Four months after the Legislature adjourned, the devastation of its feckless, slapdash budgeting is becoming more apparent. Let’s talk about foster children, in particular.
Ten years ago, fewer than half of foster kids graduated from high school on time. Most dropped out, never earning a diploma, the baseline credential necessary to get even a minimum-wage job.
That is a scandal. The state took those children from their homes due to fears about their safety, with the tacit promise — and the legal responsibility — to parent them better than their own moms or dads could. Progress in education was part of that duty and, quite clearly, Washington was failing its obligation.
Enter Treehouse, the Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to the well-being of foster youth, particularly their schooling.
Yet the Legislature slashed Treehouse’s budget, effective July 1. Sen. June Robinson, chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, says this was unintentional, an oversight that came when lawmakers cut a much larger pool of money that contained the Treehouse funds. That’s hard to believe, considering Treehouse supporters and The Times editorial board raised the alarm as these devastating cuts moved through the budget process, even weeks before the Legislature adjourned in April. But to no avail.
Either way, the upshot is that now only foster children in 23 of the 140 school districts formerly served by Treehouse will get any help. About one quarter of the staff are facing layoffs.
Lawmakers are supposed to be focused on results. And in the child welfare arena, where progress is notoriously difficult, Treehouse was making a real difference. During the past decade, when it trained its focus on education, on-time graduation rates for foster kids rose markedly. Today, they are up by nearly 10 points, to 51.2%. Treehouse’s Graduation Success program made such a difference it’s attracted attention from other states hoping to do something similar.
Lawmakers ignored this progress when, in one fell swoop last spring, they obliterated the pool of money doled out by education officials for individual programs, including $7 million for Graduation Success.
The Department of Children, Youth and Families, which oversees foster care, added insult to injury by nixing an additional $460,000 for education advocates who work with foster kids.
This is the definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face. Education is the most reliable way to put young people on track toward a productive adulthood, rather than the more common outcomes of foster care: homelessness and incarceration. Meanwhile, the Department of Corrections budget has doubled to $1.6 billion over the last decade.
Want to trim these costs? Ensuring foster kids get through school successfully is a good way to do it. (Roughly 25% of prison inmates nationally are former foster youth.)
Chris Reykdal, the superintendent of public instruction, can be commended for restoring some of the cuts to Treehouse’s funding, about $1.4 million, which will keep Graduation Success going — in diminished form — at least until the 2026 legislative session. That’s when lawmakers have a chance to revisit their wrongheaded decision.
They should not squander the opportunity, nor these kids’ futures.
They must wake up and see that indiscriminate hacking to cut costs frequently costs more in the long run. And that’s a price tag this state truly cannot afford.