment. School refusal can also be closely tied to bullying in the educational environment—for example, LGBTQ youth, another group overrepresented in the foster care population, experience bullying at higher rates than their peers. Far too often, school refusal is interpreted as “defiance” or “laziness,” but the causes are usually far deeper and more nuanced.

9. Racism—Children in the school system have to deal with racism at a variety of levels. When CBS published an article online considering how young parents should start talking to their children about race, commenters shared story after story about hearing their first racial slur in elementary—or earlier. We know that experiences of racism are stressors on the body, and also contribute to low self-esteem. Beyond interpersonal experiences of racism, we know from the data that Black and Hispanic students both in Virginia and nationwide are consistently disadvantaged within the school system: Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be suspended than their white peers, and Black disabled boys are the population most likely to be suspended. African-American, Hispanic, and low-income children are identified for subjective IEP categories such as emotional or intellectual disability at higher rates than their peers, but also are provided fewer academic resources when they are identified as having a disability. They are more frequently placed in self-contained special education classrooms, where we know outcomes are worse. It should be no surprise, then, that a 2020 JLARC report on Special Education in Virginia found that Black children with disabilities have dismal graduation rates, clocking in at 52%, even worse than for disabled children as a whole, who only graduate at a rate of 65%. These stats don’t even touch the fact that resourcing of local schools is based on income from real estate tax, which ties back to continuing impacts of redlining and historic investment (or not) in specific neighborhoods. Nor does this reflect that many of our families carry historic and generational trauma when it comes to the education system, due to being systematically shut out of both public and private schools during massive resistance in the South, and then trauma accrued during the federally enforced school integration process.

10. Lack of access to educational advocacy—Special education attorneys and advocates can be very expensive to access, if you’re lucky enough to have educational advocates or attorneys serving your area. This means that a SpEd attorney is generally out of reach for the children and families most vulnerable to poor educational outcomes. Special education attorneys tends to be scare compared to the overall pool of attorneys, due to the complexity of the specialty area and the length of the cases. Some areas of the state have programs that specifically build programming for those who might not typically be able to access it—e.g. the Just Children Legal Aid Society in Charlottesville, and the special education clinic out of William and Mary Law School—but those don’t provide coverage throughout the whole state.

Knowing the deeply embedded systemic risks that our children face in the educational system should sharpen our sense of urgency as advocates to ensure that our CASA children are being appropriately assessed and supported with the tools that are right for them and their success. To learn more about how to support CASA kids at school, check out our playlist on YouTube all about educational advocacy, or our other blog posts on educational advocacy.