The Department of Children and Families told lawmakers today that it needs an additional 18 million dollars if it is to help foster children succeed when they age out of the system. Currently, when foster children turn 18, they are out on their own. DCF Assistant Secretary George Sheldon says a new agency study found foster kids turning 18 are being sent out into the world with few skills. ?Ten percent of kids aging out have drivers licenses. They don?t know how to open a checking account. They?ve never been in bank. So some of the basic skills that children have when they grow up in a family, a lot of foster kids just don?t have.?<\/p>\n
The study also found that many of the foster children become homeless and end up in the criminal justice system. The agency wants 18 million dollars more to help youngsters transition to the real world when they leave foster care. The Department of Children and Families told lawmakers today that it needs an additional 18 million dollars if it is to help foster children succeed when they age out of the system. Currently, when foster children turn 18, they are out on their own. DCF Assistant Secretary George Sheldon says a new agency study found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,22,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"