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By Kimberly Beltran
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
New laws that ushered in California’s landmark Local Control Funding Formula call on the departments of social services and education for the first time to identify and share information about foster students with school districts.
Schools are also mandated to track and report on the academic progress of foster youth – making California the first to do so in the nation.
The new requirements could prove challenging for many schools – mostly because it is simply unfamiliar territory, says one expert who helped write the section of law emphasizing this new student subgroup’s success.
“This is not a subgroup of students that school districts have traditionally focused on, unlike English learner students and low-income students, where for many years they’ve been trying to improve the educational outcomes for those subgroups,” said Jesse Hahnel, an attorney and director of the California-based FosterEd, a non-profit initiative of the