House Status:
Senate Status:
Senate Status:
Minutes for SB384 - Committee on Education
Short Title
Requiring the state department of education and the Kansas department for children and families to prepare an annual report on educational outcomes for foster care students.
Minutes Content for Tue, Feb 18, 2020
Staff gave an overview of the bill.
Tanya Keys, Deputy Secretary, Kansas Department for Children and Families (DCF), explained a high priority of DCF is ensuring educational stability for children in foster care. DCF daily sends KSDE a data file containing the information of every child of school age in DCF custody and has initiated a workgroup focused on education stability for children in foster care. DCF is supportive of providing as much education outcome data as possible to achieve better educational outcomes to ensure transparency and promote accountability for foster care students.(Attachment 2)
Joey Hentzler, Director of Advocacy, Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, spoke in support of the bill saying the foster care system in Kansas is in crisis. In order to come up with the best solutions for addressing 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. Kansas Appleseed urges favorable passage of this bill while recommending it be amended to also include collection of deidentified disaggregated racial and ethnic data for the seven data points currently outlined in the bill.(Attachment 3)
Beverly Mortimer, Senior Vice President of Programming, JAG-K, reported that at the state and national level there is evidence of concern in academic progress of students in foster care as listed in the testimony. Academic challenges for students in foster care are complex and impacted by social and emotional development factors. Increasing school discipline incidents interrupt school attendance. The performance data clearly shows the students in foster care deserve better.(Attachment 4)
Proponent written testimony submitted by Gary Robbins. (Attachment 5)
Chairperson Baumgardner closed the hearing on SB384.
