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Success and Opportunity Through Quality Charter Schools Act

Floor Speech

Date: May 9, 2014
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Minors and Children K-12 Education

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Ms. BASS. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to offer an amendment along with fellow congressional Caucus on Foster Youth cochairs Tom Marino, Jim McDermott, and Michele Bachmann. I also want to thank the chairman and the ranking member for their leadership on this issue.

This amendment will help ensure that foster and homeless youth are not unfairly disadvantaged in the enrollment process for charter schools.

Across the country, charter schools often have requirements that don't exist in traditional public schools. For example, they may require parent interviews or parent involvement volunteer service during the academic year. Sadly, foster and homeless students might not be able to meet that requirement because they might not have adults in their life that are available to meet these standards, and foster parents may be unwilling or unable to do this. In turn, these youth may not be able to attend charter schools.

This really isn't acceptable, especially since the academic achievement gap between foster youth and their peers is quite significant. In fact, a recent study by the Stuart Foundation in California indicated that test results for students in foster care fell into the two lowest performance levels for language arts and mathematics at twice the rate of the statewide student population. Additionally, the 2010 graduation rate for all high school seniors was 84 percent; but for students in foster care, it was just 58 percent, the lowest rate among at-risk student groups.

Foster and homeless youth need more educational options, not less. This amendment will provide the nearly 400,000 foster youth and 1.7 million homeless youth in the United States with greater access to quality schools.

In the spirit of National Foster Care Month this May, I want to thank the Democrats and Republicans in the Foster Youth Caucus who came together to author this commonsense but necessary amendment.

I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.

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