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Minutes for SB51 - Committee on Education
Short Title
Requiring the state department of education and the department for children and families to publish a Kansas foster care children academic report card.
Minutes Content for Wed, Feb 3, 2021
The Chair opened the hearing on SB51 - Requiring the state department of education and the department for children and families to publish a Kansas foster care children academic report card.
Tamera Lawrence, Assistant Revisor, Office of the Revisor of Statutes, gave an overview of the bill. (Attachment 1)
Mike Fonkert, Campaign Director, Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, stated that by requiring an annual report on important educational information concerning students in foster care, SB51 will help shine a light on the best path forward for foster care reform, particularly when it comes to education performance.
The foster care system in Kansas is in crisis. Too many Kansas children are in the system and they are entering at racially disproportionate rates, staying in care too long and often experience dangerously high instability in their placements.
In order to come up with the best solutions for this crisis, we need to have a more complete understanding of the challenges we are facing. Information regarding the details of a foster care child's experience in the education system is essential to tailoring the best response. Racial disparities among kids in the foster care system are continuing to rise. Kansas Appleseed believes gathering disaggregated subgroup data for racial and ethnic groups of foster kids in the education system will be important. (Attachment 2)
Melinda Kline, Deputy Director of Permanency, Kansas Department for Children and Families (DCF), supports this bill as it will codify the contents of Executive Order No. 20-53, ensuring that the foster care children annual academic report card continues regardless of decisions made by future administrations. DCF and KSDE collaborated to assemble the 2019-20 Foster Care Report Card report and submitted it the House and Senate Education Committees on January 15th as required by the Executive Order. The date required to be in the report is the same data as required by this bill. DCF supports providing as much educational outcome data to the Governor, Legislature, and public as possible. This data can be used to identify and address gaps in service delivery and make practice improvements related to the education of students in foster care. (Attachment 3)
Mark Tallman, Associate Executive Director, Kansas Association of School Boards (KASB), appeared as a proponent based on a policy position adopted by KASB Delegate Assembly. Under the goal of helping students be successful as individuals, KASB's position is to improve educational outcomes for the growing numbers of students in foster care or homeless.
KASB realizes that the results of a report card on education outcomes will show deficiencies but that not all educational challenges facing children in foster care can be solved by the school system but measurable data is an important step. (Attachment 4)
Written proponent testimony was submitted by Rachel Marsh, CEO, Children's Alliance of Kansas. (Attachment 5)
Neutral written testimony was submitted by Deena Horst and Ben Jones, Legislative Liaisons, Kansas State Board of Education (Attachment 6)
There being no further conferees, the Chair closed the hearing on SB51.
