The Relationship Between Position in the Tulsa County Foster System and Attitudes Regarding the System’s Provision for Educational Needs

Stephen Zedler, Master’s Student, Education

 

The educational needs of foster children and how to provide for them has become an area of growing interest and concern for those who work in and with child and adolescent wards of the state. Many recent studies have shown that, generally, such needs have not been met effectively. Research has also illuminated what some of these specific needs are, as well as certain steps in meeting them. Yet ideas for how to improve the educational performance of foster children are still varied, and many have yet to be heard, much less tried.

 

This study proposes to assess the opinions and attitudes of those who work most closely with these children, foster parents and caseworkers, regarding these unique educational needs. It will deal specifically with the needs of adolescents. They are the ones whose education is most likely to be negatively impacted, and they are also the ones who are least likely to be reunited with their parents or adopted into a new family.

 

A survey will be distributed to caseworkers and foster parents who work in Tulsa County, asking them their opinions about the general effectiveness of programs intended to improve educational performance, their knowledge of those programs, and how well the foster care agency promotes these programs. Questions will also deal with how Tulsa Co. informs those working with foster children about their educational needs. Once the surveys have been returned, they will be analyzed for statistically significant differences in the perceptions of the two groups.

 

We hypothesize that the opinions of the foster parents and caseworkers will differ significantly, with caseworkers having a better perception of the efforts of the foster agency to promote educational advancement in its wards than the foster parents.

 

The results of this study will be valuable, as any result will tell us something important about the condition of foster care in Tulsa County. Should both caseworkers and foster parents agree that the foster agency makes sufficient provisions for the educational needs of foster care adolescents, further study of actual achievement could be done to corroborate these opinions. However, if both groups agree that these needs are not being addressed properly, such information would be valuable in pursuing further reforms to the system.

 

Dissimilarity between the two groups will raise even more issues. If caseworkers believe the system adequately provides for these needs, but foster parents do not, this could point to a lack of communication between the two, among other problems. The survey will attempt to assess what members of each group believe is at the root of any shortcomings in the system with regards to education, if they, in fact, believe such problems exist. This information would prove extremely helpful in any attempt to make the foster care system more effective in providing for the developmental needs of those in its care.