Empower

According to Children’s Bureau, there are more than 391,000 children and young people in foster care as of 2024 in the United States. All these children have high rates of adverse childhood experience (e.g. abuse, neglect, household dysfunction). A staggering 70% of former foster children reported to have over five adverse childhood experiences (Hambrick et al., 2016). These high rates of trauma can take a huge toll on a child’s development emotionally, behaviorally, and academically. ​While it is not proven that these ACES and difficulties come from foster care itself, it has been shown that it often comes from pre-care experiences (O’Higgens et al., 2015). These developmental difficulties can have a negative effect on their education such as higher disciplinary rate, higher grade retention rates, educational attainment, as well as lower grades and test scores (Goulet et al., 2023).  These are things that can have lasting effects on a child’s life and while the ACEs and trauma cannot be undone, there have been interventions shown to have positive results in increasing a child’s success within education system.