Legislative Agenda

Supporting Funding for Treehouse Educational Advocates

The Problem

Changes in home placement, school transitions and emotional upheaval cause youth in foster care to fall behind in school. By 9th grade, these youth are missing nearly 1/3 of school days. Students who are chronically absent or failing courses are at extremely high risk of falling off track and even dropping out of school altogether. A root cause of this instability is inadequate support services and financial assistance for caregivers, particularly when children have high levels of behavioral and mental health support needs.

The Solution

Treehouse Educational Advocates support students in foster care by providing timely, appropriate educational supports and interventions tailored to each individual’s academic and developmental needs. By partnering with a team of existing supports in a youth’s life – caregivers, caseworkers, teachers, school counselors and community providers – Treehouse’s Educational Advocates help resolve barriers and identify needed resources to help the youth make progress at school.

Our Ask

Permanently fund four Educational Advocates in the amount of $920,000.

Continuing & Expanding Support of Project Education Impact

The Problem

Youth experiencing homelessness, foster care or juvenile rehabilitation face trauma, frequent school changes, poor mental health and other serious challenges due to circumstances outside their control. Consequently, their educational outcomes are far worse than their peers who do not face similar challenges. When youth fail to graduate from high school, they are more likely to live in poverty, require public assistance, experience adult homelessness and be incarcerated.

Over the past decade, Washington state has passed landmark legislation and invested significantly into improving education outcomes for these youth. However, we have limited coordination between services and systems, and organizations accountable to these investments are more capacity-constrained than ever. Coupled with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the expanding crisis of homelessness and the unprecedented adolescent mental health epidemic, the gap has widened for students experiencing homelessness, foster care or juvenile rehabilitation in almost every measure of educational progress.

The Solution

Project Education Impact (PEI) is a legislatively mandated workgroup that convened in 2017 to improve educational outcomes for youth in foster care. In 2018, the legislature expanded PEI’s scope to include students experiencing homelessness. PEI aims to achieve educational equity by 2027. To reach that milestone, PEI proposed several high-level recommendations in 2019, such as leveraging data to inform real-time, individualized education supports for students as well as a longitudinal analysis of education outcomes.

PEI’s collective impact work – where participating organizations are collaborating, rather than competing for funding and supports – is invaluable to addressing the disparities faced by these marginalized youth, and is the only one of its kind in the U.S. This work is leading the nation!

Our Ask

For the 2023 legislative session, PEI recommends the legislature expand the work group’s scope to include youth in or exiting institutional education, since the responsibility of juvenile rehabilitation now lies within the Department of Children, Youth and Families. PEI also recommends their sunset date be extended to July 1, 2028 (as opposed to July 1, 2024) so that the group can complete its goal of educational equity by 2027. These efforts can be accomplished through $150,000 in state funding. The PEI work group will pursue a 100% private funding match to these dollars.

Expand Extended Foster Care

This bill led by The Mockingbird Society will remove barriers to access for the Extended Foster Care (EFC) program and increase support for young people aged 18-21.

The problem we are trying to solve is that about 20% of young people who are dependent at age 18 do not currently participate in EFC!

Youth are required to prove they are engaged in certain activities such as working, attending school, pursuing school or work, or that they are unable to do these things due to a medical condition to be eligible for EFC. These requirements are barriers to participation, especially for the most marginalized young people.

Mockingbird’s bill will eliminate these as requirements for enrollment in EFC. Youth will automatically be enrolled in EFC when they turn 18 in care unless they choose to opt out.

Meeting Post-Secondary Basic Needs

Education is a proven pathway out of poverty, but many students in WA struggle to pursue and complete educational programs because they cannot meet various basic needs (e.g. food, housing, childcare, etc.) or lack support to navigate existing systems.

To pursue and complete educational programs, students need a single point of contact on campus who can help them access programs and services to meet their basic needs. To holistically support students struggling to have their basic needs met, the WSAC’s Post-Secondary Basic Needs Coalition proposes the five following solutions:

• Fully resource on-campus navigators and establish one-stop centers at each postsecondary institution. Navigators should be equipped to connect students to all available resources to fulfill their basic needs.
• Create Hunger-Free Campus legislation for WA’s 2- and 4-year colleges and universities.
• Expand and make permanent the Supporting Students Homelessness Pilot and allocate additional funding to the Student Emergency Assistance Grant Program.
• Require WSAC to partner with at least 16 postsecondary institutions to contract with a telehealth provider, evaluate this program’s impact on students, and ensure access to mental/behavioral health services to over 95K students.
• Establish a state matching funds program for federal grants that fund on-campus childcare centers; expand the Working Connections program to include childcare for students seeking 4-yr degrees; Make the Working Connections subsidy more accessible (remove US Citizenship requirement).