This month, CASA staff members collaborated and explained how CASA volunteers cultivate family connections for the youth they serve and either find them a forever home before they age out or help prepare them for life after foster care. 94% of children with a CASA who left foster care in 2020 in Tarrant County found a permanent home (compared to 75% of children without a CASA).
Child Advocacy Supervisor Chuck Gilliatt says, “In 2016, I became increasingly concerned about the plight of children in long-term foster care (PMC cases). I considered that they were removed from their families and everything they had known, their school, friends and neighborhood; the efforts to achieve permanency in the first year had failed; the state was now the Conservator with a drawn out timeline, less hearings and less urgency; they had suffered trauma by the child welfare system itself. If they aged out, the outcomes were dismal. They had been described as “The forgotten children.” I decided to dedicate the remainder of my professional life to doing something about it.
The year before, in 2015, US District Judge Janice Graham Jack ruled that foster children in Permanent Managing Conservatorship to the state were being abused by the system that is sworn to protect them, thereby violating their Constitutional rights. The ruling stated that, “Texas’s foster care system is broken, and it has been that way for decades. It is broken for all stakeholders, including DFPS employees who are tasked with impossible workloads. Most importantly, though, it is broken for Texas’s PMC children, who almost uniformly leave State custody more damaged than when they entered. She added, “Most PMC children also do not have a Court Appointed Special Advocate (“CASA”), who are appointed by judges to watch over and advocate for foster children, even though a child’s CASA usually is the only person who truly knows the child and knows how the child is really doing.”
CASA needs gritty and dedicated advocates to collaborate with stakeholders, challenge the system, cultivate family connections, and find them a forever home or help prepare them for life after foster care.”
Child Advocacy Specialist Tracy Williams says, “Teens aging out of foster care are a very vulnerable group because they are transitioning from someone making decisions for them, to making those decisions themselves. This can be a very hard adjustment because of the fear of not wanting to make the wrong choice. But having a CASA as a support during the transition is very important because they know that the CASA is going to continue to provide them with encouragement as well as push them to believe and achieve their goals. I hear so many teens who are happy that their CASA stuck with them through the aging out transition because they needed someone to believe in them just as much as they believed in themselves.”
Child Advocacy Specialist LaZedrick Blackshire says, “We all focus on the current dangers and trauma that many of our children face in the child welfare system, especially those who are younger. Our older youth face those same problems, but one thing they can also face is aging out without proper support set in place. Its so important that we serve older youth because, many need guidance to prepare them for their future, whether they plan on going back with family, leaving care, or staying in extended foster care. Some older youth have no family to lean back on, or foster parents or adoption options like the younger kids. Many have no idea what they want to do for their future or the resources that are available for them. Whether its getting documents, drivers license, prepping for college or anything else, they have a lot of things to prepare for after having so many decisions made for them most of thier lives. Having an advocate can very well be the difference between your kid being successful or the cycle repeating itself.”