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While most kids are taking a break this summer, about a dozen young people from Cby25 are attending a new school just for youth from foster care.
Students choose to attend the school, which is open year-round from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Since the school first opened last fall, about 75 young people have attended, though a core group comes regularly. No one is assigned to the school, which has done no marketing or recruiting; instead, its existence is spread by word of mouth. The school offers tutoring for those 13 and older. And because the school is an official Adult Education Program, it offers classes for those 16 and older.
With a lot of individualized attention, a teacher and an assistant teacher tutor students to prepare for General Educational Development testing, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, and college entrance exams. The individualized help permits the young people to either return to a public school or achieve their GEDs at Connection with Education.
Students' skills vary widely: Some teens read at a third-grade level, while others are brushing up on chemistry to prepare for college.
"We get kids from foster care who haven't been in school for years," says Diane Zambito, executive director of Connected by 25. "If they are under 18, we might do some tutoring and help mainstream them back into a high school. Or they can do basic adult education and complete their GEDs at our school."
Zambito says Connection with Education is succeeding at reaching youth from foster care who had been floundering in traditional schools. About 85 percent of the kids who enrolled voluntarily have stayed with the program.
Sarah Capps, 18, is one of them. "Since I have been coming to school on my own, I’m learning everything better," she says. "The teachers are here to help you. If you need extra help, they will give it to you."
Like most all the students, Sarah loves the setting of her new school - a warm, cozy Victorian in downtown Tampa, where teachers serve students lunch as an incentive to stay all day. "It's more like a house. You can relax when you are at home," says Sarah. "I don't always like sitting in a building, but you can go outside to do your homework. If I'm hungry, I can get something to eat."
Sarah is trying to pull her life together. She is pregnant with her second child and is trying to get her first one back from foster care. At age 18, she herself aged out of foster care not long ago and is living with a friend. "I'm really trying to get things together," she says. She is working on her online GED and hopes to go to college someday.
Zambito says she knows her school runs counter to established practice regarding youth from foster care. "The thinking has always been that you don't separate foster care kids in a school setting," says Zambito. "But the reality is that for a group of these kids, being in traditional schools just wasn't working. Instead, they feel comfortable here."
Connection with Education is funded entirely with private funds from the Eckerd Family Foundation, the Conn Memorial Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Lightning Foundation, the Triad Foundation and the Lerner Family Foundation. "The community built this school," says Zambito. "We are grateful that the community answered our call."
Later this month, Connection with Education plans to move into an old, restored Victorian next door to the current Victorian that houses Connected by 25. The new school building has 3,188 square feet of space, enough room for the school's computer lab, open classroom, administrative offices and a kitchen. In addition to the school, the new site also will feature a jobs skills program called Connection with Employment. The new name will be CWE2
Connection with Education aims to turn around what is a dismal picture nationally for youth from foster care. Nationally, only about half of all young people in foster care graduate from high school, compared to 70 percent of their peers. And about half of the 300,000 youths ages 18 to 25 who have been in foster care are qualified to go to college, but only about 30,000 of them-20 percent-actually are in postsecondary education, compared to 60 percent of their peers. Of those who do go on to college, less than 5 percent actually complete their degrees, according to a study earlier this year by the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
Zambito found an equally dire situation in Hillsborough County. In 2004, Connected by 25 received data from the Florida Department of Education for 96 youth, ages 18 to 22, who were involved in the Cby25 program. The dropout rate was almost 10 times the Hillsborough County average of 2.6 percent. And less than 14 percent of these youth are enrolled in or are maintaining satisfactory progress in post-secondary vocational and educational programs.
At the same time, Cby25's current group of 288 foster care youth, ages 14 to 17, scored poorly on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in 2005. Little more than half of the youth scored at level one or two in reading, and 45 percent scored at those levels in math. Level three is considered on-grade level. Students in 10th grade need to pass both the reading and math tests to graduate from high school.
Zambito was alarmed by the large number of teens from foster care not attending school at all and falling through the cracks.The earliest idea for such a school first started with the young people from Connected by 25. The Lumina Foundation for Education had given Connected by 25 a grant for a guidance counselor who tracked the teens from foster care as they moved from placement to placement and school to school. That counselor helped dramatically improve young people’s academic progress. Previously, about half of those young people would drop out of high school when they turned 18 because they had to leave their foster care placement - which typically meant they also left their school as well. With the guidance counselor on board, more than 70 percent of those young adults stay in high school after their 18th birthdays because the counselor helps them with enrollment, transportation, their class schedules and education plans.
That success led the young people to tell Zambito they needed a place for tutoring and studying. "The kids said they were more comfortable in our surroundings," said Zambito. "The kids said, 'Give us a place to go.' "
So, she started with a tutor for English, reading and math last November and then she approached the Hillsborough County school system, which she found to be "very forward-thinking." The school system allows Connection with Education to be affiliated with Brewster Technical School down the street. Zambito plans to add staff as enrollment grows. And on June 30, Hillsborough County school superintendent Mary Ellen Elia plans to visit Connection with Education.
"We started with a little tutoring because we had all these kids who weren't in school but who came to our building to work with our transition specialists," says Zambito. "Now, it has turned into a full-fledged school."
The school has been a perfect fit for students like Blair White, 17, who has been coming every day since January. The last grade she completed in a regular school was her freshman year of high school. That summer between freshman and sophomore year, she went into foster care, and things became to fall apart. At Connection with Education, she needed to start out with remediation tutoring and now is enrolled in the online GED program.
"I just couldn't do the high school thing," she says. "It was always a popularity contest. And being in foster care made it so much harder to be in high school. You don't get to do all the things other kids do, like go to movies or slumber parties. Here at this school, everyone is in the same predicament."
Connection with Education has helped Blair regain her footing and even expand her horizons. Her original plan was to get her GED and go into the Navy, but now she is thinking about studying at Hillsborough Community College to become a pediatric nurse. "Everyone is so supportive of you here," she says.
